Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288-1344), philosopher, scientist, and rabbinical authority,1 has often been portrayed in the scholarly literature as a faithful follower of Aristotle and an unorthodox, even radical, theologian: “The boldest of all Jewish philosophers” Gersonides “may be the truest disciple of Aristotle whom medieval Jewish philosophy produced” and hence is “essentially alien to those biblical doctrines which in his formulation he seemed to approach.” In Gersonides' system “mosaic dogma [gives] way to the requirements of Aristotelianism” since his intellectual worldview is “Islamic peripateticism in all its purety.” One scholar considers his theory of the world's creation to be “almost in the spirit of modern deism” because it “[limits] the direct activity of God to the act of the creation of the world.” Another deems his theory of divine knowledge “a theological monstrosity”; still another claims that it “radically destroys the whole of history as told in the Bible.”