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Updated: June 7, 2025
For we must distinguish between the general principles which pertain to divine legislation as such and hence are common to all religions, and special principles which are peculiar to a particular religion. Seeing the importance of this subject, Albo continues, I undertook this investigation.
We have followed its ascending curve from Saadia through Gabirol, Bahya and Ibn Daud to its highest point in Maimonides, and we likewise traced its descent through Gersonides, Crescas and Albo. We took account of its essential nature as being a serious and conscientious attempt to define a Jewish Weltanschauung in the midst of conflicting claims of religions and philosophies.
Having laid bare the defects in the attempts at a list of fundamental dogmas of Judaism made by his predecessors, Albo categorically lays down the following three principles as fundamental to divine religion: Existence of God, Providence, and reward and punishment, Revelation.
Having disposed of the auxiliary dogmas, Albo takes up the fundamental principle of Reward and Punishment. He cites various opinions on the subject, which are dependent upon the idea one entertains concerning the nature of the soul.
According to Maimonides, it would seem, he would be called a heretic and be excluded from a share in the world to come equally with one who denied the existence of God; whereas according to Albo a person so guilty is a sinner and needs forgiveness, but is not a heretic.
He was persuaded by their advice and added the other three sections, each devoted to one of the three fundamental dogmas and the corollaries following from it. Here Albo has nothing new to teach.
Albo includes in his enumeration all the thirteen dogmas of Maimonides with the exception of the fifth, namely, that God alone be worshipped, but instead of placing them all on the same level of importance as equally essential to the structure of Judaism, as Maimonides apparently intended, Albo divides them into three categories of descending rank as follows: fundamental principles, derived principles, true beliefs.
It would be rash to suppose that an echo of the studies of the Encyclopedists had reached a province double-barred and double-locked by politics and religion. The European languages were unknown in the Lithuanian Jewries of the Gaon's day, and his pupils sought their mental pabulum in the writings of the Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, and Albo, and their compeers.
It suffices for me that the son of Valeria Albo, my son, has forgot his duty to his mother and his respect for himself." Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, relighted her lamp at the old woman's rush candle, and went slowly and heavily up the stairs. She felt stunned and outraged. Her son! hers! to lie out of nights with a little nameless vagrant! Gianna caught hold of her skirt.
The degree in which a person realizes this service determines his reward and punishment. The argument from experience Albo does not answer here, but we may suppose he regards it as answered by what he said in his discussion of Providence, where he tries to account for the prosperity of the wicked and the adversity of the righteous.
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