Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (2014)

I knew very little about Maimonides when I started this intellectual biography - basically, only that he was somewhat akin to people like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Thomas Aquinas in that they all sought to integrate their religious faiths with Aristotelian philosophy. By the time I was finished with Maimonides, I was, to put it in technical terms, blown away by him. His intellectual audacity was breathtaking. As a type, he reminded me of Max Weber. John Leizman, a colleague at Bard, compared him to Aristotle himself. Maimonides' first major project was a codification of all of halakhah, the great, overflowing and, by design, contentious corpus of Jewish law encompassing the Mishnah and the Talmud. Maimonides aspired to put an end to the contention by codifying and, in a sense, replacing that corpus. This work - Mishneh Torah- drew extensively on Aristotelian ideas. His other great project, however, The Guide for the Perplexed, more directly addressed the challenge of integrating Torah and philosophy. However, unlike the Mishneh Torah, the Guide addressed an elite audience and concealed its radicalism, making it an esoteric text. Halbertal skillfully guides the reader through the theological and philosophical questions Maimonides wrestled with. The decisive question pertained to God's will and God's wisdom. Emphasizing the former meant that God created the world ex nihilo, intervened purposefully and repeatedly in history, etc. This fitted the traditional, and arguably self-evident, interpretation of the Bible. Contrary to it, however, Maimonides's revolutionary theology focused on the wisdom of God, which implied that the world had existed eternally, God did not intervene, God's wisdom could be found in the orderliness of nature, etc. In short, this was a nearly wholesale reinterpration of Judaism in light of Aristotle's thought. Even prophecy and personal salvation were reinterpreted as natural accomplishments. What made Maimonides's project all the more remarkable were the conditions in which he lived and worked. He and his family fled al-Andalus in the middle of the 12th century, upon the seizure of power by the relatively intolerant Almohads. Unlike many Andalusian Jews, who fled to Provence, Maimonides fled first toward the Almohad power center in the Maghrib. Eventually, they settled in Cairo. Maimonides had lost the safety and familiarity of Cordoba and had to make due as a refugee. To accomplish such a revolutionary rethinking of an entire tradition under such conditions is truly remarkable.