The period of systematic and rationalistic effort culminated in the legal and philosophical works of Maimonides, the greatest Jew of the middle ages. The Rev. H. S. Lewis gives a readable and sympathetic sketch of this pre-eminent Jewish systematizer and rationalist. He defends him against the strictures of Luzzatto and Graetz and points out the great influence his thinking had on Judaism and Jews of his own and subsequent ages, and even on the Christian scholastics. The following four essays are devoted not to representative men but to brief and interesting sketches of tendencies in Jewish thought and departments of Jewish literature. The Rabbinic legalistic lore of the Mishnah and Talmud, which finds no general treatment in the volume, is partly represented by the article of Dr. S. Daiches, who gives a popular account of the post-Talmudic attempts to codify the immense legal material scattered in Mishnah and Talmud and in later additions. Maimonides' code naturally occupies an important place in this sketch, and a novel feature is the important place assigned to Jacob ben Asher (1280-1340), the author of the _Turim_, who superseded Maimonides and is popularized by Joseph Caro in his _Shulchan Aruch_. _Jewish Rationalism and Mysticism_ THE title of the next paper, written by the competent hand of Dr. A. Wolf, versed in philosophy as well as in Jewish literature, sounds novel; and as the author says, is the first effort of the kind so far made. It is well known that the philosophic movement in medieval Jewry is characterized with few exceptions by the more or less faithful adaptation of Aristotelian thought as represented in the Arabic translations of his works and in the compendia and expositions made by such ardent disciples of the Stagirite as Al Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. Dr. Wolf undertakes briefly and readably to indicate how much the Jewish medieval philosophers owed to the Greek sage and what their attitude to him was, and interestingly summarizes the Aristotelian point of view by the one word rationalism, as distinguished from dogmatism and mysticism. He rightly points out that while the specific doctrines borrowed from Aristotle and read into the Bible by his ardent Jewish disciples are for the most part obsolete, the spirit of systematic inquiry, the use of the reason in elucidating disputed problems, "the exalted conception of the place and function of human thought, the hallowing of intellectual effort," which was the product of this philosophical activity, is a gain of inestimable value for all time.