Adam Kirsch, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016)

Alex Star recommended this to me, as he did the books by Halbertal reviewed below, when I asked him about books on Jewish thought and history. Kirsch's book was superb, each of its chapters a gem about a different classic. I came away feeling that my understanding of the tradition had been both broadened and deepened. In many cases - as with the medieval Zohar, the source of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, or the Tsenerne, the early modern Yiddish-language digest of Biblical stories and lessons for the shallowly literate - I had simply not been aware of these works at all. In other cases, as with Deuteronomy, Philo of Alexandria, Spinoza, and Herzl, Kirsch significantly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the texts and authors. Next I plan to read Kirsch's book about the Talmud, based on his own seven-plus year reading of it.

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.

Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997)

This is a pithy, profound book. In its 130 pages, Halbertal traces the evolving nature of the "rabbinic revolution," which roughly 2000 years ago replaced the priest and prophet with the rabbi and book. In Weberian fashion he distinguishes different species of a common genus - whether canon, meaning, the hermeneutic principle of charity, Kabbalah, esotericism, etc. First came the Bible, of course; but then came the Mishnah and the Talmud, both of which were open-ended, polyphonic, and contentious - the first a collection of legal rulings, the second a discussion of them. The Talmud in particular displaced the Torah as the central text of this text-centered community. In the middle ages, philosophy and Kabbalah (mysticism) each claimed to complement the Talmud. As I was reading about these intense efforts in hermeneutics and legal reasoning, I found myself wondering about the interaction between Jewish and Christian thinking, especially after, say, 1000, when Christian efforts to revive Roman law and to integrate Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy began? Were these Christian and the similar Jewish efforts Halbertal describes merely running in parallel, or was there cross-fertilization between them? My guess would be that any influence there might have been went only one way, from the Christian to the Jewish - simply because I don't believe the dominant Christian thinkers took much interest in the tiny Jewish minority, at least not until the Reformation. But I may be wrong. In any case, this is not a question Halbertal here addresses. The focus is on the evolution of Jewish texts and text-centeredness, but there are all sorts of connections to fundamental questions of interpretation, religious evolution in general, the meeting of cultures (Judaism and Greek philosophy in the middle ages), etc. The second I finished this book, I started Halbertal's intellectual biography of Maimonides, which looks to be superb as well.....