uickened intellectual life of Provence Jews also took active
part. David Kimchi has come to be regarded as the teacher _par
excellence_ of Hebrew grammar and lexicography, and Judah ibn Tibbon,
one of the most notable of translators, in his testament addressed to
his son made a complete presentation of contemporary science, a
cyclopaedia of the Arabic and the Hebrew language and literature,
grammar, poetry, botany, zoology, natural history, and particularly
religious philosophy, the studies of the Bible and the Talmud.

The golden age of letters was followed by a less creative period, a
significant turning-point in the history of Judaism as of spiritual
progress in general. The contest between tradition and philosophy
affected every mind. Literature was widely cultivated; each of its
departments found devotees. The European languages were studied, and
connections established between the literatures of the nations. Hardly a
spiritual current runs through the middle ages without, in some way,
affecting Jewish culture. It is the irony of history that puts among the
forty proscribers of the Talmud assembled at Paris in the thirteenth
century the Dominican Albertus Magnus, who, in his successful efforts to
divert scholastic philosophy into new channels, depended entirely upon
the writings and translations of the very Jews he was helping to
persecute. Schoolmen were too little conversant with Greek to read
Aristotle in the original, and so had to content themselves with
accepting the Judaeo-Arabic construction put upon the Greek sage's
teachings.

Besides acting as intermediaries, Jews made original contributions to
scholastic philosophy. For instance, Maimonides, the first to reconcile
Aristotle's teachings with biblical theology, was the originator of the
method adopted by schoolmen in the case of Aristotelian principles at
variance with their dogmas. Frederick II., the liberal emperor, employed
Jewish scholars and translators at his court; among them Jacob ben
Abba-Mari ben Anatoli, to whom an annuity was paid for translating
Aristotelian works. Michael Scotus, the imperial astrologer, was his
intimate friend. His contemporaries were chiefly popular philosophers or
mystics, excepting only the prominent Provencal Jacob ben Machir, or
Profatius Judaeus, as he was called, a member of the Tibbon family of
translators. His observations on the inclination of the earth's axis
were used later by Copernicus as the basis of further