Maimonides the Rationalist

Maimonides was not the first rabbinicscholar to take an interest in philosophy, but he was unique in being atowering figure in both areas. His law code, the Mishneh torah, standswith Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian Talmud as one of the two mostintensely studied rabbinic works coming out of the Middle Ages, while his Guideof the Perplexed is the most influential and widely read Jewishphilosophical work ever written.Admirers and critics have arrived atwildly divergent perceptions of the man. We have Maimonides the atheist oragnostic, Maimonides the sceptic, Maimonides the deist, Maimonides theAristotelian, the Averroist, or proto-Kantian. We have a Maimonides seduced bythe blandishments of 'accursed philosophy'; a Maimonides who sowed the seedsthat led to Spanish Jews' loss of faith and mass apostasy and who was thereforeresponsible for the demise of Spanish Jewry; a Maimonides who incorporatedphilosophical elements into his rabbinic works and wrote the Guide of thePerplexed not to propagate doctrines to which he was personally committedbut in order to rescue errant souls seduced by philosophy; a Maimonides who wasthe defender of the faith and defined the articles of Jewish belief for alltime.In his own estimation, Maimonides wasneither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devotedrabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single,harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental tothe lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidsonexamines Maimonides' efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalistworldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile.