Jewish skeptics are Jews (historically, Jewish philosophers) who have held skeptical views on matters of the Jewish religion. In general, these skeptical views regard some or all of the "principles of faith," whatever these may be (see Maimonides, Albo), but historically Jewish skepticism is directed either at (1) the existence of the God of Judaism or (2) the authenticity and veracity of the Torah. 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. Seer and sage alike appealed to reason to substantiate and verify the postulates of faith (Isa. ; Job ). The passage "The Lord is a God of knowledge" (I Sam. ) is interpreted by the Rabbis by the remark, "Great is knowledge which leads from God to God" (Ber. 33a). Skepticism in the Bible and Talmud In a work by Emile Joseph Dillon, entitled The Skeptics of the Old Testament (London, 1895/1973), it has been suggested that the authors of the Book of Job, of Ecclesiastes, and of the Words of Agur, the Son of Jakeh, were skeptics, but the original compositions were so interpolated and remodeled as to make the skeptical points no longer noticeable. All three contain bold arraignments of divine justice and providence. As to the author of Ecclesiastes compare E. H. Plumptre's edition: "He was almost driven back upon the formula of the skepticism of Pyrrho, 'Who knows?'" (p. 49). Heinrich Heine called the book Das Hohelied der Skepsis. Friedrich Delitzsch, in Das Buch Hiob (p. 17), calls Ecclesiastes Das Hohelied des Pessimismus, but he might as well have called it "the Song of Skepticism." Jewish skepticism was always chiefly concerned with the moral government of the world. The great problem of life, with "its righteous ones suffering woe, and its wicked ones enjoying good fortune," which puzzled the mind of Jeremiah, and Moses also, according to the Rabbis, and which finds striking expression in the Psalms, created skeptics in Talmudic as well as in earlier times.