THE movement to formulate the fundamental teachings of Judaism first gained headway at the beginning of the eleventh century with the Karaites, whose entire conception of Judaism was such as to render their sect hopelessly stagnant and doomed to dwindle. Still, even they would never have thought of emphasizing certain dogmas as indispensable, had they not discerned in the teachings of Mohammedanism a dangerous challenge to Judaism. Thus the dogma-making tendency in Judaism arose during the Middle Ages not as an indigenous product but as a retort to the dominant religions of the time. What might be called the application of the synoptic method to the Jewish religion remained confined mostly to the part of Jewry which came, directly or indirectly, under the influence of Aristotelian intellectualism. To this trend Judah Ha-Levi (1085-1140) stands out as a notable exception. In him the disapproval of having Judaism subsumed under formulas of a philosophic stamp comes again to the surface. His being a poet even more than a philosopher enabled him to get a better insight into the inwardness of Judaism than that obtained by the intellectualists with their analytic scalpels. This is apparent in his well-known "Al-Khazari." The story goes that the Khazar king, after consulting a philosopher, a Mohammedan, and a Christian as to what he should believe and do, finally turned to a Jewish rabbi. When the king asked him about the Jewish religion, the rabbi replied, "I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, who fed them in the desert, and gave them the land. . . . Our belief is comprised in the Torah, a very large domain." Upon hearing this, the king grew indignant, and said to the rabbi, "Shouldst thou, O Jew, not have said that thou believest in the Creator of the world, its Governor and Guide, and in Him who created and keeps thee, and such attributes which serve as evidence for every believer?" But the rabbi persists in his mode of stating Judaism. He parries successfully the king's efforts to draw out of him some definition of Judaism in terms of speculative theology. The king in time becomes a convert to Judaism, and it is only then, according to Judah Ha-Levi, that he succeeds in getting the rabbi to teach him concerning the attributes of God, as if to imply that one has first to be a Jew before indulging in any abstract or philosophic study of Judaism. The keynote of Ha-Levi's thought is that the essence of Judaism is not merely to give assent to any general belief, but to belong to Israel and share in its experiences. _By Maimonides and by Abravanel_