EVEN Maimonides (1135-1204), who is usually represented as the chief sponsor of the systematizing and speculative tendency in Judaism, is far from having attached as much significance to the Creed he formulated as the fact of its presence in the prayer book might indicate. He himself strongly deprecates attaching more importance to one part of the Torah than to another. "The Ten Commandments and the Shema in the Torah," he says in the very same chapter of his commentary on the Mishnah which contains the Creed, "are no holier than any of the genealogies that are found in it." Albo (1380-1444) reduces the essence of Judaism to three, yet inconsistently declares that he who denies other articles of faith which are of minor importance is no less a heretic than he who denies any of the essential ones. In fact, he admits that there are as many articles of faith as commandments in the Torah. Abravanel (1437-1508), though an admirer of scholasticism, and practically the last of the line of Jewish Aristotelians, considers the thirteen Articles of Maimonides' Creed gratuitous, and as not representative of the maturer views of Maimonides. His opinion is that they properly belonged to the commentary on the Mishnah, which was the work of his youth; and that as he ripened intellectually, he changed his mind about their value. We miss them in the Code and in the "Guide to the Perplexed," where we should most of all have expected to find them. In the same connection, Abravanel adds that the fashion of laying down creeds as fundamental in Judaism owes its origin to the method employed in the secular studies which always started with certain indisputable axioms. The same resistance to the effort to extract Judaism from a few source principles is encountered in Jewish mysticism. Whatever we may think of the particular form which mysticism took on in the Jewish religion, we cannot but regard it as the outbreak of a longing that forms a part of all vital religion. We have good reason, therefore, to treat with respect its opinion of the intellectualizing process of Jewish philosophy. Although it was also addicted to speculative categories and developed a theosophy instead of a theology, it approached Judaism from an entirely different angle. Being impressionistic in its trend, it was bound to look elsewhere than to abstract concepts for the core of Judaism. To put Judaism into the form of a creed appeared to the mystics like combining pure gold with a baser metal, in order to mint it for circulation. _And More Recently by Mendelssohn_