Scattered over the face of the globe, no longer constituting a
body politic, the Jewish people by cultivating its intellectual
patrimony creates for itself an ideal fatherland; and mingled, as
it is, with its neighbors, threatened by absorption into
surrounding nations, it recovers a sort of individuality by the
reverence it pays to men that have given best expression to its
peculiar genius.

But the Jewish people, its national life crushed out of it,
though deprived of all political ambitions, has yet regained a
certain national solidarity through community of faith and
ideals; and it has maintained the cohesion of its framework by
the wholly spiritual bonds of teaching and charity. This is the
picture it presents throughout the middle ages, during the period
which, for Christianity, marked an eclipse of the intellect and,
as it were, an enfeeblement of the reason to such a degree that
the term middle ages becomes synonymous with intellectual
decadence. "But," said the historian Graetz, "while the sword
was ravaging the outer world, and the people devoted themselves
to murderous strife, the house of Jacob cared only that the light
of the mind burn on steadily and that the shadows of darkness be
dissipated. If a religion may be judged by its principal
representatives, the palm must be awarded to Judaism in the tenth
to the thirteenth century." Its scholars, therefore, its
philosophers, and its poets render Judaism illustrious, and by
their works and their renown shed a radiant light upon its
history.

Maimonides is one of those eminent spirits in whom was reflected
the genius of the Jewish people and who have in turn contributed