Joel Kraemer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds is, like its protagonist, the great 12th-century rabbi and scholar, impressively erudite and maddeningly elusive. Kraemer is a medievalist with a knowledge
of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Maimonides' native Judeo-Arabic, and he also has an impressive command both of traditional Jewish sources and traditional Islamic sources. His greatest source for contemporary documents is the Cairo Geniza, a repository of hundreds of thousands of documents kept by Cairo's Jewish community from the 9th through 19th centuries. But even with all the necessary ingredients at his disposal, the story never feels fully finished: both the man and his philosophy remain maddeningly out of reach.
Moses Maimonides, commonly called RaMBaM (an acronym for Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon), or Musa ibn Maymun in Arabic, was a towering figure of his day across religious communities. Born in Cordoba, the greatest city in Islamic Andalusia, he was forced to flee with his family to North Africa when fundamentalist Almohad Berbers overthrew the tolerant dynasty that had previously reigned. Both he and his father wrote tracts about Jews who were forced to convert to Islam, and there is much speculation -- which Kraemer finds credible -- that Maimonides himself outwardly converted to Islam, perhaps while he was doing his medical training in Fez, Morocco, while continuing to practice Judaism in secret. After more than a decade of travel, Maimonides finally arrived in Egypt, like his namesake, where he soon became court physician to Saladin, the ruler of Egypt and Syria who defeated the Crusaders in Palestine; simultaneously, Maimonides became the most prominent Jewish leader in Egypt, coordinating community affairs, judging disputes, writing responses to legal questions, and writing major philosophical works, when he wasn't seeing patients.
Kraemer is burdened by the weight of his subtitle. Maimonides' prose is dense and rich, both allusive and elusive, as he admits quite openly that he has no wish to make his meaning clear on the surface, but to write in layers so that only the most learned will penetrate his deepest meanings. While Kraemer does a good job writing his life and world, he doesn't do a good job of explaining why Maimonides is one of civilization's greatest minds -- which is, in fairness, a truly difficult task. He would have had both to explain Maimonides' philosophy, and then to explain the importance of Maimonides' philosophy in the context of the history of civilization. And Maimonides' ambitions were extraordinary. His Mishneh Torah was designed to condense the Jewish Oral Law, the Mishnah and Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, from a discursive record of legal argumentation into a coherent, understandable legal code. His Guide of the Perplexed attempted to harmonize Jewish religious tradition with Aristotelian philosophy, to resolve the ancient dispute over whether there were contradictions between science and faith in God.
His prose tended to be intentionally obtuse, however, partly because some of his views were far from the mainstream of Jewish thought, and partly because he was a Jew living in a Muslim land, where anything outwardly contradicting Islamic thought would have been punished harshly. As a result, he's hard to summarize simply, and he's hard to sketch in broad strokes. Rather than roughly outline Maimonides' major works, Kraemer opts instead to dip in and paraphrase representative samples, showing where Maimonides borrowed from Aristotle, and where he borrowed from Islamic legal tradition and Muslim philosophers, especially al-Farabi. It's undoubtedly easier to understand than a college textbook on Maimonidean philosophy, but ultimately an unsatisfying choice, and it doesn't allow Kraemer to pursue his argument about Maimonides' importance.
As a primer on Maimonides, this is a worthy effort, worth a read despite its shortcomings. In choosing Maimonides for his subject, Kraemer was hardly less ambitious than the Master himself. He wanted to write the definitive biography of the man, and instead wound up writing the definitive biography of his life and world -- Maimonides the doctor and community leader, but not Maimonides the philosopher. That book, perhaps, is yet to be written.
Rating: 73
Crossposted on Remingtonstein.