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November/December 2008
Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds
Allan Nadler
Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds Doubleday |
No figure in the long history of the Jews has earned anything approaching the fame and veneration of Maimonides (Rambam in Hebrew, after his acronym Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon: b. Cordoba, 1138; d. Cairo, 1204). His monumental legacy is treated in a massive corpus of both reverentially religious and soberly academic studies, without parallel in the field of Jewish studies. This legendary jurist, philosopher and physician led an uncommonly tumultuous life—one that encompassed several illustrious careers, from chief rabbi of Egypt’s Jewish community to head physician to Cairo’s Royal Court—unmatched in its lasting religious, philosophical, communal and political impact. He authored the most comprehensive and original code of halacha in the history of Jewish jurisprudence, the Mishneh Torah; the most influential work of medieval Jewish philosophy, The Guide for the Perplexed; and a host of other works from authoritative rabbinical responsa to groundbreaking medical tomes.
The only theological creed ever to take root among the Jewish masses, Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, originated as one of the three prolegomena contained in Maimonides’ Commentary to the Mishnah; another is the standard work of medieval Jewish rationalist ethics, The Eight Chapters. His Epistle to Yemen, which offered great comfort to a community in distress from violent missionary coercion by Muslim fundamentalists and the ravings of a popular Jewish messianic pretender, earned Maimonides honorable mention in the Kaddish recited by Yemenite Jews to this day.
Given these unmatched achievements, it is little wonder that a popular adage declares that “From (the Biblical) Moses to Moses (Maimonides) there never arose anyone like Moses.” No less wonder that the literature on Maimonides is so vast that a search of his name in the database of the New York Public Library yields more than 1,700 titles. Additionally, tens of thousands of articles and monographs have been written about Maimonides, and his works, translated into more than 20 languages, have been the objects of hundreds of rabbinical and philosophical commentaries over the centuries.
In the few years since the worldwide commemorations of the 800th anniversary of Maimonides’ death alone, almost 100 new publications about him have appeared, including four biographies. It was then with no small degree of skepticism that I read the publisher’s advertisement for Joel Kraemer’s new book as the “long-awaited first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides.”
I wondered what more could possibly be added to the vast literature on Maimonides? Happily, as it happens, a great deal, thanks to Kraemer’s deep erudition in the Mediterranean/Islamic world that Maimonides inhabited. In his introduction, Kraemer emphasizes that the preponderance of sources he consulted to reconstruct Maimonides’ life are of Islamic origin, setting him apart from the majority of Jewish scholars who have tended to limit themselves to Hebrew sources: “It turns out that our main historical sources are written in Arabic by Muslims. That is because Jews wrote very few historical works, whereas Muslims wrote enough biographical and historical tomes to fill a good-sized library.”
Fortunately for Kraemer and Maimonides’ other biographers, and despite the Talmudic rabbis’ dismissal of historical and biographical writings as “things of no significance” (devarim shel ma be-khach), we also possess a rich trove of material from Maimonides’ time and place: the vast Cairo Genizah, taken from the storage house of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat (old Cairo) where Maimonides spent the last four decades of his life. There is simply no other pre-modern Jewish figure whose life is illuminated by a comparable treasure-house of primary sources, many of which are Maimonides’ works and letters in his own hand.
Kraemer’s book closely follows the chronology of Maimonides’ life, its chapters alternating between breezy biographical narrative and scholarly treatment of his major works. The obvious advantages of such a linear arrangement notwithstanding, it tends to produce an uneven book, both in terms of style and intellectual focus. The chapters depicting Maimonides’ environs, beginning with mid-12th century Cordoba, concluding with late 12th century Cairo, and including the Moroccan city of Fez where his family sought temporary refuge from religious persecution in Andalusia, are the most original sections of the book. Kraemer’s intricate explications of the theological differences between the various Islamic sects that rose and fell in Spain, North Africa and Egypt during Maimonides’ life are without parallel in Jewish historiography.
Unfortunately, however, so enthusiastic is Kraemer on demonstrating the influence of Islam on Maimonides’ life that he often slips into exaggerations and distortions. The most blatant example is the chapter that will almost certainly be the object of wide criticsm by both rabbis and historians, provacatively entitled "Did Maimonides convert to Islam—?" a question that Kraemer unambiguously answers in the affirmative.
There is a problem with the way Kraemer arrives at his sensational conclusion. His main source for this calumny is the vindictive accusation of a Muslim visitor to Cairo from Fez, who seemed to have remembered Maimonides as a Muslim when he lived in Morocco. Surprised more than 30 years later to discover that Maimonides had become Egypt’s most distinguished rabbi, he denounced him to the authorities as an apostate.
But this account, along with a handful of similar testimonies cited by Kraemer to bolster his claim, proves nothing more than that Maimonides practiced the time-honored medieval Islamic tradition of Taqiyya, or prudent dissimulation, by dressing and behaving like a Muslim publicly, perhaps occasionally presenting himself at a mosque, while remaining an observant Jew during the darkest period of Almohad persecution, which forced Jews to dress in hideous costumes and resulted in thousands of forced apostasies and deaths. There is simply no credible evidence that Maimonides converted, let alone that he was a “practicing Muslim.”
Kraemer’s related discussion of Maimonides’ lenient views regarding the status of coerced Jewish apostates, focusing on his Epistle on Forced Conversion (whose attribution to Maimonides is a matter of scholarly dissension, unmentioned by Kraemer), reflects his uncertain grasp of fundamental methodological issues in Talmudic literature and rabbinic jurisprudence. For example, in treating the Talmudic deliberations on this question he writes: “A Talmudic ruling held that if the act of coercion was not in public...a Jew is permitted, even obligated, to transgress, even to worship idols, and should not give up his life. The Tosafists [a school of medieval French commentators to the Talmud] did not accept this. They held that in the case of idolatry one should be slain and not transgress, even in the presence of one person.”
Anyone familiar with the basic methodology of Talmudic commentaries knows that neither the authors of the Tosafot nor any of the other medieval rabbinic exegetes would ever dare to dissent with a Talmudic ruling. The particular Tosafist commentary that Kraemer seems to have in mind merely calls attention to the singular opinion (not ruling) that permits idolatry under coercion, attributed to Rabbi Ishmael, one that was rejected by all other Talmudic authorities. More egregiously, Kraemer creates the impression that a “Talmudic ruling” was overturned in 12th century Franco-Germany in the wake of the Crusades, and analogizes from it to Maimonides’ ruling in his Mishneh Torah, which in fact strictly follows the Talmudic consensus.
The fundamental flaw of this book lies in its uneven conception and poor literary execution. Kraemer seems unable to decide what genre of book he wished to produce. Consequently he appears to cram everything he has ever learned and wanted to say about Maimonides over the course of the half-century that he has been studying him into this single volume. The result is a string of chapters that don’t feel as if they’re part of a single work. As the book proceeds, the reader is increasingly drowned in lengthy digressions about dozens of Muslim theologians and scientists, whose relevance to understanding Maimonides is at most marginal.
Kraemer’s penchant for verbose digressions is not limited to the scholarly sections of his book. In the chapters where he tries his hand at biographical prose, he tends to get lost. Take the following excerpt, from the entirely superfluous chapter, “Moses and David,” describing the doomed voyage of Maimonides’ brother to the southeastern Egyptian Red Sea port of Aydhal: “As the boat made its way, travelers gazed at the thicket along the Nile, the huts and the fellahin... Along the riverbanks crocodiles basked, opening their lazy eyes, patient and outwardly indifferent to the human spectacle gliding by. Glimpsing crocodiles in the water, with their bulky reptilian bodies submerged, their eyes protruding, the onlooker felt the gaze of ultimate peril.”
This all might be appropriate for a travelogue of medieval Egypt, but all the reader needs to know about David’s drowning in the Red Sea—the exact circumstances are unknown but he certainly was not eaten by a Nile crocodile!—is that his death sent Maimonides spiraling into a long period of depression and unproductiveness.
Kraemer is at his best when focusing on Maimonides’ major works, in individual chapters dedicated to the Commentary to the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah, the Guide for the Perplexed and the major Maimonidean Epistles. But here, too, serious problems abound, most of them the consequence of his imbalanced and strangely selective treatments of these seminal writings.
In treating the important and highly original section of the Mishneh Torah on the Laws of Torah Study, Kraemer limits himself to a single issue—the status of women—which Maimonides barely discusses at all, and ignores the master’s revolutionary reclassification of the Jewish religious canon and the order of its study. His concluding paragraph offers unintentional insight into his motivations, both here and throughout the book, for omitting many of the core issues and focusing instead on what can fairly be called “trendy ones.” “As we have seen, Maimonides believed that women were capable of being instructed in Talmud and even that women can be prophetesses, as was Miriam, sister of Moses. In the modern period, the greatest Talmudist since the Gaon of Vilna, Rabbi Saul (GeRaSH) Lieberman, an admirer of Maimonides, encouraged women to study Talmud and admitted them into his Talmud classes.”
Leaving aside the preposterous claim about Rabbi Lieberman’s stature as a Talmudist eclipsing that of the hundreds of rabbinic luminaries of the 19th and 20th centuries, Kraemer’s education at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary (where, as we learn in the book’s preface, he studied with Lieberman) and his affiliation with Conservative Judaism have evidently influenced his selection of themes from Maimonides’ work, themes that were of no relevance to Maimonides’ generation.
Joel Kraemer is an erudite scholar who has devoted a lifetime to the mastery of Maimonides’ life and works. His book, densely packed with valuable information, is the culmination of many years of research and writing. While the interpretive errors are his alone, primary blame for its serious literary defects must be assigned to a press whose editors were so impressed by the author’s renown that they trusted him not wisely but too well.
Allan Nadler is a professor of religious studies and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University.
