Overview
Joseph Albo’s Sefer ha-Ikkarim organizes Judaism around three fundamental principles: the existence of God, divine revelation, and reward and punishment. Written after the religious controversies and disputations of early fifteenth-century Iberia, the work sought to distinguish essential beliefs from secondary doctrines. Albo engaged Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas, Christian polemic, and broader philosophical traditions while allowing significant interpretive flexibility. His classification was partly a response to the pressures of interreligious debate. Sefer ha-Ikkarim became a widely studied statement of Jewish theology and an important record of late medieval Sephardic intellectual adaptation.
