(Author: Jeremy Gordin, Vol. 78, #1, Summer 2023)
Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.
Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922.1
Rabba before he commenced [his lesson] to the scholars used to say a joking word, and the scholars were amused. After that he sat in awe and began the lesson.
Talmud Bavli (TB), Shabbat 30b.
To attempt to “contextualize” Maimonides – Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (c.1135-1204) – via some personal reflections and potted family history is doubtless inappropriate and indulgent, probably plain silly. But I ask the reader to bear with me: not necessarily to suspend willingly his/her disbelief, but rather to trust that, “though this be madness,” yet there is a purpose in it. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi remarked early on in his book on Jewish history and memory: “I trust that, by the time I have done, the personal will not seem merely arbitrary”.2
I began reading about Moses Maimonides, the medieval Torah scholar, philosopher and physician, and trying to understand the philosophical and historical context of his work, in about 2005, when I’d have been 53. This seemed somewhat curious, even to me: at that time, I had for about 30 years been earning my living mostly as a journalist, writing chiefly during the last third of that period about South African politics. To be sure, my interest in scholarly issues had been re-ignited in the late 1990s, during Classical Culture studies at the University of South Africa 3; and, after completing an honours in Classical Culture, I remained registered as a Master’s student for many years, without however producing much, if anything.
Mainly, I suppose, I wanted to appease my Über-Ich, hovering in the form of my father: to demonstrate that, despite having squandered my time at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during my twenties, at least as far as academic achievement was concerned, I could earn higher degrees as easily as others seemed to do. Also, as grandiloquent as it sounds – and indeed is – I have, like John Donne, always been “diverted by the worst voluptuousness, which is a Hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning and languages”.4 Still, for the most part academic studies were something I pursued on the side. While writing, say, an unauthorised biography of Jacob Zuma, which I did in 20085 , turning to academic work felt like taking tea with a former Innamorato; the motive might be duty, remorse or nostalgia, but not passion. Moreover, elements of my intellectual/emotional heritage6 did not seem conducive to studying Maimonides. “Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf,” Philip Larkin wrote in “This Be The Verse,” his well-known (notorious?) poem about parents and grandparents.7 But they also hand on other things.
From the maternal side, via my Lithuanian-born grandfather, Tsemach (Solomon) Awerbuch (1880-1966), and my mother, Mary/Miriam (Awerbuch) Gordin (1910-2002), I had imbibed or learnt a secular approach coupled with an attitude probably best defined as sceptical – dry, questioning, unemotional8 – often ascribed to the traditional Litvak.9 Personally, though, rather than “scepticism,” I prefer the phrase with which Paul Ricoeur labelled Sigmund Freud’s methods: a “hermeneutics of suspicion”.10
From the paternal side, however, via my grandfather, Latvian-born Fishel Gordin (1869-1951), and my father, Elias Gordin (1911-1989), my heritage was more tinged with Yiddishkeit. Fishel had received smichut and journeyed to Johannesburg in about 1905 in response to an invitation from a small Chabad community to be its rabbi. But, once he’d arrived, the community had found itself unable or unwilling to pay him, and so he became an egg-merchant, or rather peddler, walking the streets of nascent Johannesburg with a basket of eggs. Or so my father claimed. Given my grandfather’s reported disinterest in religion, his apparel and demeanour, as seen by me in photographs (he died before I was born), as well as anecdotes about his and my Grandmother Sarah’s laissez-faire attitude towards, for example, kashrut, 11 it seems highly unlikely that Fishel had been a rabbi. Perhaps my father – a journalist manqué – didn’t want to let facts spoil a charming story; I leave it there
Yet it does seem Fishel had attended a (Latvian) yeshiva, in his day the equivalent of a higher education in Jewish studies. Among his few possessions when he died were various Hebrew tomes including volumes of his Shas (a Hebrew abbreviation for the Talmud), hauled with him from Latvia. Moreover, without derogating my father’s prodigious auto didacticism and his own experiences and interests, it does seem Fishel had more than a common or garden variety connection with Jewish learning and had found time “to teach his son Torah”.12 From where else came my father’s passion for acquiring his skills in biblical Hebrew, knowledge of the Bible and Talmud and scholarship relating to these, and extensive knowledge of most aspects of Yiddishkeit?
It seems also that Fishel – apparently having walked away (for whatever reason) from organized religion and its trappings – might have bequeathed to my father, in tandem with some Jewish learning, bifurcated feelings about Judaism, religion and God, or planted the seeds of such an attitude. But whether he did so is perhaps moot: because my father seemed to have acquired at first hand an ambivalence of his own. In 1946, aged 35, having grown up as the son of impecunious immigrants in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, Elias, a pharmacist, was employed, first in northern Italy and then Paris, as a “Medical Supply and Administrative Officer”13 by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as the JDC or Joint. Active since 1914, the Joint14 was an American Jewish organization which provided relief for Jewish communities around the world. Between 1945 and 1952, it focused its efforts on aiding displaced persons (DPs) who had emerged from the death and concentration camps, providing transportation costs for those trying to get to Israel and informally cooperating with the Bricha.15
While in Europe, my father of course visited the camps and the remains of places such as the Warsaw ghetto (I have his photographs); his charges had recently emerged from them. He said little (at any rate to me, b. 1952) about these experiences. But from what he did say, and from what he said to my mother and siblings, it was evident that he was devastated, “traumatized” we might say now, by what he witnessed. He seemed to me to have been affected in (at least) two, seemingly contradictory, ways. First, he took even more seriously what he considered to be genuine Judaism. Inaccurate understanding or shallow criticism of its history or practices – or using them for nationalistic or fund-raising purposes on behalf of Israel – viscerally irritated him. Yet simultaneously he turned away (even more?) from religious ritual and the idea of a divinity.
I hope I am not exaggerating, but it seemed that going to a synagogue service after what he had seen in Europe made him palpably uncomfortable. Sitting in a shul seemed to bring back memories of what he had witnessed, what he’d come to realize had happened to his family, what survivors had told him about their lives and what he had learnt in Europe about pre-holocaust European and east European Jewry; and, somehow, being in a synagogue was for my father (almost physically) incompatible with those memories. My father also evinced scant respect for the learning of local rabbis and for the official representatives of the South African Jewish community, especially the latter’s frequent attempts at rationalizing cooperation with the National Party government; shades perhaps of the Judenräte.
Yet my father’s apprehension when Israel was ostensibly threatened with annihilation by some Arab countries in 196716 and his irrepressible exultation when Israeli special forces teams freed Jewish hostages during the 1976 Entebbe airport raid were palpably genuine. He remained incontrovertibly tied to his ‘people’. There’s an old Ashkenazic song: “Voss mir zaynen zaynen mir/Ober Yidn zaynen mir…” (“What we are, we are; but we are Jews”). Jewishness was part of what the French would call my father’s moi profond.
So: intellectually-speaking I inherited from my parents and grand-parents scepticism or the hermeneutics of suspicion, a purportedly rational rejection of religion, and ambivalent feelings about Judaism. Besides, in 2005, to use the date mentioned above as a convenient baseline, I lived – and still live now, in 2018 – a resolutely secular life. I have scant interest in religious ritual, am not at all prone to spiritual, mystical or religious ‘feelings’; and, though I studied, for want of a better word, and lived in Jerusalem for five years, speak and read modern and ancient Hebrew to some extent, and have family and friends residing there, my attitude to the state of Israel has for political reasons grown increasingly ambivalent.
In 2005 then, and during the years since, it was not inappropriate for my son, friends and acquaintances – and I myself – to wonder why I was bothering with Maimonides. What was the point? Why concern myself with a difficult, orthodox and apparently conservative and austere rabbi who lived in the 12th Century CE?
John Berryman once noted about the Bard: “When Shakespeare wrote, ‘Two loves I have’, reader, he was not kidding”.17 In Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question, Julian Treslove ruminates as follows:
He dreaded getting so far with Maimonides and then suddenly hitting that blank wall of incomprehension that awaited him at about the same point, even at about the same page, in every work of philosophy he had ever tried to read. It was so lovely, bathing in the lucidities of a thinker’s preliminary thoughts, and then so disheartening when the light faded, the water turned brackish, and he found himself drowning in mangrove and sudd. But this didn’t happen with Maimonides. With Maimonides he was drowning by the end of the first sentence. 18
Treslove, reader, was not kidding either. Nor is his experience unusual. Maimonides is certainly difficult and his decision in The Guide of the Perplexed19 to be evasive, or ‘esoteric’, as the scholars say, whatever his reasons were, does not make it easier to understand him. Richard Ellmann wrote of James Joyce: “His books are not easy reading. He does not wish to conquer us, but have us conquer him. There are, in other words, no invitations, but the door is ajar”.20 With Maimonides, certainly for the secular, modern reader, the door might not be locked but nor is it ajar; one must find a way to open it oneself.
Exacerbating the situation is that the Talmudic rabbis – and of course the Talmud undergirds Maimonides’ work – were prone to what we would consider to be ambiguities, anachronisms, if not glaring historical and chronological contradictions. Consider the following Aggadah:
Rabbi Judah said in the name of Rab: When Moses ascended on high [to receive the Torah] he found the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in affixing taggin [crown like flourishes] to the letters. Moses said: “Lord of the Universe, who stays Thy hand?” [i.e., who is preventing You from giving the Torah without these additions/ ornaments?] [The Lord] replied: “There will arise a man at the end of many generations, Akiba ben Joseph by name, who will expound, upon each tittle, heaps and heaps of laws [deduce other, new laws from every little curve and crown of the letters].” “Lord of the Universe,” said Moses, “permit me to see him.” He replied: “Turn thee round.” // Moses went [into the academy of Rabbi Akiba] and sat down behind eight rows [of Akiba’s disciples]. Not being able to follow their arguments he was ill at ease [as he thought his Torah knowledge was deficient], but when they came to a certain subject and the disciples said to the master “Whence do you know it?” and the latter replied, “It is a law given to Moses at Sinai,” he was comforted (TB Menachot 29b; interpolations added).
That the whole of the Law, not only the written (torah she-bi’ketab) but also the ‘oral’ (torah she-be’al peh), had already been revealed to Moses at Sinai, was (and is) an axiom of rabbinic belief.21 (In fact the latter was redacted by Yehudah Ha’Nasi at the start of the third century CE.) Nevertheless, were Moses transported to a second-century classroom he would struggle to understand the legal discussions, especially those led by Rabbi Akiba, Rosh la-Hakhamim (“Chief of the Sages”). As Yerushalmi noted, “In the world of Aggadah both propositions can coexist in a meaningful equilibrium without appearing anomalous or illogical.”22
One friend, living in Israel and cursorily familiar with Maimonides, drew my attention to Maimonides’ remarks, used to explain one of his famous parables, in the Guide:
Those who are outside the city [the parable is about the city and its Ruler] are all human individuals who have no doctrinal belief …: such individuals as the furthermost Turks found in the remote North, the Negroes found in the remote South … The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes (Guide III.51.618-9; interpolation added).
My friend asked why I would want to study “a racist like Maimonides, who refers to blacks, and Turks for that matter, as apes or almost-apes”. Others asked why I did not study someone or something – why not get another degree – in something more pertinent to my life and my ostensible occupation, political journalism.23 My son, now 24 [as of 2018 – ed.] and a master’s student in astrophysics, is wont to point out that Aristotle’s cosmogony, with which Maimonides might have taken issue but which he used as a “scientific” benchmark, is now completely passé, and, as for Maimonides’ views on the divinity … So, the question for me was (and is): Why should or would someone such as I – halachically Jewish24 (but Halachah is not important to me personally), child of the 20th Century, stepchild of the 1960s’ counterculture (notionally, anyway), and thus Western, secular, and essentially a pinko Liberal, for which group it’s always a case of “moderation or death”25 – why would I (or others, mutatis mutandis, similar to me) want to study Maimonides, an abstruse, irrelevant, possibly “racist,” traditional and God-fearing medieval philosopher? Why would a 21st Century person of my ilk be drawn to Maimonides?
In the new preface to David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, one reads that a pivotal piece of evidence confirming the book’s thesis resulted from a person called Chaim Bloch having dreamed a dream and consequently deciding to have a – not very felicitous but for Bakan significant26 – meeting with Sigmund Freud, roughly 30 years before he, Bloch, told Bakan about the dream and the meeting27. Similarly, in the tri-partite preface to Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis by Bakan, Dan Merkur and David S Weiss, Merkur notes that after Bakan’s death, which was prior to completion of this book, he was uncertain
…whether to remain within the scope of David Bakan’s notes or to exercise greater license in order to fulfil David’s ambitions for the project, and I had a dream one night in which I saw David saying to me, “Keep on going.” I counted David’s acquired intellect among the angelic intelligences28 and wrote accordingly.29
The significance of dreams and efficacy of dream interpretation have of course been issues of debate from time immemorial; the Bible contains stories of many dreams, dreamers and dream interpreters, notably Joseph in Genesis (41:15 et seq.); Aristotle wrote two treatises on the subject, “On Dreams,” and “On Divination in Sleep”;30 some of the rabbis of the Talmud, notably in TB Berakhot 55a, also treated dreams and interpretation at length;31 and Maimonides, perhaps with Aristotle’s work not too far from his mind, wrote that dreaming is clearly part of the activation of the imaginative faculty and connected to having prophetic powers (Guide, II.36.370). Yet is it not peculiar that the authors of purportedly scholarly works would use dreams as reference points? I am not certain. But I am going to take Bakan’s and Merkur’s usage as authorisation for what follows, though it is about neither a dream nor a vision, merely an unexpected memory.
A few months ago, while thinking idly about the physical conditions of Maimonides’ life, two disparate quotations came uninvited into my mind. I had read both quotes pretty much contemporaneously before I was 18 and numerous times since then; so what was significant, it seemed to me, was not that I remembered them but that they should come unbidden and at the same time – holding hands, as it were – even though they bore no apparent relationship to each other or to the subject of my rumination. The first is by George Steiner. In “A Kind of Survivor,” having described his “self-definition” as a Jew, Steiner continued:
Mine, because I cannot speak for any other Jew. … [E]ach of us must hammer [his/ her self-definition] out for himself. That is the real meaning of Diaspora, of the wide scattering and thinning of belief.32
Second was Albert Camus’ first sentence in The Myth of Sisyphus, so well-known it has unfortunately become almost trite: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”.33 Recalling these a few months ago, I remembered that as a young person, then at the end of my teenage years, brought up in the diaspora but living at the time in Israel, I had been quite seized by the sentence “That is the real meaning of Diaspora, of the wide scattering and thinning of belief”. I thought I understood what Steiner meant. By ‘belief’, I took him to mean unquestioning belief in Jehovah and Jewish ritual; and that the connection between the thinning of this belief and being in the diaspora was that, following the destruction of a centralized place of worship in a ‘Jewish’ territory – the levelling of the Second Temple and devastation of Jerusalem in 70 CE by the Romans – Jews and Judaism were scattered and thinned and belief became attenuated or at any rate much ‘changed’ – which of course it had, shifting to what Paul Johnson has termed a “congregationalist faith”: “[At Yavneh] the Sanhedrin and the state were buried and in their place a synod of rabbis met …The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism, which from now on was essentially a congregationalist faith.”34
Still, Steiner is an evocative writer and the passage stayed with me. Regarding Camus’ proposition, I had indeed thought about it, as was probably appropriate for a self-involved adolescent and undergraduate philosophy student inclined to Byronic posturing. Still, I wondered – a few months ago, that is – why my subconscious (or ‘unconscious’ if one is a Freudian) had dredged up Camus in tandem with Steiner some 45 years after my adolescence? (I have not thought about suicide, in a personal context, for at least 35 years.)
James Baldwin once wrote: “Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.”35 To those pressing needs, money and sex, I would add food, poetry and rugby (the last two being personal predilections, admittedly); and must therefore assume that as a young man in Jerusalem there were indeed times, or at least moments, when I apparently had ‘enough’ money, sex, food, poetry and rugby – because I did think about other things. (Let me say, first, that what I did not think about inordinately was suicide. The linking of Camus with Steiner in my recollection was, I suggest, not about suicide per se but a reminder or realisation that philosophy is not necessarily a trivial business and that subtending the apparently passionless words of many philosophers, especially classical and medieval ones, might be an anguish and passion we moderns do not always recognize.)
What I did cogitate on as a young person was the issue of God’s existence, where and how the universe originated and, flowing from or running parallel to these, Jewish history and culture, e.g. Steiner’s remarks about self-definition, belief and diaspora. Looking at this last sentence, my concerns then (besides money, sex, etc., or perhaps including them?) seems jejune and pretentious. But, pace Camus, aren’t questions about God’s existence and the origin of the universe (also) among “the truly serious problems”? Stephen Hawking, the renowned cosmologist, would think so. In the final paragraphs of his 1988 A Brief History of Time, he wrote:
Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories…. // However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God. 36
Notwithstanding his later cavalier attitude to this passage and particularly the phrase “the mind of God”,37 as well as his later adamant insistence that he was an atheist, Hawking retained the passage in the 20th anniversary edition of A Brief History in 2008; and it is a remarkable passage, not only because of Hawking’s concatenation of philosophers and scientists – his clear recognition of their dual role in inquiring into the origins of the universe38 – but especially, and particularly for the Maimonides’ student, because of Hawking’s linkage of “human reason” and “the mind of God”. In fact this could be an apt précis of Maimonides’ Guide: “an inquiry into human reason and the mind of God”.
The point of my unexpected recollection is that I had been perplexed in my youth; as perplexed about certain ‘big’ issues as purportedly was Yosef ben Yehuda ibn Simon, the student to whom the Guide is addressed by Maimonides. But, as we all know, one is forced to move on with one’s life, earn a living and so on, and, as Jude the Obscure bitterly discovers,
… [n]ecessary meditations on the actual, including the mean bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs.39
Yet: like a ghost (the “ghost in the machine”?40), always just out of sight, at least until I was in my 50s, a memory of my early perplexity seemed to have lolled unobtrusively in the cellar of my mind, waiting patiently for the house to be opened up to a little recherche du temps perdu – for me to confront or revisit those “high thinkings” or “big issues”. The poet Dennis Silk41 once told me of a well-known Jerusalem kabbalist (or Mekubal) who said to Silk, when the latter spoke of a letter he knew had been posted to him but had never arrived: “You will of course receive the letter when it is ordained that you should.”
Perhaps my interest in the origins of the universe and related issues was simply fated (the lovely Yiddish word is beshert) to be re-kindled at the time it was, and not before. According to the Talmud, when a person comes before the heavenly tribunal after his death he is asked: “Did you conduct your trade honestly? Did you designate times for Torah study? Did you engage in procreation [raise a family]? Did you engage in the dialectics of wisdom or understand one matter from another?” (TB Shabbat 31a). Perhaps the ghost in my machine was reminding me that the time had come for trying to understand one matter from another.
But returning to the question asked earlier, why was I drawn to Maimonides? Why not Stephen Hawking or Ludwig Wittgenstein or Plato or one of the myriad of people who promise enlightenment? Besides having rekindled, during my studies at Unisa in the 1990s, an interest in Aristotle, I had been fascinated for some time by personages whom Hillel Halkin has described as “God-arguers”:
[Sholem Aleichem’s protagonist] Tevye is a God-arguer: as such he belongs in a long Jewish tradition that starts with Abraham and runs prominently on through Moses, through Job, through the Tannaitic rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi (who refused to accept a heaven-backed interpretation of Scripture even though it was supported by divine miracles),42 through Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, the saintly Hasidic master who is said to have held a trial at which God was the absentee defendant, accused of having inflicted undeserved suffering on His people. Other religions may have their folktales about men who debate with and even rebuke God, but only in Jewish tradition, I believe, are such stories taken with high seriousness, the behaviour in question being regarded – provided, of course, that it comes from a spiritually ripe individual – as the highest form of religious service. 43
Those mentioned by Halkin, despite their quarrel with the Almighty, remained believers, though in Job’s case it took a great deal of painful, indeed murderous, coercion. Then, however, there are those God-arguers who clearly stepped outside the tradition, who crossed a certain boundary. They can be said to begin with Korach, the son of Izhar (Numbers 16), who, in an astounding episode given its context, rebels against Moses and Aaron, accusing Moses, as though he were a trade union secretary-general in modern-day South Africa, of being guilty of “not consulting” and above all setting himself up as a prince. Korach and his followers are thereupon swallowed up by the earth while some are burnt alive. Such God-arguers also included the ‘heretic’ Rabbi Elisha ben Abuya, whom the Talmud suggested was led to apostasy by inter alia his study of Greek writings (TB Hagigah 15b), something Maimonides was accused of for many years and of which he is still accused by some.
One text about which my parents debated vigorously, so I was familiar with it from my teenage years, was a lecture delivered by Isaac Deutscher to the World Jewish Congress in 1958 and published posthumously in 1968 as an essay, “The Non-Jewish Jew”. Deutscher begins the essay by telling the story of the surprisingly close friendship between Elisha Ben Abuya and Rabbi Meir (139-163CE), the latter considered one of the greatest of the Tannaim, 44 precisely for which reason he was not expected to be on good terms (or any sort of terms) with Ben Abuya, mostly portrayed in the Talmud as a dangerous and destructive person. By way of trying to understand this inappropriate relationship, Deutscher wrote, he came to consider Ben Abuya as “the Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry [yet] belongs to a Jewish tradition”.45 Deutscher saw in him the prototype of a number of Jews, former Jews or converted Jews who had in their own ways tried to change the world. 46 One of them was Baruch Spinoza, at whom I took “another look” – and discovered Spinoza’s ‘debt’ to Maimonides and other medieval (Jewish) thinkers.47 I also found that it was perfectly cogent to draw a connecting line between my admired Aristotle and Maimonides, generally thought of as a paragon of Orthodox Judaism only.
The main philosophic touchstone of Maimonides’ Guide is Aristotle – to whom Maimonides had been led by his spiritual and intellectual confrères in the world of Islam: Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroës), among others. I learnt too that Maimonides lived in the world of Islam – not entirely happily, but that is a separate issue – and also wrote much of his work in Judeo-Arabic, the language of the Jews in the world of Islam.
Perhaps not everyone would have shared my frisson when I made these ‘discoveries’. But for me it was exciting; and I wasn’t in bad company. Ralph Lerner prefaces his essay, “On First Looking into Maimonides’ Guide,” with these lines from John Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” – 48 “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken”.
The enfant terrible (and later philosopher) Shlomo Yehoshua, who changed his name to Solomon Maimon, said his discovery of the Guide for the Perplexed in about 1775 could only “be compared to a man who, having been long famished suddenly comes upon a well-stocked table and attacks the food with violent greed, even to the point of surfeit”.49
Maimonides was a Sephardi (Spanish or Andalusian) Jew50 whose main spoken language was Arabic, living as the equivalent of a Metic51 in the world of Islam. In c.1168 Maimonides settled in Fustat (“old” Cairo) and became physician to Saladin’s Vizier, al Qadi al-Fadil, his family and court. By any measure, even in Fustat, Maimonides studied and wrote in harrowing circumstances, in addition to the intellectual and spiritual pressures under which he considered himself to be. Besides persecution, exile from Andalucía, ‘forced’ conversion,52 and wanderings on the fringes of the Mediterranean, Maimonides’ sole financial support,53 his brother David, drowned between 1169-70 and Maimonides suffered serious depression, as moderns would term it – and as he himself called it;54 he was also the leader, de facto if not always de jure, of a vulnerable minority community.
Maimonides nonetheless wrote or compiled close to 20 Judaic, philosophical and medical works, of which at least four may be consider ‘major’. These included, in Hebrew, a comprehensive code of all Jewish law, Mishneh Torah; a full commentary, in Judeo-Arabic, on the Mishnah (Kitab al-Siraj, Pirush Hamishnayot); and Teshuvot, his collected correspondence and responsa, including many public letters – on resurrection, the afterlife, conversion to other faiths, and Iggereth Teiman, addressed to the oppressed Jewry of Yemen.
His work rapidly had a crucial, massive – and very divisive – impact on Jewish theology and thought. Isadore Twersky has remarked that the record of his studying, teaching and writing “is simply extraordinary, almost surrealistic”.55 And at roughly the age of 5356 – well into his middle age (he died aged 66 or 69), despite his apparently withering work load and responsibilities, and, above all, despite a Talmudic prohibition against openly discussing, and certainly against writing about metaphysics (termed “The Account of the Chariot,” ma’aseh merkabah) – Maimonides completed a treatise demonstrating that Jewish teachings and “Greek wisdom” were compatible.
In The Guide of the Perplexed (Arabic, Dalālat al-hā’irīn; Hebrew, Moreh Nevuchim), written in Judeo -Arabic, Maimonides demonstrated, though obviously not to everyone’s satisfaction, that the Tanach was by no means inimical to Greek wisdom, provided the scriptures were understood and above all interpreted in the correct manner – “if only we [readers] are able …to access the core [of the Tanach] instead of the rind”.57
In the introduction to the Guide , Maimonides wrote:
This treatise is directed at one who has philosophized and has knowledge of the true sciences, but who believes at the same time in the matters pertaining to the Law and is perplexed as to their meaning because of the uncertain terms and parables [especially in the Tanach] (I. Intro. 10; interpolation added).
For Maimonides, “Greek wisdom” (or Philosophy, Falsafa in Arabic) is closely equivalent to what used to be called, until roughly the end of the 17th Century, “natural philosophy” or philosophia naturalis and is now referred to as Science – the natural, formal and applied sciences, particularly astronomy. But Falsafa also included logic, ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
These subjects had been written about by Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the “all wisest stagyrite” (as James Joyce called him), about whom Maimonides commented: “Aristotle’s intellect [represents] the extreme of human intellect, if we [exclude] those who have received divine inspiration”.58 However, to use a somewhat time-worn example Maimonides, like William Shakespeare, had “small Latin and less Greek” and in any case, would not, initially at any rate,59 have had access to the actual works (in translation) of Aristotle and many other thinkers and Commentators.60
Maimonides’ guides to Aristotle and to Greek thinking in general were thus the writings of the Aristotelian-steeped and aligned philosophers of his milieu as well as commentators on Aristotle, almost all of whom were of course non-Jewish. We also know that the majority of the initial translations of Aristotle and the Commentators used by the philosophers of the Islamic world were made by Syriac-speaking Christians; i.e., the translations, certainly the earliest ones, came, it is fair to say, from a ‘Christian’ milieu.61
What then do we have here? Maimonides’ Guide may be characterized as a node into (and out of) which flowed – although modified, both by circumstances and Maimonides’ own choices – Greek thought, commentaries on Greek thought, the Peripatetic School of Arab philosophy, and translations made by Syriac-speaking Christians. It simultaneously became the node or hub of an array of languages: Greek, Syriac, Arabic, JudeoArabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and (later) Latin. Maimonides’ intellectual connection with thinkers from different cultures and times represents what I term an ecumenical tableau – ‘ecumenical’ in the sense of ‘all-inclusive’, and ‘non-sectarian’.
In studying the thought of Maimonides and the thinkers with whom he was connected, both before and after his life, one observes an intellectual chain, reaching across time and place, conjoining Greek, Arabic, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, and many languages. The first and last stanzas of Philip Larkin’s short 1954 poem, ‘Water’, come to mind:
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.62
The linkages of thought and philosophy rise above the different languages, physical distances, ethnicities, and faiths – and reach a locus where, if you will, any-angled light may congregate. As George Steiner wrote:
Islam, Judaism and Catholic Christianity not only meet …: they interweave. For …Maimonides reads in the light of Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, in turn, reads via Maimonides’ reading of his Arab predecessors.63
And Edward Said has remarked:
“[A]ll cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic”.64 To study Maimonides – aware of the sources from which he drank,65 the way in which he drew from them, and the influence that his use of them in turn exercised – is to have the opportunity to see an ecumenical tableau whose riches are neither single nor pure but remarkably hybrid, heterogeneous, and unmonolithic.
In other words, though the heart quails at using such a buzzword, Maimonides is a remarkable case study in multiculturalism: a moving example of human intellectual toenadering, notwithstanding all the barriers that humans feel constrained to construct between each other. And this is only one of the gifts that studying Maimonides offers.
Isn’t it a good enough reason to feel drawn to the faylasuf from Fustat?
Jeremy Gordin (1953-2023) worked on many publications, including the Rand Daily Mail, Cape Times, Sunday Express, Financial Mail, The Star, and the Sunday Independent (TSI). From 2004-2008, he was News and Managing Editor of TSI as well as special Group Writer and Acting Editor of the Independent News Network. Gordin won a number of journalism awards, including the 2007 Mondi Shanduka SA Journalist of the Year Award. He wrote three books of poetry and co-authored two books of investigative journalism, The Infernal Tower (1996) and A Long Night’s Damage (1998), and an unauthorized biography of former president Jacob Zuma (2008). He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Unisa.
NOTES
1 Joyce, James 2000 (1922). Ulysses. London: Penguin Classics annotated student edition, p34.
2 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 1982. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, p6.
3 In particular by Dr Sira Dambe and Professor Johan Strijdom.
4 John Donne, letter to Sir Henry Goodyer, September 1608. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed.
Charles M Coffin, 1952. New York: The Modern Library, p375.
5 Gordin, Jeremy 2008. Zuma: a Biography. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers.
6 Cf. Gordin, Jeremy 1998. Pomegranates for My Son. Johannesburg: Random House.
7 Larkin, Philip,1989, Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, p180.
8 If we define authenticity “as the degree to which an individual’s actions, approach or apparent feelings are congruent with his or her true beliefs, desires and emotions” – I do sometimes wonder how authentic were and are my maternal grandfather’s, mother’s and my professed “dry, questioning, unemotional” approach. Or was (and is) this just a veneer or adopted persona? But this question is, luckily, beyond the ambit of this essay.
9 My mother, aged about 10, once came home excitedly from school and asked her father rhetorically: “Daddy, do you know the sun is 93 million miles from the earth?” He looked at her and replied: “Ninety-three million miles? Ninety-three million miles? Tell me, do you know how long one mile is? Ten miles? Fifteen miles? Have you ever walked 15 miles? So how do know what 93 million miles are?” (Tsemach had started his working life aged about 16, as a smous in the Cape; presumably he had walked a mile or two in his time.) Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_Jews#Culture; emphasis added): Following the dispute between the Hasidim and the Misnagdim [“Opponents” of Hasidism] in which the Lithuanian academies were the heartland of opposition to Hasidism, “Lithuanian” came to have the connotation of Misnagdic (non-Hasidic) Judaism generally…. The characteristically “Lithuanian” approach to Judaism was marked by a concentration on highly intellectual Talmud study… Litvaks were considered to be more intellectual and stoic than their rivals, the Galitzianers, who thought of them as cold fish.
10 Ricoeur uses this phrase on pp. 32 ff. of his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970), trans. D Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press.
11 A story my mother told me: During the early days of her marriage, wanting to prove some point during a debate or perhaps just wanting to hit back at my father for some reason, my mother said to her mother-in-law (my grandmother, Sarah): “And do you know, by the way, that your son happily ate leg-of-lamb last Sunday?” Leg-of-lamb (unless specially tended to) is not kosher. Sarah thought for a while and then replied: “I’m sure that if Elias ate it, it was kosher” – a response Maimonides might have envied.
12 Deuteronomy 11: 18-19 is clear: 18 Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.
19 And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
13 http://search.archives.jdc.org/multimedia/Documents/NY_AR_45-54/NY_AR45-54_Count/NY_AR45-54_00027/NY_AR45-54_00027_00263.pdf
14 http://yivoarchives.org/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=33169
15 Bricha: (“escape” or “flight”) was the underground organized effort that helped Jewish Holocaust survivors escape post-World War IIEurope to Mandatory Palestine in violation of theWhite Paper of 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricha
16 The jury of historians seems now still to be out on whether ‘annihilation’ was ever really a probability, but this is beside the point; to my father, and most people at the time, it seemed a reality.
17 Berryman, John 1976. The Freedom of the Poet. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. P. 316.
18 Jacobson, Howard 2010. The Finkler Question. London: Bloomsbury. P. 196; emphasis added.
19 Guide: Maimonides, Moses/Moshe ben Maimon /Mūsā ibn Maymūn 1963. The Guide of the Perplexed (Arabic Dalâlat al-hâirîn; Hebrew Moreh Nevukhim), vols. I and II. Trans., introd. Shlomo Pines; introductory essay by Leo Strauss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (UCP). Roman numerals refer to (original) Part (as indicated by Maimonides), Arabic numbers refer to (original) Chapter; and page numbers refer to Pines’ translation: e.g. III: 20:231.
20 Ellmann, Richard 1982 (1959; new & Rev.). James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, p6.
21 Palestinian Talmud, Peah 17:1: “All that a mature disciple will yet expound before his master has already been told
to Moses at Sinai.”
22 Yerushalmi, ibid, 18.
23 Perhaps it’s mainly specialists and scholars only who pay attention to a contention such as Howard Kreisel’s: “The purpose of most of Maimonides’ literary activity must be understood from a political perspective …teaching Mosaic law as the ideal expression of political philosophy” Kreisel: 1999: 267; emphasis added).
24 Halakhah is the collective body of Jewish religious laws derived from the Written and Oral Torah and including the 613 mitzvot (‘commandments’), subsequent Talmudic and rabbinic law and the customs and traditions compiled in the Shulchan Aruch (literally “Prepared Table”, but more commonly known as the “Code of Jewish Law”).
In terms of halakhah, the child of a (halakhically) Jewish woman is ipso facto Jewish.
25 Hitchens, Christopher 2000 (1998). “Goodbye to Berlin” [“Moderation or Death”], 138-164, in Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. London: Verso. p151.
26 Bloch dreamed he should meet Freud; they did meet but came to verbal blows because Bloch reacted with horror to Freud’s mss., or perhaps an early copy, of Moses and Monotheism; Freud left the room angrily; Bloch therefore had a look at Freud’s bookshelves, and saw certain books – which apparently went missing from Freud’s library later, when it was transported to England – that confirmed, according to Bakan, Freud’s interest in, or at least familiarity with, Jewish mysticism.
27 Bakan, David 2004 (1958). Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. Dover Publications. Electronic book
(EB): loc. 153-71.
28 Re “acquired intellect” and “angelic intelligences” in relation to Maimonides’ work and that of other medieval philosophers: in medieval astronomy the universe was divided into a series of spheres each contained within the other. Each sphere was supposed to be governed by an intellect in the same way that a human body is governed by its soul. The intellect of the lowest or most central sphere, the one that contains the planet Earth, was called the “Active Intellect”. Cf. Samuelson, Norbert M 1984. “Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” 260-303, in Holtz, Barry W (ed.) 1984. Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic
Jewish Texts. New York: Summit Books
29 Bakan, David, Merkur, Dan & Weiss, David S 2009. Maimonides’ Cure of Souls: Medieval Precursor of Psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York System Publishers (SUNY). EB: loc.92-4.
30 Aristotle 1995 rev. (1984). The Complete Works of Aristotle, vols. one and two. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Bollingen series LXXI: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press (PUP). P. v; 729-35; 736-39.
31 The rabbis are remarkably entertaining, droll, hopelessly sexist and quite percipient, at least about dream interpreters (psychotherapists?) and payment (!): “Bar Hedya was an interpreter of dreams. To one who paid him he used to give a favourable interpretation and to one who did not pay him he gave an unfavourable interpretation” (TB Berakhot 56a). I recommend reading TB Berakhot (55- 57a).
32 Steiner, George 1967. Language and Silence. London: Faber and Faber, p165 (interpolation added).
33 Camus, Albert 1955. (Trans. Justin O’Brien.) The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Hamish Hamilton, p11.
34 Johnson, Paul 1987. A History of the Jews. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, p149. Cf. Ben-Sasson, HH (ed.) 1997 (1969). A History of the Jewish People. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp327-30; Cohen, Shaye JD 2010. The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in Jewish Hellenism. Tubingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, pp44-70.
35 Baldwin, James 1964. Nobody Knows My Name. London: Corgi, pp175-6.
36 Hawking, Stephen, 1988, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam Dell, pp190-1; last emphasis added.
37 Hawking later remarked, presumably jocularly, that he almost cut the final lines of the book at the galley stage. “In the proof stage I nearly cut the last sentence in the book, which was that we would know the mind of God. Had I done so, the sales might have been halved.” http:// theexplanation.com/stephen-hawking-human-reasonmind-god/
38 It is not without irony that most modern astrophysicists would think of Aristotle’s cosmogony as the unscientific mutterings of a mere “philosopher” whereas Maimonides considered Aristotelian “philosophy” the acme of Science.
39 Hardy, Thomas 1959 (1895). Jude the Obscure. NY: Dell. p88.
40 Gilbert Ryle referred to René Descartes’ mind-body dualism as the “ghost in the machine,” to highlight (what he viewed as) the absurdity of a system in which mental activity carries on in parallel to physical action, but their means of interaction are unknown or, at best, speculative.
41 Silk (b. London 1928; died Jerusalem 1998), a Jerusalem poet – an appellation he’d have preferred far more than “English-Israeli” or similar – taught me at the Hebrew University; more importantly for me, he was a friend and also my mentor for many years. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ obituary-dennis-silk-1171685.html
42 TB Bava Metzia 59a-b.
43 Aleichem, Sholem 1987. Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories. Intro. & trans. Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken, pp. xxiv-v; emphasis added.
44 Rabbi Meir or Rabbi Meir Baal Ha-Nes (Rabbi Meir the miracle maker) lived in the time of the Mishnah. He was considered one of the greatest of the Tannaim of the fourth generation (139-163 CE). His wife Bruriah is one of the few women cited in the Gemara. He is the third most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah.
45 Deutscher, Isaac, 1968, The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays. London: OUP, p26.
46 All of them, Deutscher wrote, may be placed “within a Jewish tradition … [yet] all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond it …” (Ibid).
47 I had not yet read the work of “giants” such as Harry Austryn Wolfson, to take just one example, and Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler, was not published until 2014.
48 Lerner, Ralph 2016. Naïve Readings: Reveilles Political and Philosophic. Chicago: UCP. EB: loc. 3218-22.
49 Schama, Simon 2017. Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900. London: The Bodley Head, p276.
50 As was, of course, the Hollander Baruch Spinoza (1632- 77) – by descent.
51 As careful readers, we recall that Aristotle was himself a Metic in Athens. The word in Hebrew is Ger.
52 Until relatively recently, given the paucity of reliable historical evidence, the jury has stayed out on whether Maimonides actually converted to Islam, either willingly (which would be unlikely) or due to coercion (of some kind). Among the major scholars, Salo W Baron acknowledges the evidence that Maimonides converted but says that whether Maimonides indeed converted remains “moot”; Joel L Kraemer, who considered the “evidence” in detail, believes Maimonides converted; Herbert Davidson says “Maimonides’ conversion must be viewed as unproved at best”; Sarah Stroumsa argues that Maimonides “could not have escaped” conversion. Tzvi Langermann, however, in a recent “analysis” of Maimonides’ relationship with ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Baysani al-Askalani, better known as al-Qadi al-Fadil, the de facto ruler of Egypt, seems to demonstrate clearly that Maimonides had previously converted (albeit “nominally”).
53 Maimonides was vehemently opposed to rabbis/scholars earning a livelihood from Torah. In his commentary on Avot (4:5), he writes of the Babylonian Geonim (leaders of the academies), criticizing sharply the way they: “… fixed for themselves monetary demands from individuals and communities and caused people to think, in utter foolishness, that it is obligatory and proper that they should help sages and scholars and people studying Torah … all this is wrong. There is not a single word, either in the Torah or in the sayings of the [Talmudic] sages, to lend credence to it … for as we look into the sayings of the Talmudic sages, we do not find that they ask people for money, nor did they collect money for the honorable and cherished academies” (Encyclopedia Judaica 13: 372b).
54 In a letter discovered in the Cairo Geniza, Maimonides wrote: “The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life – worse than anything else – was the demise of the saint, may his memory be blessed, who drowned in the Indian sea, carrying much money belonging to me, him, and to others, and left with me a little daughter and a widow. On the day I received that terrible news I fell ill and remained in bed for about a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever, and depression, and was almost given up. About eight years have passed, but I am still mourning and unable to accept consolation. And how should I console myself? He grew up on my knees, he was my brother, [and] he was my student” .Goitein, SD 1973. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p 207 (emphasis added).
55 Twersky, Isadore 1980. Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah). New Haven: Yale University Press, p3.
56 There is some dispute about whether Maimonides was born in 1135, 36, 37 or 38 CE, though Ivry declares that it was definitely in 1138. Ivry, Alfred L 2016. Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed: A Philosophical Guide. Chicago: UCP. P. 11.
57 Kirsch, Adam 2016. The People and the Books. NYC: WW Norton. P. 175.
58 Pines, Shlomo 1963. ‘Translator’s Introduction’, lviicxxxiv, The Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. Chicago: UCP. lix.
59 Cf. Yitzhak Melamed: In his early period Maimonides did not seem to have direct access to the Nichomachean Ethics; instead he relied on al-Farabi’s rendering of Aristotle’s claims. … [M]aimonides gained access to a translation of the Nichomachean Ethics probably in the 1160s. In the Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides already cites word for word from the Arabic translation of the Nichomachean Ethics. Melamed, Yitzhak 2016. “Spinoza and Some of His Medieval Predecessors on the Summum Bonum” (Forthcoming in Nadja German and Yehuda Halper (eds.), The Pursuit of Happiness in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Thought.) https://johnshopkins.academia.edu/ YitzhakMelamed, p10.
60 The ancient writers – some Greek, some Christian, and so on – who wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Plato.
61 D’Ancona (Costa), Christina 2017 (rev.) “Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/ arabic-islamic-greek/. No pg. nos.
62 Larkin, ibid, p93.
63 Steiner, George 2010 (1996). No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996. London: 1996: Faber & Faber. EB: loc. 5678
64 Said, Edward W, 1993, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A Knopf. EB: loc. 381.
65 TB, Avot, 1: 4: “Yossei the son of Yoezer of Tzreidah would say: Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; dust yourself in the soil of their feet, and drink thirstily of their words.”
