If we did not have good evidence that there was only one man named Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides or Rambam, 1138-1204), it would be tempting to think that there were two, or even more. Some of his works display an unrivalled mastery of rabbinic literature; others, mastery of Greek and Muslim philosophy. In addition, he produced voluminous medical writings.
No individual Jewish author had a greater effect on later generations than Maimonides. New scholarly books about him appear all the time, and they have to take a stand on who the “real Maimonides” was, the halachist, the philosopher or the doctor.
James A. Diamond holds the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo. Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon is his third book about Maimonides, yet he has still found new and worthwhile questions to investigate. Diamond is very familiar with the argument that Maimonides was a neo-Aristotelian in Jewish clothing. But the opening chapters of his book build a strong case for the Jewishness of Maimonides’ thought. Diamond also provides a learned analysis of what Maimonides meant when he talked about the love of God. Maimonides argued that such love could be achieved only through philosophical inquiry, and that it was superior to the fear of God, the only purpose of which was to scare the unphilosophical masses into proper behaviour.
These chapters set the stage for the rest of the book, which exemplifies a relatively new field of study, “reception history,” in other words, how Maimonides’ thought was “received,” i.e. accepted, rejected, appropriated, misappropriated, modified and/or twisted by later generations. Each of the eight chapters in this section concentrates on one great Jewish thinker who grappled with Maimonides’ thought, from the “assault” (as Diamond calls it) launched against him by the kabbalist Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (Ramban or Nahmanides, 1194-1270) to the “reinvention of Maimonides’ legal code” by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), the first chief rabbi of the modern Jewish community in Israel in the 20th century. Diamond deals mostly with the reception of Maimonides by rabbis, but he also includes two less traditional Jews, Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918).
The book will be of major interest to academics, but any Jew who studies and struggles with Maimonides’ thought will find it a compelling read. To give an idea of Diamond’s interesting findings, I will concentrate on the chapter about Rabbi Kook and Maimonides.
It is hard to imagine two more different interpreters of traditional Judaism than Maimonides, the medieval arch-rationalist, and Rabbi Kook, the post-chassidic creative mystical thinker. Yet Rabbi Kook never explicitly opposes Maimonides’ approach, he just “reinterprets” it. Diamond leads us through a number of such reinterpretations, drawing heavily on materials, published only recently, that Rabbi Kook left in manuscript form.
Rabbi Kook argued that when Maimonides claimed that love of God was superior to fear of God, he was only denigrating the type of fear of God that people have in their early stages of spiritual development. Rabbi Kook believed that the initiated could achieve a type of fear of God that was, in fact, superior, and that they could use the love of God as a stepping stone to bring them there. Thus Rabbi Kook essentially turns Maimonides around 180 degrees.
Diamond also shows how oddly Rabbi Kook reworks a famous line from Maimonides. In the first sentence of his great halachic work, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides wrote: “The basic principle of all basic principles and the pillar of all sciences is to know that there is (yesh sham) a First Being [=God].” Speakers of Hebrew recognize right away that this is not standard Hebrew. Although sham means “there” when referring to a place, Hebrew doesn’t use the word to mean “there is.” The reason that Maimonides used it was already pointed out by his translator, Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon, at the beginning of the 13th century. Maimonides’ Hebrew was that of an Arabic speaker, and in Arabic, the word thuma (cognate of the Hebrew, sham) is used in the phrase “there is.”
Whether Rabbi Kook knew of ibn Tibbon’s insight is unclear, but he read a mystical message into this phrase. He “interpreted” Maimonides as suggesting that only “there,” on some other plane of comprehension, and not here in our rational world, could true knowledge of God be found. Rabbi Kook wrote that we reach this level only by using “that aspect of knowledge that is impossible to know,” thus straying very far from Maimonides’ belief that the student who follows an established curriculum of sciences and philosophy will attain the desired knowledge.
Maimonides himself was often accused of imposing a foreign worldview on the Bible, by reading it through the lens of neo-Aristotelian philosophy. Perhaps there is some poetic justice in the fact that others read his work as saying things Maimonides never imagined and never would have supported. In any case, as Diamond astutely shows, the attention paid to Maimonides’ works by Jewish thinkers for the last 800 years proves that his works have become an integral part of the Jewish canon, texts that cannot be ignored and must be engaged.
Canadians should be proud that a first-rate Jewish studies scholar right here in Canada is continuing the tradition of engaging with Maimonides, and is sure to be studied seriously around the world.