About 800 years before the Pew study, Moses Maimonides received a worried letter from the leader of the Jewish community of Yemen asking him how to combat the specter of assimilation. Yemenite Jews had recently been afflicted by persecution and by a false Jewish messiah, but the worst danger of all was now surfacing: the notion that, for Jews who — like the Yemenites — were thoroughly at home in Muslim culture, there was no longer a good reason to remain Jewish.
Maimonides addresses the issue in ‘Letter to Yemen,’ a fervent polemic in which he condemns Muhammed as the “Defective One,” and, for good measure, derides “the spurious manmade faith” of “Yeshu the Nazarite, may his bones be crushed.” But Maimonides’s answer to the question of why Jews should follow Jewish law is in fact a challenging one: If you know the “deeper meaning of the commandments,” he tells the Yemenites, you realize that they “move man closer to perfection,” whereas Islam and Christianity “really have no deeper meaning. They are just stories and imaginary tales.”
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