Maimonides (Jewish Encounters) - Hardcover

Nuland, Sherwin B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805242007 ISBN 13: 9780805242003

Publisher: Schocken, 2005

Synopsis

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance: a great physician who served a sultan, a dazzling Torah scholar, a community leader, a daring philosopher whose greatest work—The Guide for the Perplexed—attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world, a rationalist living in a time of superstition. Eight hundred years after his death, his notions about God, faith, the afterlife, and the Messiah still stir debate; his life as a physician still inspires; and the enigmas of his character still fascinate.

Sherwin B. Nuland—best-selling author of How We Die—focuses his surgeon’s eye and writer’s pen on this greatest of rabbis, most intriguing of Jewish philosophers, and most honored of Jewish doctors. He gives us a portrait of Maimonides that makes his life, his times, and his thought accessible to the general reader as they have never been before.

About this title

About the Author

Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., is the author of nine previous books, including Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, The Wisdom of the Body, The Mysteries Within, Lost in America: A Journey with My Father, and The Doctors’ Plague. His book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter won the National Book Award and spent thirty-four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Time, and The New York Review of Books. Nuland is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also teaches bioethics and medical history. He lives with his family in Connecticut.

Lost in America, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, How We Live, and How We Die are available in paperback from Vintage Books.

Reviews

Maimonides, one of the preeminent personalities of medieval Jewish history, was a jurist, philosopher, expert in Jewish law, physician at the court of Saladin and a respected and dedicated communal leader. Given all that, it's difficult to understand the decision to present Maimonides's legacy primarily through the lens of his work as a physician. The 12th century was a time of stagnation in the history of medicine, and the author himself concedes that Maimonides contributed very little that was new or innovative to the field. By contrast, his jurisprudential magnum opus, the Mishne Torah, constituted a groundbreaking work in its own day and continues to be authoritative almost a millennium later. Although Nuland acknowledges this in a chapter on Maimonides's religious scholarship, it is dwarfed by the overarching concern with medicine—which seems the primary interest of Nuland, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale. The author does a serviceable job of stitching together this slight, popular biography of the larger-than-life Maimonides, but his writing is marred by an overwrought prologue and some glib generalizations. (Oct.)
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Reputedly the greatest figure in Judaism after his namesake, Moses Maimonides (1138 [not, as long supposed, 1135]-1204) was also a great physician. That second identity (he has a third as a philosopher, though no one now comprehends his Guide for the Perplexed, and a fourth as a judge) furnishes the surgeon--author of the National Book Award-winning How We Die (1994) entree into the life of this medieval intellectual titan. Like disproportionately many Jewish sons, Maimonides became a doctor in obedience, Nuland thinks, to the Lord's injunction to his people to choose life. In chapters centered on Maimonides' travels, three great books, and medical papers, Nuland argues that that obedience shows in more than Maimonides' medical career. Maimonides was devoted to sustaining the Jews as a people, and out of that, to human life generally. If he was otherwise a physician of his time, bound by the authority of Hippocrates and Galen, he believed that reason and observation should also inform prescription. A little gem of intellectual biography. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Schocken
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805242007
• ISBN 13: 9780805242003
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256