While the study of the old Talmudic lore was maintained, the greatest teachers developed tradition afresh by a philosophical restatement designed to make it appeal to the mental attitude of the enlightened.  The sermon flourished again, collections of Haggadah (Yalkut) were made as storehouses of homilies, and metaphysical treatises modelled upon the works of the schoolmen set forth a philosophical Judaism for the learned world.  It is notable also that these last were not written in Hebrew or in the Talmudic dialect, but in Arabic, the language of their cultured environment; for though the missionary spirit was dead, the controversial activity of the period impelled the Jewish philosophers to present their ideas in the form used by the philosophers of the general community.

It is not only the general conditions of the Arab-Jewish period, but also the special development of Jewish ideas, which recalls the work of the Alexandrian school.  This was, indeed, to be expected, seeing that in both cases there was a mingling of Hebraism and Hellenism.  In Spain, however, the Jews acquired Hellenism at second hand, and through the somewhat distorted medium of Arabic translations or scholastic misunderstanding, and hence the harmony is neither complete nor pure.  They endeavored to show that the teachings of Aristotle are implicit in the written and the oral law, but the interpretation is hardly convincing even in “The Guide of the Perplexed,” of Maimonides, the monumental work which marks the culmination of mediaeval Jewish philosophy.

If there is one figure in Jewish tradition with whom Philo challenges at once comparison and contrast, it is Maimonides, the brightest star of the Arabic, as he was of the Hellenic, development of the Jewish religion.  Though there is nothing on which to found any direct influence of the one on the other, the aim, the method, the scope of their philosophical work are the same, the relation which they hold to exist between faith and philosophy wellnigh identical.  The metaphysics of the Bible, according to both, is hidden beneath an allegory, and is meant only for the more learned of the people.  To Maimonides the Bible is not only the standard of all wisdom, but it is “the Divine anticipation of human discovery.”  In the words of Hosea, God has therein “multiplied visions and spoken in similitudes” (xii. 11).  The duty of the Jewish philosopher is to expound these metaphors and similes; and Maimonides, endeavoring to knit Greek metaphysics closely with Jewish tradition, propounds a science of allegorical values, which by exact philological study traces the inner as well as the outer meaning of the Hebrew words.  But differentiated as it is by greater mastery of the tradition and closer adherence to the Hebrew text, his method is nearly as artificial and his thought as extraneous to the text as the method and thought of Philo.  The content of their philosophies is, indeed, strikingly alike, save that the one is a Platonist,