Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/279

 matter, the laws of nature, etc., had their beginning at creation. On the first day God created the beginnings (reshit), that is to say the intelligences, from which proceeded the several spheres, and introduced movement, so that on this day the whole universe and all its contents came into existence. On the succeeding days these contents were disposed in order and developed; then on the seventh day God rested, which means that He ceased from active operation and laid the universe under the control of natural laws, which guided it henceforth.

The teaching of Maimonides shows a somewhat modified form of the system already developed by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina adapted to Jewish beliefs. It had a rapid and wide success, spreading through the greater part of the Jewish community in his own lifetime. But this success was not without some opposition—the synagogues of Aragon, Catalonga, and of Provence, where a very large number of Jews had sought refuge from the Muwahhids; the synagogue at Narbonne, on the other hand, defended him. It was not until the following century, and chiefly by the efforts of David Kimchi, that Maimonides was at length generally accepted as the leading doctor of the Jewish church.

Although Maimonides was known to the Latin scholastics, it was not his work nor that of any other Jewish teacher which really made the Jews important to mediæval western thought so much as the work they did in popularising Ibn Rushd, whom they