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Updated: May 2, 2025
To this method I have serious objections, continues Maimonides, for their arguments in favor of the creation of the world are not convincing unless one does not know a real demonstration from a dialectical or sophistic. The most one can do in this line is to invalidate the arguments for eternity.
Those matters which are by their nature comprehensible we can easily explain, as has been pointed out, simply by means of the context. Therefore, the method of Maimonides is clearly useless: to which we may add, that it does away with all the certainty which the masses acquire by candid reading, or which is gained by any other persons in any other way.
Philosophical thought had reached its perigee in Maimonides, and what followed after was an attempt on the part of his lesser disciples and successors to follow in the steps of their master, to extend his teachings, to make them more widespread and more popular.
Maimonides does not preserve the absolute monarchy of the Divine government, but places between God and man intermediate beings with subordinate creative powers the separate intelligences of the stars, which are identified with the angels of the Bible. But he maintains inviolate the sole causality of God and His immanence in the human soul.
He defended Maimonides against the aspersions of his opponents, and was so confident in the truth of his master's teachings that he proposed a conference of the learned men of Jewry to judge the works and doctrines of Maimonides and to decide whether the "Guide" should be allowed to live or should be destroyed. He was also active as a translator from the Latin.
This explanation does not really explain, but it is noteworthy as the first Jewish attempt to reduce prophecy to a psychological phenomenon, which was carried further by subsequent writers until it received its definitive form for the middle ages in Maimonides and Levi ben Gerson. To sum up, Israeli is an eclectic. There is no system of Jewish philosophy to be found in his writings.
With all this, however, he finds it necessary to take up the entire question anew and treats it in his characteristic manner, with detail and rigor, and finally comes to a conclusion different from that of Maimonides, namely, that the world had an origin in time, to be sure, but that it came not ex nihilo in the absolute sense of the word nihil, but developed from an eternal formless matter, which God endowed with form.
If Hasdai Crescas admits the infinite, the Aristotelian proof fails. Similarly God's unity in Maimonides is among other things based upon the finiteness of the world and its unity. If infinite space is possible outside of this world, and there may be many worlds, this proof fails for God's unity.
In conclusion, then, we dismiss Maimonides' theory as harmful, useless, and absurd.
As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the "golden age," did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the Orient at Saadia's time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides. Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised between the classes of Polish society.
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