On the first day of the semester, a certain professor of mine unreservedly characterized the great 12th-century Rabbi Moses Maimonides as “the most influential figure in Jewish rabbinic history.” While there certainly might be other contenders for that distinction, the fact that my professor was willing to make that claim is telling. Maimonides’s groundbreaking theological and philosophical positions, to say nothing of his titanic Jewish legal work, the Mishneh Torah, have made an indelible mark on Jewish religious history.
Maimonides lived in a religiously fraught world, where Islamic speculative theologians, or mutakallimun, were struggling to delineate the boundaries between Islamic conceptions of God and the universe from those of Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic philosophy. Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites were locking horns over the ideas like Occasionalism and free will while philosophers like Avicenna were reworking Islamic conceptions of prophecy and revelation to better reflect Aristotelian notions of the “active intellect.” In short, it was all very confusing, and those committed to traditional religion felt a pressing need to justify their practices rationally.
The Jews felt this need no less for not being Muslim. Some Jewish thinkers of Muslim lands, such as the Andalusian Rabbi Judah HaLevi depicted philosophy as an altogether alien and hostile religion, like Islam or Christianity. And for good reason – philosophers at that time were for the most part committed to certain dogmas: the eternity of the world, the causes, the Forms, Eudaemonia, what have you. But Maimonides went a different way.
Picking up on cues from Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, or accommodationist theologians like al-Ghazali, Maimonides put together a Jewish theology in tune with the cutting edge of philosophical Islam of his time. Looking at his late philosophical-theological work The Guide for the Perplexed, one can see Aristotelian metaphysics – causes, celestial bodies and spheres – proved from Biblical passages. There are also straight-up adoptions of Avicennian philosophy – such as his rational conception of prophecy as philosophical inspiration.
Though his thought met with serious resistance after his death, Maimonides’s comprehensive legal code established his bona fides as a serious Rabbi and scholar. Today, his thirteen principles of faith, which he establishes in his commentary on the Mishnah, are considered the sine-qua-non of orthodox Jewish dogma. This is particularly surprising, given that the majority of those principles were important points of Islamic dogma at the time they were written (particularly if we change the name “Moses” to “Muhammad” and “Torah” to “Qur’an”).
Maimonidean dogma leaves us in uncomfortable place today. The orthodox, on the one hand, find their 3000 year-old religion inexplicably bound to a theology distinctive of medieval-Aristotelian Islam. For the unorthodox, the general acceptance and influence of Maimonides has given many license to twist Jewish sources into contorted positions in order to read trendy modern philosophical or ethical concepts into the Bible and Talmud – a process that, while fun and sometimes edifying, endangers the ability of Judaism to teach us anything we didn’t already know ourselves.
So what do we do about Maimonides?
