Book Review: 'Maimonides' by Moshe Halbertal
'From Moses to Moses, there has been none like Moses" runs the epitaph on the tomb of Moses Maimonides, comparing the medieval Jewish philosopher with his Biblical namesake—in the philosopher's favor. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this intellectual giant to Jewish civilization and, through his influence on Muslim and Christian thinkers, to Western civilization as a whole. In his rigorous and insightful study "Maimonides: Life and Thought," Moshe Halbertal reintroduces readers to this rabbi-scientist, who insisted that faith should be an enterprise based on reason. What readers will gain from this remarkably modern thinker of the medieval age depends on their own reason—and their own faith.
Much of what is known about Maimonides' life comes from an extraordinary source: the Cairo Genizah, a thousand-year-old repository of nearly 200,000 medieval manuscripts discovered in 1897 on the grounds of a Cairo synagogue. Motivated by religious concerns about discarding Hebrew texts, Cairo's medieval Jewish community saved nearly all written documents, even children's schoolwork and sales receipts, providing a detailed picture of its civilization.
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Maimonides was a physician, rabbi, politician and philosopher, and his life spanned concepts and continents. Born in Córdoba in 1138, he fled with his family to Morocco as a youth when a new, tyrannical Muslim regime took power and demanded that Spanish Jews convert or die. At 17 he published his "Treatise on Logic," an introduction to Aristotelian logical principles; in his early 20s, while migrating through North Africa and then the Crusader-occupied Holy Land in flight from hostile regimes, he became a physician and began publishing on Jewish law. He arrived and settled in Egypt and in 1171, he was appointed head of Cairo's large Jewish community, acting as Cairene Jewry's liaison to the Muslim ruling class.
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Mr. Halbertal views his two greatest works—"Mishneh Torah," his profound distillation of Jewish law, and "Guide of the Perplexed," his astonishing reconciliation of faith and reason—as in part inspired by these losses. Scholars often divide Maimonides' intellectual work in two: first, his efforts at codifying Jewish law, which previously existed mainly in the vast and often unresolved legal discussions in the 63 tractates of the Talmud; second, his philosophical writing that reconciles the science of his time with his Jewish (and by extension, all monotheistic) faith. Mr. Halbertal's achievement here is that he presents these two projects as a single one: a bold attempt by Maimonides to make sense of faith for an educated audience in an advanced civilization.
Prior to Maimonides, Judaism had little by way of dogma. Jews were expected to believe in one God and to follow the Torah's commandments, but no list of beliefs defined Judaism. But Maimonides' quest to delineate Jewish belief, as Mr. Halbertal explains, wasn't some philosophical exercise but a historical necessity. Ancient Pagan regimes had presented Jews with stark physical choices—martyrdom, flight or practicing Judaism secretly. As for Christianity, Jews saw its God-incarnate as violating the Torah's prohibition on idolatry. But Islam was unambiguously monotheistic. Was it perhaps compatible with Judaism? And if so, why shouldn't a Jew convert? In answering this question for the Jews of Yemen, who posed it to him when faced with Islamic persecution—Maimonides' authority was respected by communities from France to Africa and beyond—the rabbi-philosopher presented not only a practical answer but a conceptual one. If one accepts the Torah as a public divine revelation, he posited, then any subsequent "revised" revelation, particularly one received in private, wouldn't merely suggest an imperfect Torah; it would suggest an imperfect God. Jews could not convert to Islam.
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