Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds - Hardcover

Kraemer, Joel L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038551199X ISBN 13: 9780385511995

Publisher: Doubleday Religion, 2008

Synopsis

This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the social, religious, and political issues of his time.

Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled Spain, in 1138 and died in Cairo in 1204. He lived in an Arab-Islamic environment from his early years in Spain and North Africa to his later years in Egypt, where he was immersed in its culture and society. His life, career, and writings are the highest expression of the intertwined worlds of Judaism and Islam.

Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers of humankind. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers.

Now, in a dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of Maimonides’ rich life. MAIMONIDES is at once a portrait of a great historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the twelfth century. Joel Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to re-create a remarkable period in history when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense intellectual exchange and religious conflict.

About this title

About the Author

JOEL L. KRAEMER, John Henry Barrows Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, is the author of Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam and Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, and is the editor of Perspectives on Maimonides. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Shaul Magid There are few things all Jews can agree on, but one may be that there is no figure in Judaism in the last 1,000 years who is as revered as Moses ben Maimon (1135-1204), better known by the Greek form of his name, Maimonides. Reformers and ultra-traditionalists, rationalists and mystics claim him as their inspiration. He created the template for medieval and modern Jewish thinking on matters stretching from law to science, medicine to philosophy, messianism to politics. Joel L. Kraemer's extensive biography Maimonides brings this venerated rabbi and physician to life for a new generation of readers. It is the work of a scholar deeply engaged with Maimonides' ideas and the world in which he lived; the book is lucid, entertaining and incisive. While many biographies of Maimonides have been written, Kraemer does what few have attempted: He presents the great Jewish sage as deeply embedded in an Islamic cultural, religious and intellectual milieu. The book is divided into two parts: an analysis of the Islamic context in which Maimonides lived, describing in detail the places he frequented (Spain, Morocco, the Holy Land and Egypt) and the people he met; and a survey of his writings, including volumes of letters and records of his extensive medical practice as well as his 14-volume code of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, and his philosophical masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed. Among Maimonides scholars there is a long-standing debate regarding the allegation that as an adolescent he and his family converted to Islam (either in his Spanish hometown of Córdoba or later in the Moroccan city of Fez) to avoid the ire of the Almohad dynasty, and that he lived as a Muslim until early adulthood. No credible evidence of this exists in Jewish sources. We know, however, that many in his family's social class did feign conversion to survive the militant Islamic regime that expanded across Northern Africa and much of the Iberian peninsula in his lifetime. Citing four Arabic sources, Kraemer surmises that Maimonides "practiced Islam in Fez and eventually left and sailed to Acre. We do not know whether he was already a practicing Muslim when he came to Fez." The Jewish position has been that Maimonides did not convert but rather engaged in "taqiyya" or dissimulation and, at most, lived as if he were a Muslim, something quite common of Jews in that perilous period. As I read Kraemer, that distinction (outright conversion vs. dissimulation) may be important to many Jews, but it is practically irrelevant to this biography. By Kraemer's lights, Maimonides did not simply live and work among Muslims; his entire worldview was infused with Islamic methods, ideas and ideology. The author argues, for example, that the subtle balance in Maimonides's legal code between "preservation of tradition on one side, and change and progress on the other" stems from his melding of the Talmudic tradition with key principles of Islamic legal interpretation. I, too, have sensed the Islamic influence on Maimonides, especially when reading his works with Muslim colleagues. Once, when discussing passages from The Guide for the Perplexed and Mishneh Torah, a Muslim scholar insisted that Maimonides' positions were "pure Islam" and that "Ibn Maimun" -- as he is known in Arabic -- "is a small 'm' Muslim," citing chapter and verse of thinkers Maimonides never mentions. The fact that Maimonides cites some Islamic sources, especially the philosopher Abu Nasar al-Farabi (c. 870-950), is well known. More subtle is the way even his ostensibly Jewish positions, and the methods he uses to reach them, appear to be taken, sometimes verbatim, from the Muslim tradition. One of Maimonides' great theological innovations, for example, was his Thirteen Principles of Faith, a list of Judaism's central beliefs. As Judaism is a religion founded on law and not on belief per se, no such creed had been attempted before. But the notion of principles, or pillars, of faith had existed for some time in Islam, and Kraemer contends that several of Maimonides's specific articles of faith -- including the first (God's existence), second (divine unity) and particularly the third (God is not a corporeal being) -- reflect the influence of such Islamic thinkers as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and Ibn Tumart, founder of the Almohad movement. Two ironies emerge from Kraemer's book. First, that the great architect of medieval and modern Judaism seems to have lived for a time, at least outwardly, as a Muslim; whether this was a feigned or true conversion, he was an insider in Muslim culture. And second, that what is often considered original in Maimonides is not very original at all. Throughout the book, Kraemer shows how many of Maimonides' contributions are derivative, not just of Aristotle and Plato, but also of Muslim thinkers. He notes that Maimonides's discussion of the five types of speech in Jewish law employs the same five categories contained in Islamic jurisprudence. He shows that Maimonides's prohibition of using sacred poems for mundane purposes (such as setting them to music at communal gatherings) is taken directly from a commentary on Plato's Republic by the Muslim philosopher Averroes. Kraemer's subtitle, One of Civilization's Greatest Minds, is unfortunate, because the book undermines this claim throughout. Kraemer shows that for Jews and Judaism, Maimonides was certainly an innovator, and the depth of his knowledge and compassion was truly astounding. But as a contributor to the ideas of Western (including medieval Islamic) civilization, he did not have much new to offer.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In 1947, when he was 14, Kraemer started to study Maimonides. Now, the 75-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Chicago has produced his magnum opus, a definitive biography of medieval Judaism's chief intellectual sage. To prepare himself, Kraemer mastered many languages, traveled throughout the world and studied innumerable documents, including those found in the Genizah, the storeroom of Cairo's Ben Ezra synagogue. The impressive results of Kraemer's diligent research are set forth in this learned book, supported by 90 pages of footnotes. He offers a splendid analysis of Maimonides's major works: Commentary on the Mishnah; Mishneh Torah and Guide to the Perplexed (which Kraemer calls Guide of the Perplexed.) The erudite presentation includes vital information about the life of Maimonides, tracing his path from his birth in Spain to his move to Morocco, his visit to Palestine and, finally, to his settling in Egypt. Kraemer's imposing contribution is designed for his fellow scholars. General readers should turn to the more fathomable 2005 biography, Maimonides by Sherwin B. Nuland, from Nextbook/Schocken's Jewish Encounters series and just published in paper. (Oct. 28)
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Kraemer’s comprehensive study of the great medieval philosopher and Jewish theologian Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) shows that Maimonides’ wisdom arose in no small part from having feet in multiple worlds. Although a product of Andalusia and the Mahgreb, Maimonides set down roots in Egypt; a pious Jew, he successfully navigated corridors of power dominated by Islam. A dedicated writer and scholar, he nevertheless spent a significant portion of his life immersed in the daily exigencies of medicine, business, government, and law. Perhaps most significant from a philosophical perspective, Maimonides was both an expert on the Talmud and an intellectual heir to Aristotle’s rationalism. Such multifaceted experiences, shows Kraemer, made Maimonides a gifted synthesizer of ideas, and an exemplar of the richness of twelfth-century Mediterranean culture. Kraemer, too, has a talent for synthesis, distilling Maimonides’ entire corpus of writing (including copious correspondence) and a small mountain of secondary sources (some apocryphal) into a fluid and accessible narrative. Lucid descriptions of medieval Mediterranean life—including commerce, political intrigue, and the constant interplay between cultures—will be compelling even for readers unfamiliar with Maimonides’ contributions to philosophy. --Brendan Driscoll

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday Religion
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 038551199X
• ISBN 13: 9780385511995
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 621