Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman Dana Fishkin jeremy p. brown and marc herman (eds.),Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah (Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 86; Leiden: Brill, 2021), Pp. vii + 300. $188. This collection on the commandments in medieval Jewish thought brings together a wide range of scholars and topics, reinforcing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Jewish studies. The enumeration and rationalization of the commandments emerged from the realms of medieval philosophical and mystical thinking, and this book demonstrates how fundamental those approaches were to various medieval thinkers for concepts as well as imagery and terminology. Often, as revealed by several chapters, one’s approach to the commandments served as a gauge of sorts, signaling one’s ideological, cultural, or intellectual affinities. In “Dê Maḥsoro as the Key to Jewish Almsgiving: A Maimonidean Interpretive Innovation and Its Legal Afterlife to the Fifteenth Century” (pp. 27–44), Alyssa M. Gray traces the commandment of almsgiving, alongside its evolving interpretation, from the rabbinic to the early modern periods. Rabbinic interpretations of “Dê Maḥsoro,” a shorthand reference to the biblical verse (Num 15:8) that orders Israelites to furnish an impoverished person with enough to satisfy his lack, identified concrete and specific acts of charity. Gray demonstrates how Maimonides transformed this concretized concept into a general commandment encompassing all types of charity. However, Gray shows that the Maimonidean reappraisal was not adopted until the fourteenth century when Iberian and Ashkenazic cultural sensibilities became enmeshed. Also indicating engagement between the Ashkenazic and Iberian worlds, according to Ephraim Kanarfogel, the Ashkenazic rationalization of commandments is examined in “Ṭaʿame ha- miṣvot in Medieval Ashkenaz” (pp. 177–90). This important historiographical corrective examines three groups of scholars whose engagement in the rationalization of the commandments signals exposure to Iberian rationalism. Anti-Christian polemicists and exegetes who authored biblical commentaries according to the literal sense (pashtanim) rationalized certain commandments in accordance with natural logic. The robust rationalizations of the mystically inclined German Pietists, however, highlighted their two-tiered [End Page 173] approach, in which mystical adepts and common folk each grasped different reasons for commandments. Similarly, a two-tiered social structure highlighted by the rationalization of the commandments, is also explored by Elisha Russ-Fishbane in “Pietism in the Law and the Law of Pietism: From Moses to Abraham Maimonides” (pp. 191–207). Russ-Fishbane demonstrates Abraham’s nuanced view of the pietistic ideal, founded upon key elements of the Maimonidean approach to law and supererogatory ethic, but reinforcing Sufi mystical ideals. Albert Dov Friedberg, too, examines Maimonidean notions of Pietism in “Maimonides’s Long Journey from Greek to Jewish Ethics” (pp. 97–117). He compares two Maimonidean works on ethics, the Eight Chapters and the laws concerning character traits (Hilkhot De’ot) from Mishneh Torah, to posit a noticeable revision of Maimonides’s position on ethics. In his commentary on Mishnah Avot, known as the Eight Chapters, Maimonides promotes the mean between two extremes as leading to perfect morality. Yet, as Friedberg notes, the Aristotelian stance expressed by Maimonides contradicts the valorization of supererogatory behavior found in rabbinic literature. Inferring Maimonides’s intellectual maturation, Friedberg claims that Maimonides elevates the commandment to imitate God into an independent one expressing rabbinic valorization of Pietism. Using a creative angle through which to appreciate the impact of Maimonides on the enumeration and rationalization of the commandments, Marc Herman’s “Early Evaluation of Maimonides’s Enumeration of the Commandments against the Background of the Eastern Maimonidean Controversy” (pp. 83–96) examines the exchange between a reputed “anti-Maimonidean” Daniel ben Saadia and Abraham Maimonides. Herman’s focus on the congenial exchange between Daniel and Abraham Maimonides leads him to problematize the controversial nature of the Maimonidean controversy in the East, and to conclude that, despite being a student of an anti-Maimonidean scholar, Daniel nevertheless adopted Maimonidean linguistic and conceptual elements in his own approach to Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot. Guadalupe González Diéguez’s “The Reasons for the Commandments in Isaac...