This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Joseph Albo's philosophical work, Sefer ha-Ikkarim, The Book of Principles, responded to the same pressures Iberian Jewish communities faced by narrowing Judaism's required creed, a documented reduction distinct from simply restating Maimonides' own thirteen principles of faith. Rather than following Maimonides in requiring assent to thirteen distinct principles, Albo argued Judaism rests on just three genuinely foundational dogmas, the existence of God, the divine origin of the Torah, and reward and punishment.
That narrowing is documented as a deliberate response to the polemical conditions of Albo's own day, stating as compactly and defensibly as possible what a Jew is actually required to believe, rather than a purely academic revision of an earlier philosopher's list undertaken apart from its historical circumstances. The work became a widely copied and debated attempt at that same compact, defensible statement, a documented reception distinct from a text that circulated narrowly among specialists alone.
That a philosopher writing under the same coercive pressure that had put him at the center of a church-staged disputation chose to narrow, rather than expand, what Judaism required a believer to affirm marks Sefer ha-Ikkarim as a documented case where a defensive moment in Jewish history produced a deliberately minimal, rather than an elaborated, statement of core belief.