‘A nt i M a imonidean M a imonideanism ’?

Some Remarks on a New Publication

Yos se f Sc hw ar t z

James T. Robinson ed., The Cultures of Maimonideanism: New Approaches to the

History of Jewish Thought [Supplements to the Journal of Jewish Thought and
Philosophy 9], Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009.

Since Maimonides’ 800th anniversary, in 2004, brought about a new stream

of monographs and collected volumes on Maimonides and his heritage1
it is not an easy task to suggest a new approach to studying Maimonides.
At the same time, and as Colette Sirat has vehemently argued on more
than one occasion,2 it is doubtful whether the figure of Maimonides can
provide us with some real inspiration for “new approaches to the history
of Jewish thought,” or is mainly an obstacle to the study of this tradition.
The methodology chosen in this volume in order to deal with this difficulty
is defined by the term “Maimonideanism,” i.e. a conscious widening of
scope and perspective to include not only Maimonides’ thought in itself

1  Among others, see G. K. Hasselhoff and O. Fraisse eds., Moses Maimonides (1138-1204):
His Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Wirkungsgeschichte in Different Cultural Contexts
[Ex Oriente Lux: Rezeptionen und Exegesen als Traditionskritik, vol. 4] (Würzburg: Ergon
Verlag, 2004); Georges Tamer ed., The Trials of Maimonides: Jewish, Arabic and Ancient Culture of
Knowledge [Studia Judaica: Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judenthums 20] (Berlin: Walter De
Gruyter, 2005); Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and his Works (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); A. Elqayam, D. Schwartz eds., Maimonides and Mysticism
[DAAT 64-66] (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2009); Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in his
World: A Portrait of Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2009).
2  See Colette Sirat, “Should we stop teaching Maimonides?,” in Paradigms in Jewish Philosophy,
ed. Raphael Jospe (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 112-128.
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and not only the different paths of his (mostly well-enough documented)
Rezeptionsgeschichte but also and foremost the ways in which the symbolic
capital connected with his name has been co-opted and annexed to different
traditions throughout the ages.
This was the aim of the organizers of a conference that was held in
Paris in July 2007 under the same title. The present volume represents some
of the fruits of this conference, though in a somewhat incomplete form as
I shall note. Indeed, it is within that pluralistic approach that the editor of
the volume, James Robinson, in his preface (p. ix) differentiates between
“first-order” and “second-order Maimonideanism” and declares as its main
goal the achievement of a new “historical topography of Jewish thought”
(p. xii).
Before evaluating to what extent this honorable goal was truly
achieved, I would like to dedicate the first part of this review to a brief
account of the different studies included in the book. A full account of these
studies is naturally beyond the scope of this review.
Frank Griffel’s paper (“The Project of Enlightenment in Islamic-
Arabic Tradition,” pp. 1-20) is dedicated to the development of a certain
paradigm in Islamic theology and philosophy. His assumption is that
“pedagogical pessimism” was a commonplace of medieval thought, based
on an almost ontological differentiation between the cognitive capacities
of different social groups, and hence between their potential grades of
perfection. “Medieval philosophical literature written in Arabic, Latin and
Hebrew does not discuss the possibility of educating the vast majority of
their communities in such a way that they understand, for instance, that
God is incorporeal. . . .” (p. 12).
In this generalized form, Griffel’s claim is quite problematic,
especially when one considers the complex situation in Latin-European
environments, both Christian and Jewish. In the following, however,
I would like to concentrate only on Arabic culture as the author’s main
concern. Griffel defines Maimonides, too, as one such pedagogical
pessimist, hence rejecting a whole tradition that makes him into a role
model for Aufklärung im Mittelater: “Yet how can these authors be
connected to the Enlightenment if many of them, certainly Maimonides
and the Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century, were pedagogical
pessimists?” (p. 14). The “Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century,” to the
extent that such a phenomenon exists at all, are surely not the group that
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can represent any search for a medieval Christian pedagogical approach.3

But is this definition true for Maimonides? As I have argued elsewhere,4
Maimonides’ Aufklärung might be approached from different angles,
and some inner differences might be pointed out here within the falsafa
intellectual tradition. In a way, Maimonides’ differentiation between the
different social groups, extremely defined as it is, might be less “ontological”
than that of Averroes, in that it seems to be historically conditioned
and relativized. There are various reasons to assume that the prophetic-
messianic vision, in which all humanity shall be enlightened, is not only an
abstract utopia of Maimonides but also a concrete postulate of his political
program, one that has direct consequences for his juridical and political
thought.
Howard Kreisel dedicates a long discussion to Maimonides’
philosophical or scientific oriented esotericism (“From Esotericism to
Science,” pp. 21-56). More than an encounter with the central phenomenon
of esotericism, a phenomenon to which some highly important studies
were dedicated in the last decade,5 his article mainly concentrates on the
status of the science of metaphysics qua ma`aseh merkavah, in relation to
astronomical and psychological realms, divided between pre-Maimonidean
Jewish thought, Maimonides himself, and the reception of Maimonides by
different Provencal Jewish philosophers, from Samuel Ibn Tibbon onwards.
It is in this discussion of later European-Jewish traditions that the lack of
any true attempt to analyze the hermeneutic-political aspects of esotericism
is most clearly felt. It seems that Kreisel’s discussion could only profit if he
would take seriously some of the ideas offered by Moshe Halbertal in his
monograph.

3  The literature here is much too extant even to begin with. For a general view I would suggest
Alain de Libera, Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1991).
4  Yossef Schwartz, ‘To Thee is silence praise’: Meister Eckhart’s Reading in Maimonides’ Guide of
the Perplexed (Tel Aviv: Am Oved 2002), 329-333; idem., “Friedrich Niewöhners mittelalterliche
Aufklärer,” in Kritische Religionsphilosophie. Eine Gedenkschrift für Friedrich Niewöhner,
ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Georg Tamer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 25-34
5  See Dov Schwartz, Contradiction and Concealment in Medieval Jewish Thought (Ramat-Gan: Bar
Ilan University Press, 2002); Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation:‎ Esotericism in Jewish
Thought and its Philosophical Implications, translated by Jackie Feldman (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
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Jonathan Dauber strives in his paper “Competing Approaches to

Maimonides in Early Kabbalah” (pp. 57-88) to provide a new key for the
analysis of the complicated reception of Maimonides in early Kabbalah,
avoiding the sharp dichotomies suggested by Moshe Idel and following
the more complicated approach of Elliot Wolfson (p. 58f). This he tries to
achieve mainly through his notion of “non-Maimonidean Maimonidean”
as a category he attributes to some of the earliest figures of Spanish
Kabbalah, foremost to R. Asher ben David and to R. Azriel of Gerona,
as well as to a figure such as R. Meir ben Simeon of Narbonne, who is
normally considered part of the Maimonidean party. Dauber rightly points
out that the political rivalry between what seems to be two closed groups
disputing the legacy of Maimonides is far from representing a homogenous
attitude within each of the parties. Pro- and anti-philosophic approaches
merge with pro- and anti-Kabbalistic approaches in different ratios, and
Maimonides’ ideas are integrated in different ways by all of them, including
within some points related to “the very creation of the discourse that came
to be called Kabbalah.”
Tamas Visi’s very important contribution (“Ibn Ezra, a Maimonidean
Authority,” pp. 89-131) demonstrates the way the supercommentaries on
Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentaries, as a central intellectual phenomenon of
late medieval Jewish thought, were well motivated by the need to provide an
alternative Sephardic systematic interpretation of the Bible to stand against
the Ashkenazi authoritative reception of Rashi. Though rather different from
Maimonides in his basic scientific approach, Ibn Ezra serves as an alternative
Sephardic authority who provides a full and systematic commentary on
scripture that is both scientifically oriented and hermeneutically close
to the Maimonidean paradigm. To this rather convincing historical and
theoretical analysis I would like to add here two further comments: first,
the turn to Bible exegesis on the part of the Maimonideans is far from being
only a reactive move against their opponents but has its clear roots in the
hermeneutic praxis of Maimonides himself and in the systematic framework
provided by him. In that sense, part of the attraction of Ibn Ezra for the
Maimonideans might be rooted in the fact that he seems to restrict himself
less in translating his hermeneutic program into a full biblical commentary,
doing precisely that which Maimonides himself hesitated to do. Another
striking example of this hermeneutic heritage can be found in Salomon
ha-Levi’s, alias Pablo de Santa Maria’s, severe attack on Nicholas de Lyra’s
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Postilla.6 Here the new Christian is writing an influential Bible commentary

not in order to argue against his former Jewish companions but in order to
defeat a different Christian alternative of Hebraist Bible interpretation, one
that according to his own claim in the prologue is wrongly based on the
inferior commentary of Rashi instead of on the superior Spanish tradition
of Ibn Ezra and Nachmanides. An appendix to Visi’s article (pp. 118-131)
provides the reader with a survey of the early supercommentaries on Ibn
Ezra.
Roberto Gatti’s short discussion of Gersonides (“Between Mai-
monideanism and Averroism,” pp. 133-148) relies heavily on modern para-
digms from the realm of philosophy of science, mostly Kuhn and Lakatos,
in order to portray Gersonides’ exact stand toward “the Maimonidean
research program” (p. 136). Gatti points out the fact that Jewish thinkers
such as Gersonides, Albalag, and Moses of Narbonne were actually
moving freely between two different “paradigms,” i.e. Maimonideanism
and Averroism. I’m not sure that Kuhn’s concept of “essential tension” is
so helpful in order to understand “Gersonisdes’ movement back and forth
between Maimonides and Averroes” (p. 142). The tension described in
Gersonides’ approach is a well established element of Hebraic-European
Maimonideanism throughout the thirteenth century, a direct consequence
of the massive project of Averroes’ Hebrew translations that creates for
the Hebrew philosopher an intimate space of different syntheses between
Averroes and Maimonides. For a long period this “tension” seems to play
a rather positive role for Jewish philosophers as an element of stability, not
of unrest.
Maud Kozodoy’s article “No Perpetual Enemies” (pp. 149-170)
moves us toward early modern discourse, concentrating on Jewish
Maimonideanism in the beginning of the fifteenth century while trying
to read together two different complex polemical structures: that of the
inner Jewish debate and that of the changing Jewish-Christian polemic and
mutual influence in an age that gave birth both to “Hebrew scholasticism”
and to new forms of Christian Hebraism, one in which the role of Jewish
apostates with their own Maimonidean agenda becomes more significant.

6  Biblia Sacra cum glossis interlineari et ordinaria Nicolai Lyrani Postilla, ac Moralitatibus,
Burgensis Additionibus & Thoringi Replicis, I, Venetiis 1588, p. 6b.
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As in many other chapters, here as well the diverse attitudes out of which
the figure of Maimonides might be co-opted is revealed.
Abraham Melamed’s “Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles” (pp. 171-
190) is dedicated to the most widely spread form of popularization of the
content of Maimonides’ elitist philosophy. The way Melamed introduces
the basic esoteric strategy of Maimonides himself in this context (p. 172) is
somewhat odd, assuming that Maimonides consciously broke a traditional
prohibition on the transmission of esoteric philosophic knowledge. The
scandalous move of Maimonides was obviously not his revealing rabbinic
secrets, but his insistence on implementing the esoteric rabbinic method
on classic topics of philosophic discourse, i.e. metaphysics, physics, and
ethics. However, the great popularity of sacred poetry (piyyutim) based on
Maimonides’ doctrines, and the way they systematically manipulate the
original doctrines into a more consensual popular teaching, is certainly
a major mechanism shaping the “cultures of Maimonideanism.”
Mor Altshuler’s description of R. Joseph Karo’s concept of prophecy
and its Maimonidean background (pp. 191-210) illuminates again the
degree to which Maimonidean philosophic, hermeneutic and halakhic
speculations become part of Jewish intellectual habitus, to the extent that
they were found over and over again in the most unexpected contexts, here
in the highly messianic, visionary, and Kabbalistic atmosphere of sixteenth-
century Safed. Yaacob Dweck’s analysis of Leon Modena’s anti Kabbalist
polemic (“Maimonideanism in Leon Modena’s Ari nohem, pp. 211—244)
illuminates the opposite phenomenon, as Maimonides becomes a source
of inspiration for a radical attack on Kabbalah. In order to understand
Modena’s unique attitude, Dweck follows both the Kabbalists’ negation
(pp. 215—225) as well as the Kabbalists’ appropriation (pp. 226—232) of
Maimonides before he turns to the analysis of Modena’s own usage and
interpretation of Maimonides.
The great role reserved for Maimonides in modern Jewish
enlightenment is rather poorly addressed in this volume, mostly in Abraham
Socher’s short analysis of Salomon Maimon (“The Spectre of Maimonidean
Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century”).7 Socher’s laconic description

7  From the great bibliography dedicated to different aspects of this topic see Christoph Schulte,
Die jüdische Aufklärung (München: Beck Verlag, 2002); Resianne Fontainne, Andrea Schatz, Irene
Zwiep eds., Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened
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is then again answered by a deeper analysis of the negative role played

by the figure of Maimonides from the side of the conservative orthodox
intellectuals in their turn against the ideals of Jewish Haskalah (Micha
Gottlieb, “Counter-Enlightenment in a Jewish Key,” pp. 259-287). The real
fact that emerges from both chapters relates to the great symbolic force
attached to the figure of Maimonides in Jewish traditions of the last 800
years, one that drives all parties back to his ideas.
The last five chapters of this volume are occupied with different
manifestations of Maimonideanism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Görge Hasselhof (“Manuel Joel,” pp. 289-307) and George Kohler
(“Maimonides and Ethical Monotheism,” pp. 309-334) both concentrate
on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German-Jewish
thought. Hasselhof provides the reader with a very precise description of
Joel’s scholarship, but this description remains in great need of social and
intellectual contextualization in order to gain meaning, both in relation to
more general trends within the Wissenschaft des Judenthums and in relation
to Catholic and Protestant scholarship of the time. Some of this larger
framework is given by Kohler, who follows this path to Hermann Cohen
and some of his later disciples.
Hanoch Ben-Pazi (“Eros within the Limits of Mere Reason,” pp. 335-
352) and Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft (“How to Read Maimonides after
Heidegger,” pp. 353-383), both concentrate on central philosophic systems
of the twentieth century. Ben-Pazi’s intriguing discussion evokes the
notion of Eros between Cohen and Rosenzweig, trying to relate it, one
must say in a rather laconic manner, to an element of intellectual eroticism
in Maimonides. Wurgaft describes the efforts of two important Jewish
philosophers flourishing in the second half of the twentieth century, Leo
Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, to confront the challenge of Heideggerian
philosophy. The role played by Maimonides in this encounter seems to be
more convincing in relation to Strauss than in the case of Levinas, who
chooses a rather different symbolic tradition in his Talmudic project.

Jewish Discourse (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007); Yossef
Schwartz, “Causa Materialis: Solomon Maimon, Moses ben Maimon and the Possibility of
Philosophical Transmision,” in Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatism and Empirical Skepticism,
ed. G. Freudental (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 125-143.
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Finally, Dov Schwartz turns to religious-Zionist thought in order

to define the dual and ambivalent role reserved there for the writings of
Maimonides (“Maimonides in Religious-Zionist Philosophy,” pp. 385-408).
His thorough review concentrates on the different solutions provided by
these thinkers to the tension between different writings of Maimonides,
different symbolic personae related to his figure, and different ideal Jewish
models of particular versus universal.

As I hope is clear enough from my brief description of the rich

content of this volume, the reader can find here a great number of
important discussions and enlightening perspectives. In the last part of this
review I would like to try and follow some of the general methodological
and ideological assumptions underlying this volume, as reflected in its
structure.
Like many other contemporary publications, this volume’s origination
was in a conference. The nature of such conferences necessarily creates
a moment of arbitrariness, and too often the editors do not make enough
effort to improve the immediate scope by enlarging the preliminary results
into a full thematic discussion. I am afraid this volume is no exception.
Concretely speaking, the acute question to be asked is what are the
overall cultural identities inside which the “cultures of Maimonideanism”
are being examined? A first glance into the above described chapters seems
to provide a simple answer: an isolated Jewish arena is here excavated, as
much as Jewish cultural phenomena can be examined in isolation from their
larger cultural background, a question to which I shall return immediately.
But is this a fair representation of Jewish cultures of Maimonideanism? Well,
a positive answer to this question would then only be possible if one put aside
the Jewish environment in which Maimonides himself lived and thought,
i.e. Arab-Jewish culture. Not one single chapter is dedicated to any aspect of
North-African, Egyptian, Syrian, Babylonian, or Yemenite medieval and/
or modern Maimonidean tradition, not to mention non-Jewish Moslem
encounters with Maimonides. In spite of some short remarks by the editor
in his introduction, this volume must be defined as one dedicated solely
to European-Jewish culture. Here the contextual doubt must be raised
again: is it really possible to understand Jewish European intellectual and
cultural history without taking into account eastern Judaism on the one
hand and Christian culture on the other? I truly believe that the answer
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must be negative, and that the volume discussed here can’t claim from the
beginning, in spite of the editor’s assertion, any general encounter with its
subject matter.
As is very well known, Christian European culture does more than
provide us with some kind of general cultural environment, relevant to
the understanding of any particular Jewish phenomenon. In the case of
Maimonides, it develops its own forms of Maimonideanism. In thirteenth-
century theology, philosophy and medicine,8 in early modern Christian
Kabbala, in seventeenth-century philosophy and science, etc. Essential
portions of Rosenzweig’s philosophy cannot be understood without
knowing the parts of Hegel’s philosophy of history polemicized by
Rosenzweig, and Hegel himself, like Leibniz and Kant before him, bases
an important part of his analysis on ideas directly taken from Maimonides.
Muhammad al-Tabrizi and Ibn Arabi, the whole Yemenite tradition from
Maimonides’ lifetime to the mid twentieth century, Abraham Abulafia and
Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel; these are only a few of the
names that could have made an alternative rich and inspiring volume.
Naturally, no single volume can truly take on such a scope, and yet
I believe that such a presumptuous volume should have striven to provide
the reader with at least some hint of the full possible range of the true
historic phenomenon.

To sum up: Is it possible to create an isolated topography of Jewish

thought while ignoring its immediate surroundings? The present volume
proves that such work can be done and published, but at the same time
clearly demonstrates its limitations.
No doubt Jewish intellectual history shall be newly written, and
the figure of Maimonides would make an excellent starting point. Colette
Sirat’s longing for an emancipated historiography of Jewish thought has
received in this volume a truly genuine methodological answer, based on
the emancipation of Jewish intellectual history from the great shadow of
Maimonides through its symbolic manifestations as “Maimonideanism.”
A true implementation of such a method is still awaited.

8  For the reception of Maimonides in Latin scholasticism see Görge K. Hasselhoff, Dicit Rabbi
Moyses. Studien zum Bild von Moses Maimonides im lateinischen Westen vom 13 bis zum 15
Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Köenighausen & Neumann, 2004).