Maimonides: A Biography (review)

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote this biography of Maimonides in German when he was a young man of only twenty-eight, the first major work of Heschel’s rich and varied career. It is now almost seventy-five years old, and yet it still speaks clearly, cogently, and coherently. It also demonstrates how the academic study of Judaism has changed—many would say declined—in the intervening years. From Heschel’s biography, which is long and strong on reading and analysis of primary sources, lacking in theory—the be all and end all of modern scholarship—Maimonides emerges as incredibly human. A lonely man of faith and intellect, who encompassed all Jewish learning, classical philosophy, and mathematics, Maimonides was and remains the most important Jewish thinker in the post-biblical period. Indeed, as Heschel himself once quipped, if Maimonides were not a man he would have to be a university.

The geographical course of Maimonides’ life from Andalusia to North Africa to Egypt—and a possible visit to Jerusalem, debated by scholars as to whether or not it occurred—was, in some ways, matched by his intellectual journey. For Maimonides the goal of his intellectual wandering was to come to know God as far as humans are able. Blessed with a remarkable mind, prodigious memory, and insatiable desire to absorb all he could, Rambam moved freely through all spheres of knowledge, sacred and profane. As scions of the family of Yehuda ha-Nasi, the Maimonides clan saw itself as having a special calling.

To escape the Almohade fanaticism of Fez, the family moved to Alexandria and then settled in Fustat, outside Cairo. Maimonides was devoted to his brother, David, who was the merchant of the family and whose business success enabled Rambam to engage in his studies. His brother’s death plunged Maimonides into depression, from which he was slow to emerge. It was in Fustat that Maimonides undertook his greatest projects.

As a descendant of the redactor of the Mishnah, Maimonides undertook a similar redactive enterprise, the editing of a major legal compendium, the Mishneh Torah, about which Maimonides famously wrote that his codex coupled with a Bible would be all any Jew would need in order to come to an understanding of legal issues. Seeing his place in the lineage of R. Yehuda, Maimonides wrote, correctly and no doubt proudly, that he was emulating the style and language of the Mishnah. This compilation was an educational reform of sweeping magnitude, and for him, a major contribution to the Jewish religious tradition. Such bravado and boldness did not curry favor within all rabbinic circles. And it was the Mishneh Torah’s scholarly sin of omission, in his case sources, footnotes, and other scholarly trappings, that infuriated his adversaries. Would that Heschel had devoted more pages to this text, since Maimonides considered the Mishneh Torah the monumental achievement of his life.

It was in Fustat, thanks to his brother’s work, that Maimonides had the time to devote to his numerous studies. Visits by various peripatetics could not erase what he saw as the vapid intellectual climate of Egypt, and yearning for Andalusia never seems to have waned completely. Nevertheless, Maimonides continued to write, including a commentary on the Mishnah written in Arabic, a well-known and controversial letter to the Jews of Yemen concerning messianic stirrings, and various other works.

For Maimonides a burning question was: how does a human reach the highest level of perfection possible? Maimonides wrote Joseph ibn Aknin, scholar, poet, and physician well-known for his commentary on the Song of Songs, that he would write a text to guide him on this perplexing issue. For Maimonides, such a quest would of course entail a full-blown encounter with philosophy and its greatest teacher, Aristotle. The resulting Guide for the Perplexed ensured Maimonides fame in the non-Jewish world. Maimonides tackled issues of concern to all religious thinkers, and they, in turn, came to be in his debt. Heschel explicates this encounter in a remarkably clear, concise...