Traditions of Maimonideanism, ed. Carlos Fraenkel (original) (raw)
Related papers
This then, was the man, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam. To recall him means to raise a question, a question that is directed to ourselves.'' With these words, 8i-year-old Rabbi Leo Baeck concluded his lecture, delivered in Dusseldorf on July 7, 1954, to commemorate the 750th anniversary of the death of Maimonides. The Rambam's writings, he explained to his audience, had unified the Jewish people, pointing them toward a life of science and morality. To Baeck, by pairing true Judaism with altruistic humanism Maimonides's personality had foreshadowed the open mindset of Reform Judaism. Thus, through his life and work, the medieval halakhist-philosopher had provided intellectual, social, and religious guidance for the present-day Jew. Written in 1954, Baeck's portrait was but one in a long line of modern reinterpretations of'Maimonides: The Man, His Work and His Impact,' as the title of the lecture went. In postwar Germany, however, it became a unique gesture of Jewish-German rapprochement. It is this rich reception history, with its ever-shifting needs and agendas, that will briefly concern us here. Our starting point is the Berlin Haskalah, the German-Jewish Enlightenment that brought a revaluation of Maimonides, after a dip in recognition that roughly coincided with the gap between the Sabbioneta (1553) and Jessnitz (1742) editions of the Guide of the Perplexed. At the time, the Jewish commercial elite in Prussia faced what seemed a disruptive dilemma: should they accept the recent invitation to 'civic improvement' and join the Enlightenment project of progress and profit? Or should they stay with the Jewish corporate nation and continue its ancient traditions? Also, in shul and in school, should they choose the universal religion of reason over the faith of their fathers, and introduce secular knowledge, indispensable for participating in gentile society, at the cost of rabbinic learning? Torat ha-Shem or Torat ha-Adam?-that was the question in 1780s Berlin. Most maskilim, if not all, preferred accommodation over rupture and thus opted for integrating the two conflicting paradigms. When trying to fit their innovations into the Jewish continuum, many turned to Maimonides for help. In 1786, Shimon Berz published a biography that portrayed the Rambam as an advocate of secular studies, freedom of conscience, equal rights, and tolerancein short, as an early prototype of the Berlin maskil. In 1761, Mendelssohn himself issued an annotated version of the master's Treatise on Logic in an attempt to spread the latest ideas on the relation between language and thought. Thirty years later Solomon Maimon completed Giv'at ha-Moreh, a Hebrew introduction to Kantian philosophy disguised as a commentary on the first book of the Guide. New wine poured into time-honed wineskins; needless to say, this was no sign of intellectual weakness, but a conscious, deliberate tactic. Modern scholars have contemplated the irony that maskilim identified with medieval thinkers at a time when the gentile Enlightenment was propagating a clean break with the past, 'imagine a lapsed Catholic philosophe,' Abraham Socher has written, 'utterly rejecting the worldly and doctrinal authority of the Church while taking the pen name "Aquinas."''' Socher's is a crucial observation: the Enlightenment was all about moving forward.
Adventures in Jewish Philosophy. The Case of Maimonides and his Modern Readers
blogs.bu.edu/mzank, 2018
This blog post summarizes my approach to Maimonides that I use in a seminar I teach at Boston University. The students were prompted to present on a significant text from our readings, or on their term paper. I decided to set myself a task as well, namely, to articulate the arc of the course, and explain what I hoped to achieve. The result is perhaps the first step toward a prospectus of a book.
Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion 3 / 2024
Koninklijke Brill BV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements ix Maimonides on the Psychology of Leadership in the Mishneh Torah 1 Alexander Green Rabbinic Manners [Derekh Ereṣ] and the Formation of Etiquette Literature in Medieval Europe 23
The Medieval Appropriation of Maimonides
2012
Between 1295 and 1305 two rather diff erent individuals —one the nephew of Arnau de Vilanova, an academic physician trained at Montpellier, the other a Jew converted to Christianity and practicing at the papal court— undertook independently to translate into Latin all the medical works of Maimonides, above all his short works on asthma, on poisons, on coitus, and on hemorrhoids. In these works, taken as a whole, Maimonides passed along details drawn from the whole spectrum of life in Egypt in his day, ca. 1200. A comparative study of the translations of these two individuals allows us to study the kind of picture of Islamic life that they chose to present, and how they depicted Maimonides himself, to a European readership.
David Sclar, The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
Featuring Highlights from the Hartman Family Collection of Manuscripts and Rare Books, 2023
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-golden-path-9781802077889?cc=us&lang=en& Among the intellectual luminaries dotting the millennia of Jewish history, none shines brighter than Maimonides (1138-1204). He was a rabbi, jurist, Talmudist, philosopher, physician, astronomer, and communal leader, and produced a myriad of writings on halakhah, theology, medicine, and philosophy that have attained near-canonical status. We have more source material from or about Maimonides than possibly any other Jewish figure in the medieval period, and more has been written about him than perhaps any other Jew in history. Epithets like the 'Great Eagle' and the 'Western Light?' and the glorifying statement 'From Moses to Moses, none arose like Moses?' reflect centuries of authority, influence, and fascination. The Golden Path traces the impact and reception of Maimonides and his thought through a study of materiality, specifically the production and dissemination of textual objects. It consists of two sections: a descriptive catalogue of an exceptional private collection of manuscripts and rare books; and essays from leading scholars on aspects of Maimonides's cultural context, influence, and appropriation through disparate eras and geopolitical spheres. Combining intellectual, reception, and book historical research, the heavily illustrated volume explores his effects in assorted social and political circumstances, across diverse intellectual and cultural environments.
Review of James Diamond, "Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon", Iyyun, July 2016
This incisive study explores responses to Maimonides by eight diverse Jewish thinkers. It begins with Nahmanides in the thirteenth century and ends with Abraham Isaac Kook in the twentieth, taking in such unlike figures as the excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (Netziv), head of the Volozhin yeshiva, and, in a coda, even netting Franz Kafka. Such wide scope alone compels admiration. Professor Diamond's book is however far from being simply a chronicle of positions vis-à-vis Maimonides. He grounds his examination of the later writers in a general thesis about the nature of Maimonides' dominance of the history of Jewish ideas since his time. © Iyyun • The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 65 (July 2016): 319–324