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He just leaves us with the juxtaposition of two incompatibles. We shall see that Hasdai Crescas was more consistent, and admitted determinism. We have now considered Judah Halevi's teachings, and have seen that he has no sympathy with the point of view of those people who were called in his day philosophers, i. e., those who adopted the teachings ascribed to Aristotle.
Proceeding to the more dogmatic elements of Judaism, Maimonides was the first to reduce the 613 commandments of Rabbinic Judaism to thirteen articles of faith. Hasdai Crescas criticised Maimonides's principle of selection as well as the list of dogmas, which he reduced to six. And Joseph Albo went still further and laid down three fundamental dogmas from which the rest are derived.
Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a cultured and high-minded Jew, was his trusted adviser, and like his royal patron he protected and encouraged Jewish learning, Talmudical as well as scientific.
The persecutions of the Jews in Spain led many of them to emigrate to neighboring countries, which put an end to the glorious era inaugurated three centuries before by Hasdai Ibn Shaprut. The centre of Jewish liberal studies was transferred to south France, but the literary activities there were a pale shadow compared with those which made Jewish Spain famous.
To be sure, it was felt that the doctrine of freedom is fundamental to the spirit of Judaism, and the philosophic analyses led to the same result though in differing form, sometimes dangerously approaching a thorough determinism, as in Hasdai Crescas.
Moses ben Enoch the Talmudist, Menahem ben Saruk, the grammarian and lexicographer, and Dunash ben Labrat, the poet all three under the distinguished patronage of Hasdai ibn Shaprut inaugurated the long line of Spanish Jewish worthies, which continued almost five centuries, constituting the golden era of Jewish literature and making of Spain the intellectual centre of all Jewry.
The influence of the Kalam is present in greater or less degree in the philosophers up to Abraham Ibn Daud and Maimonides. The latter gave this system its death blow in his thoroughgoing criticism, and thenceforth Aristotelianism was in possession of the field until that too was attacked by Hasdai Crescas.
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.
The Arabs made use of this suggestion and endeavored to bring the phenomenon of prophecy under the same head. The Jewish philosophers, with the exception of Judah Halevi and Hasdai Crescas, followed suit. The suggestion that prophecy is a psychological phenomenon related to true dreams is found as early as Isaac Israeli. Judah Halevi mentions it with protest.
And he reigns supreme for over a century until the appearance of the "Or Adonai" of Hasdai Crescas, who ventured to deny some of the propositions upon which Maimonides based his proof of the existence of God such, for example, as the impossibility of an infinite magnitude, the non-existence of an infinite fulness or vacuum outside of the limits of our world, the finiteness of our world and its unity, and so on.
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