The Great Rambam: Joel Kraemer’s ‘Maimonides’

It is hard to do a philosopher’s life. For starters, sources tend to be rather meager: Philosophers generally tend not to live an active, engaged public existence (Socrates, Sartre, and Russell notwithstanding), and they seldom leave behind a rich personal correspondence out of which an inner life can be reconstructed. Contemporary philosophers, themselves perhaps most qualified to write about other thinkers, do not often write biographies, regarding the pursuit as a kind of disreputable, unserious intellectual project that will not earn the respect of peers (much less tenure). But those who do choose to write the lives of great thinkers have got to get the philosophy right, and do so in an accessible way. Someone picking up a philosophical biography may be looking for eccentricity or scandal, but they will also want to know about ideas.The biographer of a distant historical thinker such as Moses son of Maimon, better known as Maimonides, the great 12th-century rabbi, doctor, and philosopher, will need additional skills: linguistic (a knowledge of medieval Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, and Aramaic for primary sources, and several modern languages for the secondary literature); paleographical (many essential texts come from the ancient Cairo genizah, a Jewish community’s repository for discarded documents), and cultural (writing about Maimonides’s life requires understanding the different medieval worlds he inhabited: Andalusian, North African, Arabic, Muslim, and Jewish).Maimonides is a towering figure in Jewish history. In addition to being the religious and political leader of his community — indeed, in his lifetime he was the Jewish legal authority throughout much of the Muslim world, and beyond — as well as a court physician to the Egyptian sultan, Maimonides devoted what little time he had away from his professional duties to creating monuments of Jewish law, theology, and philosophy. His “Mishneh Torah” (“Repetition of the Torah”) is a compendium of all of the commandments of Jewish law (written and oral) for those who do not want to navigate the debates of the Talmud. And his “Guide of the Perplexed” is simply the greatest work of Jewish philosophy ever written. As the saying goes, “From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses.”“Maimonides” (Doubleday, 594 pages, $35), Joel Kraemer’s biography of the man known among observant Jews as “the RaMBaM” (for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon), has been 20 years in the making and is clearly the product of great study. Mr. Kraemer is a scholar of the first rank, and his book is informed by historical, religious, and biographical erudition. He is as fluent working through the genizah texts and the urban geography of a medieval Spanish city as he is drawing out the contemporary relevance of ancient Arabic religious rivalries and the import of Maimonides’s halachic or legal writings.Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Andalusia, in 1138-39. Under Umayyad Muslim rule, Iberian Jews in this era enjoyed what Mr. Kraemer calls an “age of splendor.” Jews benefited from a relatively high degree of toleration and economic success and served the Muslim caliphate in a variety of capacities: as courtiers, physicians, financial advisers, and even military leaders. While the transition to the stricter Almoravid rule at the end of the 11th century led to substantial changes in Jewish communities, life in Córdoba remained stable enough for most families to remain. When the even less tolerant Almohads invaded in 1147, however, and sought to impose Islam violently throughout their realm, Maimonides’s family (along with many Jews and Christians) left Córdoba for other parts of Andalusia. Eventually, they landed in Fez, Morocco, still a part of the Almohad domain but apparently offering greater room for a covert Jewish life. It was here that Maimonides began his medical training.As Muslim rule in Fez grew harsher, Jews were under tremendous pressure to convert, and one of the great questions of Maimonidean biography is whether or not he and his family became apostates. Mr. Kraemer answers with a well-argued “maybe.” He notes that in his “Epistle on Forced Conversion,” Maimonides condones conversion (when forced), discourages martyrdom, and encourages migration to safer lands where one can return to Judaism. And he insists (contrary to Herbert Davidson, another recent biographer) that testimony by individuals who claim to have known Maimonides personally points to Maimonides having converted outwardly, either in Fez or even earlier in Andalusia, while continuing to practice Judaism in secret.In 1165, Maimonides, along with his father and two brothers, departed for the Holy Land, where they lived for a time in Acre. Within the year, however, he was ensconced in Egypt (in violation of the rabbinic prohibition against dwelling in the land of the pharaohs). Maimonides settled first in Alexandria, a center of Mediterranean commerce with a large Jewish population, and then in cosmopolitan Fustat, part of greater Cairo and home to three synagogues. He would remain there until his death in 1204.Maimonides experienced Egypt under both the relatively liberal Fatimids and then the stricter Ayyubids. The Ayyubid sultan, Saladin, an ambitious leader who sought to extend his power throughout the Mediterranean and the Levant, recognized Maimonides’s skills as a doctor and as a teacher of the sciences and appointed him as one of his court physicians. He also saw that Maimonides’s learning and personal charisma, as well as the respect accorded him by fellow Jews, made him the natural leader of his people, and in 1171 Maimonides was appointed “Head of the Jews” in Egypt. This position entailed managing religious, political, legal, social, and business issues within the community, as well as serving as representative of the Jews before the Muslim regime. Although Maimonides occupied this official position for only two years, his religious and moral authority was so great that he was, in effect, “the Great Rav” until the end of his life.It was in Egypt that Maimonides composed his two greatest works, the multivolume legal treatise “Mishneh Torah,” and his philosophical masterpiece “Guide of the Perplexed.” The “Guide,” written in Judeo-Arabic, is a monumental work of philosophical theology, metaphysics, cosmology, ethics, legal philosophy, epistemology, and Bible interpretation. Maimonides wrote the “Guide” for individuals who, because of their training in philosophy, might become confused about just those elements of the faith that seem inconsistent with philosophical and scientific truth. Maimonides set out to refute any anthropomorphizing of God, particularly attributing body to him. He also insisted that the truths of Scripture are philosophical (i.e., Aristotelian) truths. And he argued that divine providence consists not of some personal deity handing out rewards and punishments, but rather simply of the natural protection in the face of nature’s vicissitudes that results from the pursuit of knowledge. If the “Mishneh Torah” represents a systematizing of Jewish law, the “Guide” represents its radical rationalization — something that did not sit well with his later critics, who within a century would instigate the book’s burning because they saw it as reducing faith to the handmaiden of philosophy.This is more than just a biography of one of history’s greatest thinkers. It is also a rich cultural, religious, and intellectual history of Jews, Arabs, and Christians in the Middle Ages, as well as an accessible, if ultimately inadequate, introduction to some of Maimonides’s ideas. Mr. Kraemer’s story is populated by a large and varied cast of characters, and it ranges over a good part of the Muslim Mediterranean world. Kings, sultans, viziers, doctors, diplomats, military men, philosophers, poets, merchants, rabbis, and heretics all pass by rather quickly, and by a certain point the litany of names becomes overwhelming, even confusing. Mr. Kraemer can be a bit long-winded and repetitive; he is given to lengthy exposition, argumentation, and digression that could easily be condensed for the nonspecialist reader. More frustratingly, as expansive as Mr. Kraemer is on historical, political, and religious context — his narrative is often interrupted by biographical sketches of individuals who really have only a peripheral role to play — he is very stingy when it comes to explaining Maimonides’s ideas. He says nothing on the details of Maimonides’s ethics in his discussion of the commentary on the Mishnah and only a little bit in his chapter on the “Mishneh Torah.” His exposition of the “Guide”‘s doctrines is more generous, although it may be rough going for beginners. But then he makes no mention whatsoever of one of the work’s primary aims: showing how rational Jewish law is and how all the commandments, no matter how irrational they may seem, ultimately have their reasons.There can be no question that Mr. Kraemer, with impeccable scholarly skill and breathtaking erudition, has written a monumental, immensely learned volume, a real labor of love (albeit one that is in serious need of a good editor). As a source for the details of Maimonides’s life and of his world, this will probably be the standard biography of Maimonides for some time to come. However, Mr. Kraemer simply does not do justice to the rich and complex thought of this intellectual titan. The philosophy of the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time deserves better than this.Mr. Nadler is chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the author of “Sinoza: A Life” and “Rembrandt’s Jews.” His new book, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” will be out this fall.

The Great Rambam: Joel Kraemer’s ‘Maimonides’

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