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Updated: June 11, 2025
Crescas, in the fourteenth century, declared like an earlier Buckle that the excellence of the Jew sprang merely from the excellence of Palestine. Mr. Abelson, in his recent valuable book on Jewish mysticism, alleges that when Rabbi Akiba called the Jews "Sons of God" he meant only that all other nations were idolaters.
The very incoherence of the Talmud, its confusion of voices, is an index of free thinking. Post-biblical Israel has had a veritable galaxy of thinkers and saints, from Maimonides its Aquinas to Crescas its Duns Scotus, from Mendelssohn its Erasmus to the Baal-Shem its St. Francis.
So Crescas takes up in detail all the Maimonidean proofs of the existence, unity and incorporeality of God and points out that they are not valid because in the first place they are based upon premises which Crescas has refuted, and secondly were the premises granted Maimonides's results do not follow from them.
Hasdai Crescas also classes it with true beliefs and not with fundamental principles. Albo resolves the problem as follows: A matter that is revealed by God himself cannot be changed by a prophet unless it is changed by God himself.
Crescas, his teacher, had written, beside the "Or Adonai," a work against Christianity.
In this discussion also Crescas takes issue with the intellectualistic point of view of Maimonides and particularly Gersonides.
We are sure that Abraham Ibn Daud, the forerunner of Maimonides, had a thorough familiarity with the ideas of Aristotle; and those who came after him, for example Maimonides, Gersonides, Hasdai Crescas, show clearly that they were deep students of the ideas represented in the writings of the Stagirite.
Especially do we find this to be the case in Crescas who opposes Aristotle on philosophic grounds.
Maimonides endeavors to reconcile the dilemma by throwing the blame upon our limited understanding. In God's knowledge which is toto cœlo different from ours, and of which we have no conception, all oppositions and contradictions find their ultimate harmony. Crescas, as we might naturally expect, agrees with Maimonides in this matter rather than with Gersonides.
He rehashes the problems which occupied a Maimonides, a Gersonides and a Crescas, and sides now with one, now with the other. The style is that of the popularizer and the homilist; and to this he owes his popularity, which was denied his more original teacher, Crescas. But philosophy as such was not Albo's forte, nor was it his chief interest.
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