I HAVE used my text in good old fashion as a pretext for a little sermon to the intelligent lay reader of THE MENORAH JOURNAL who may be an influential member of the American Jewish community, pointing out that we are sorely in need of a great many such books as the present one, treating various "aspects of the Hebrew Genius"; and they are sure to come just as soon as there is a real demand for them. The Jewish students in our colleges and universities whose number is rapidly increasing have in their midst a great many talented young men who only need encouragement to devote their best energies to Jewish learning. These will serve as a leaven to raise the entire Jewish community of America to a more intelligent Jewish level. What we need is liberal endowments for Jewish chairs in our universities and for the promotion of Jewish education generally. And now to proceed to my proper topic: _Aspects of Hebrew Genius_ is a very creditable volume consisting of eight well-written essays on several topics of Jewish history and thought. Norman Bentwich contributes an article in which he gives an interesting sketch of the Jewish Alexandrian period of the first two centuries B. C., whose thought activities culminated in the works of Philo, the first man in history who attempted an amalgamation of Hebraism and Hellenism. It was not a success so far as Judaism is concerned, as is evidenced by the fact that he was neglected and forgotten by his Jewish successors. He was made use of, however, by the early Christian writers in the formulation of the Trinitarian dogma, and by early Christian apologists and theologians in presenting the doctrines of the new religion in a form likely to appeal to the Græco-Roman world, which trained as it was in philosophical thought would have been repelled by the simple narratives of Scripture and the Gospels. _Representative Men and Tendencies in Jewish Thought_ THE next essay by M. Simon deals with the second and more successful attempt to enrich Jewish literature by infusing into it the spirit of rationalistic inquiry originally derived from Greece. This time, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the scene is placed in Babylonia. The place of the Greeks is now taken by their medieval successors, the Mohammedan Arabs, upon whom fell a part of the Hellenic mantle, that represented by Greek science and philosophy. The æsthetic and literary aspects of the Greek genius were left severely alone by the Arabs. The man about whom this sketch centers is the famous Gaon of Sura, Saadiah. And Mr. Simon lays great stress upon his achievements in Biblical exegesis. As the Septuagint was the first Jewish translation of the Bible, so Saadiah's Arabic translation was the second, and it was enriched by introductions and a commentary in which Saadiah leads his co-religionists, the Rabbanite Jews, from the Talmud back to an appreciation of the Bible.