Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider (review)

When University of Notre Dame Press asked me for a blurb for this remarkable book, I responded that it consisted of “a series of extraordinarily close readings of core texts of Maimonides’, readings which illuminate the delicate interplay between philosophical and religious ideas in Maimonides. In his previous work, Diamond convincingly illustrated the way in which Maimonides carefully chooses, subtly interprets, and circumspectly weaves together rabbinic materials to address philosophers and talmudists alike, each in their own idiom. This book is a further expression of Diamond’s mastery of this intricate methodology and is a work to be studied and re-studied.”

Asked now to write a full-fledged review of the book, I find myself in a quandary: Diamond’s book is indeed a major contribution to Maimonides studies, but its value lies primarily in its detailed reading of discrete texts, readings which can hardly be summarized here. Indeed, Maimonides himself faced a similar quandary. Desiring to write a commentary explicating the inner, esoteric (philosophical) meaning of rabbinic aggadot, he realized that if he explained their meaning, he would be going against the will of the Sages, who, after all, wrote esoterically for a reason; if, on the other hand, he replaced one philosophical allegory with another, of what use would be his book?

Wanting to be faithful to Diamond and useful to the reader of this review, I shall therefore restrict myself to summarizing some of his main conclusions, while urging all readers of Shofar to study this fine book itself—is that not after all the point of a rave review?

In separate chapters Diamond focuses on Maimonides’ treatment of “outsiders”: proselytes, lepers, heretics, kings, philosophers, and, the ultimate “outsider,” God. Proselytes come from the outside and seek to enter the inner precincts of Judaism and the Jewish people; lepers are forced outside the camp, while heretics force themselves outside of it; kings (who ought to be philosophers) are set over and against the rest of the House of Israel, while philosophers (who ought to be invited to be kings) set themselves apart from the rest of the House of Israel while assiduously pretending not to. Maimonides’ sharply transcendent God is, of course, the ultimate other, an other, however, which is said to be always present (which necessitates a distinct but connected chapter on the notion of Shekhinah). A final chapter on the Sabbath, as “temporal outsider,” rounds out this noteworthy book.

Through his insistence on dogmatic orthodoxy, Maimonides turns Judaism into a church of true believers (my language, not Diamond’s); it is thus no surprise that through a subtle reading of Maimonides’ letter to R. Obadiah the Proselyte, Diamond shows us how Maimonides “construct[s] a model of the convert as the only authentic Jew” (p. 31).

In Diamond’s talented hands, Maimonides is shown to transform the rabbinic reading of the Biblical leper as someone punished (not by Hansen’s disease, but by a divine malady) for humanly damaging misuse of language (lashon ha-ra) into a metaphor, a metaphor for the consequence of the misuse, not of language, but of what makes language possible, the intellect (ha-ko’ ah ha-meddabber in medieval philosophic Hebrew).

There is no way that I can describe in this short review the subtlety of Diamond’s analysis of Maimonides’ use of verses and rabbinic proof-texts in these and the other chapters of this book. Diamond takes a linguistic pebble and throws it into the sea of Maimonides’ thought, following the ripples where they lead: verses connect to verses and to rabbinic glosses upon them, which in turn lead to further exegetical and philosophical ripples. There is always the danger of “over-reading,” of seeing more in the text than Maimonides’ intended. This reader, for one, is convinced that Diamond avoids that danger, although, to be honest, it may be because he and I read the same Rambam, as it were. A reader whose...