Maimonidean Studies. Volume I, and: Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy (review)

t36 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 ~ 1 JANUARY I99~ Arthur Hyman, ed. Maimonidean Studies. Volume 1. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., t99o. Pp. 200. Cloth, $35.00. Marvin Fox. Interpreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology, Metaphysics, and Moral Philosophy . Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199o. Pp. xiii + 356. Cloth, $~7.oo. These two texts represent the newest additions to recent studies on Maimonides, which include Leonard Kravitz's The Hidden Doctrine of Maimonides' Guidefor the Perplexed; Menachem Kellner's Maimonides on Human Perfection; and The Thought of Moses Maimonides, edited by Ira Robinson, Lawrence Kaplan, and Julien Bauer. This list will expand with the forthcoming publication of Menachem Kellner's Maimonides onJudaismand theJewish People (Albany: SUNY Press). The appearance of Maimonidean Studies and Marvin Fox's Inteffrreting Maimonides: Studies in Methodology,Metaphysics,and Moral Philosophysuggests that, in the marketplace of ideas, Maimonides represents a growth stock. Maimonidean Studies is the first volume in a planned interdisciplinary annual. The editor, Arthur Hyman, notes that it will carry studies on halakhah or rabbinic law, philosophy, history, and science. Most articles will be in English, but European and Hebrew language materials will be accompanied by an English summary. This inaugural volume goes a long way toward its goal of advancing Maimonidean scholarship by including David R. Lachterman's "Maimonidean Studies 195o-86: A Bibliography" (197-216). This bibliography of books and articles in major European languages contains well over two hundred entries, and supplements are planned for future volumes. The remainder of this volume contains the following essays: Seymour Feldman, "Abravanel on Maimonides' Critique of the Kalam Arguments for Creation" (5-25); Paul B. Fenton, "A Judeo-Arabic Commentary on the Haftarot by Hanan'el ben Semu'el (?), Abraham Maimonides' Father-in-Law" (~7-56); Sarah Klein-Braslavy, "King Solomon and Metaphysical Esotericism According to Maimonides," translated from the Hebrew (57-86); Joel Kramer, "Two Letters of Maimonides from the Cairo Genizah" (87-98); Daniel J. Lasker, "Maimonides' Influence on Karaite Theories of Prophecy and Law" (99-a15); Charles H. Manekin, "Belief, Certainty, and Divine Attributes in the Guide of the Perplexed" (a 17-41); T. M. Rudavsky, "The Theory of Time in Maimonides and Crescas" (a43-62); and Eliezer Schweid, "Religion and Philosophy : The Scholarly-Theological Debate between Julius Guttman and Leo Strauss," translated from the Hebrew (163-95). In a separate Hebrew section one also finds (with English summaries) Mordechai A. Friedman's "Menstrual Impurity and Sectarianism in the Writings of the Geonim and of Moses and Abraham Maimonides" (1-21) and Israel Ta-Shma's "Maimonides' Responsum Permitting Travel by Boat on the Nile and Other Large Rivers on Shabbat" (~3-42). Many of the essays clearly address a philosophical audience (e.g., Feldman, Manekin, and Rudavsky). A few treat halakhic issues rather narrowly, without demonstrating their relevance for philosophical studies. Others succeed in demonstrating the influence of philosophical ideas upon Maimonides' approach to religious texts (e.g., Klein-Braslavy). Though not all of the essays will prove valuable to the historian BOOK REVIEWS I37 of philosophy, still the interdisciplinary character of Maimonidean Studies is quite welcome and reminds the reader that Maimonides was himself a philosopher, rabbi, and physicifin. Marvin Fox's Interpreting Maimonides also provides this reminder. Fox's Maimonides is the philosopher-theologian who denied neither philosophical nor religious imperatives, but insisted that each must inform the other. This is not an easy balance to maintain, and in his first chapter ("The Many-Sided Maimonides") Fox reviews how often it has been lost among the critics of Maimonides. Was he a heretic (either unconsciously or self-consciously) or a model of conventional orthodoxy? Was he a philosophical rationalist, or one who violently subordinated reason to revelation? Fox proposes that these oppositions can be removed, but not the tensions that evinced them, by recognizing that Maimonides "deliberately takes the position that opposed views may each have so much to recommend them that we must commit ourselves to both and hold them in a balanced dialectical tension" (~3). Maintaining this balance, he insists, will not only enable the reader to recover the historical Maimonides, but also to find what Maimonides...