ABSTRACT
SOME fine illustrations of this last phenomenonnamely, the power of great medieval Jews to rise above their personal experiences in order to form a fair estimate of another faith-will lead us to one of the most fertile causes promotive of personal intercourse between Jews and Christians in the middle ages. Maimonides was himself a sufferer from Mohammedan fanaticism, and his father and family fled for their lives from Cordova when the persecuting, if pure, Unitarianism of Ibn Tumart offered to heretics the Koran or the sword. But the fact that Islam persecuted Judaism was, in his view, no reason why Judaism should libel Islam. 'The Moslems,' he says, 'ascribe to God a perfect unity, a unity in which there is no stumbling-block.' He refused to describe as superstitious the customs~such as prostration in prayer, and the stone-throwing at the Kaaba-which Islam had taken over from paganism. Maimonides was as tolerant in regard to the doctrines of Christ as he was to those of Mohammed. (The teachings of Christ, and of Mohammed who arose after him,' saicl Maimonides, 'tend to bring to perfection
all mankind, so that they may serve God with one consent. For since the whole world is thus full of the words of the Messiah, of the words of the Holy Writ and the Commandments-these words have spread to the ends of the earth, even if any men deny the binding character of them now. And when the Messiah comes all will return from their errors 1.'
