Background On Jewish Skepticism
A skeptic in the strongest sense is one who remains in a state of doubt, declaring all positive truth, religious or philosophical, to be unattainable to man. This type of skeptic can scarcely be found in Judaism. However bold the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages were in their research or critical in their analytic methods, they never so distrusted human reason as to deny it the power, as the Greek skeptics did, to arrive at any positive knowledge or truth. Nor did the Jewish mystics attempt, as did Christian theologians, to build up a system of faith upon skepticism—that is, upon the assumption that reason is incapable of grasping any truth. Seer and sage alike appealed to reason to substantiate and verify the postulates of faith (Isa. xl. 26; Job xii. 7). The passage "The Lord is a God of knowledge" (I Sam. ii. 3) is interpreted by the Rabbis by the remark, "Great is knowledge which leads from God to God" (Ber. 33a).
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