GEN526 With respects to the limits of our obligation to love our neighbor [Leviticus 19:18], there is a well-known controversy. “Rabbi Akiba says, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ is a great principle in the Torah. Ben-Azzai says ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’ [this verse] is an even greater principle. [Sifre, Kedoshim, 4:12] While Rabbi Akiba places very high value on the love of neighbor, the meaning of neighbor in his usage is open to doubt. If we take it as I presume Rabbi Akiba did, in its technical halakhic sense, then it can only mean another Jew.  There are those who attempt to expand the meaning by construing kamokha to mean, “he is like yourself.” This interpretation, which is offered by various exegetes from Mendelssohn and Wessely in the eighteenth century to Hermann Cohen in the twentieth, means to expand the reference to all humanity by stressing that every other man is human like yourself, and by virtue of that fact merits your love.  It can even be read to conform with Maimonides’ greater restriction, namely, he is an observant and learned Jew like you and this is the reason that he deserves your love.  Ben-Azzai wanted to avoid all such ambiguities.  For that reason he stressed as his primary principle the concern with humanity as such.  Consider his proof-text in its entirety.  “This is the book of the generations of Adam.  In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him” [this verse]. About this notion of man there can be no debate.  He is everyman, for he is like Adam the first man, who is not a Jew. He is, beyond all parochial limits, man created in the image of God.  FOXMJE 38-9