Moses Redivivus (review)

Abstract

Moses Redivivus (review) Peter Heinegg Joel L. Kraemer : Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds : New York : Doubleday , 2008 . xvi + 621 pp. $35 . The Guide of the Perplexed has to rank near the top of any list of Unread Classics, right up there with Polybius, Boethius, Dante’s Purgatorio, Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, and the darker reaches of The Man Without Qualities. Maimonides (ca. 1138–1204) comes across today as a dry, difficult writer (“encoded,” as Kraemer calls it, to discourage untrained Jews and deflect suspicious Muslims). Kraemer is an emeritus professor at the Chicago Divinity School and an extraordinarily erudite expert in the comparative study of Judaism and Islam. In this hefty volume, he undertakes the all but impossible task of doing a biography of Maimonides that is at once scholarly and popular—and he succeeds well enough to make this a valuable contribution to any religious library: it is panoramic history with a solid intellectual core. Moses ben Maimon, physician, philosopher, theologian, was born and spent his first twenty‐one years in Andalusia. He moved from there to Fez for five years; then spent a year in Acre and his remaining thirty‐eight years in Cairo/Fustat. Much has been made recently of the peaceful and productive convivencia of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the “Golden Age” of Maimonides’ birthplace, Córdoba. But Kraemer sharply reminds us that even under the great Ummayyad caliph, ‘Abd al‐Rahman III (d. 961) Jewish and Christian dhimmis were merely tolerated subject peoples; after the death of his son and successor, al‐Hakam II, in 976, that Golden Age was over. Under Ibn Abi ‘Amir (978–1002), cultural pluralism took a heavy hit; as throngs of Berber mercenaries poured into Spain to fight the Christians, followed by the armies of the Almoravids (1086) and then the Almohads (1195), life for the Jews got progressively worse. A century before Maimonides left Spain (1066), a gang of Sanhaja Berbers murdered the Jewish vizier of Granada along with hundreds of Jews in the city. So much for tolerance. It is not clear why Maimonides went to the Maghrib, as Morocco too was under Almohad control; there, the precocious Jewish scholar was forced to pretend‐convert to Islam. That in turn may have been a motive behind the year he spent in Israel, visiting the holy places: perhaps it was to expiate having apostatized to save his life. (He later advised persecuted Jews to choose emigration over martyrdom.) Maimonides spent the rest of his days in Egypt, where as an internationally known sage, he was the de jure or de facto leader of the Jewish community (Rais al‐Yahud). Having thrown off the disguise of conversion, he might have been executed for abandoning Islam, but he enjoyed the protection of Saladin’s counselor, al‐Qadi al‐Fadil, who recognized that Maimonides had only converted under duress. Musa Ibn Maymon (his name in his native Arabic) also deftly bridged the dynastic changeover from the Fatimids to the Ayyubids under the great Kurdish sultan Saladin (1137?–1193), for whom he served as court physician until Saladin’s permanent departure for Syria in 1182. Maimonides’ first great work was his Commentary on the Mishnah (1168), best known for its Thirteen Principles of Faith, versified by into the Yigdal by Daniel ben Yehudah and still part of the weekday morning prayers of Askhenazi Jews (Friday evenings for Sephardim). Greek‐speaking Christian theologians had hammered out the Nicene Creed (325) and had been dueling over complex dogmas long before the New Testament canon was finally closed (starting around 367), but the more pragmatically minded Jews waited more than a millennium before framing anything like it. (One cannot help noticing how both creeds go beyond the bare scriptural text, as in the affirmation of the Trinity, which is not in the New Testament, and of the resurrection of the dead, which is not in the Torah.) Maimonides’ second magnum opus was the Mishneh Torah (1177 [“mishneh” = “repetition”]), a rationally structured compilation of the entire Oral Law. An indication of how great the distance could be between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham...