Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation With Mysticism (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006) (original) (raw)
Related papers
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
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 on the Status of Judaism - with Menachem Kellner
Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Studies in Honour of Daniel J. Lasker (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2021) : 135-161., 2021
We use the "Guide of the Perplexed"' 3.32. to illustrate Maimonides’s understanding of the history of the Jews and the nature of Judaism. To our great surprise, the revolutionary implications of that chapter in the Guide of the Perplexed—notorious in and of itself—have been ignored throughout the generations
In this intellectual tour de force, Professor Menachem Kellner revives the medieval Hebrew literary tradition of articulating two messages in one composition. On one hand, Kellner, in a work of objective scholarship, insightfully decodes what he takes to be two opposing religions that have contended for recognition as the Orthodox expression of Judaism from ancient to modern times. On the other hand, Kellner, as an engaged modern Orthodox thinker who has a stake in this confl ict, applies wide learning, critical skills, and expansive control of traditional Jewish sources, intellectual history, and analytic philosophical tools in a sustained argument. Although clearly an advocate of Maimonidean epistemology, Kellner sadly concedes that 1) Maimonidean Judaism is not the dominant version of Orthodoxy, and 2) Maimonides provides but a partial model for rationalist religionists in modernity. Kellner claims that these two confl icting systems have been contending from of Israel's very inception. He notes that the mystical ritualistic religion of ancient Israel, as understood by Professors Jacob Neusner and Baruch A. Levine, fi rst appears in Leviticus and focuses upon the religion of the holy experience. This experiential religion refl ects what Max Weber calls the "enchanted" world of pre-modern humankind. In rabbinic times, Essene and Christian "Judaisms" inhabited an enchanted world while the Judaism of the Mishnah, theologically decoded by Neusner, did not. In Genesis through Numbers, where God is the speaker, reality is for the Torah-audience enchanted, while in Deuteronomy, where the narrator is the mortal Moses, the narrated world appears to be disenchanted. Moses' book was called Mishneh Torah by the rabbis of the Judaism of the Dual (Neusner's Oral and Written) Torah, probably because the religious systems presented
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.