Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 18, 2023

To Believe, or to Seek Knowledge of the Divine?

Competing ideas about the nature of Jewish faith.

While credos and catechisms were unknown to the rabbis of the Talmud, some medieval Jewish thinkers sought to identify certain beliefs as foundational and necessary to adherence to the Jewish religion. Most famous of these was Moses Maimonides, who summed up thirteen such principles in one of his early works, and codified theological axioms in his legal magnum opus. Dovid Campbell examines some later rabbis who took a contrary position:

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