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  • My Truest Perplexities
  • Y. Tzvi Langermann (bio)

I must begin with a confession, so that the reader may know just how I entered into this maze over twenty years ago, and perhaps understand the perplexities that engulf me now. The first paper I ever presented at an academic conference, and the first true article that I ever published, was a study entitled, “The ‘True Perplexity’: The Guide of the Perplexed, Part II, Chapter 24.”1 The conference was held at Tel Aviv University, and I was invited to give the paper through the kindness of Joel Kraemer, the first of several important gestures that he made on my behalf. The motive for writing that paper now seems quite naïve. Having just finished a dissertation in the history of science which consisted of an edition, translation, and study of a key medieval cosmological text, I thought that the community of Maimonidean scholars might benefit from a close look at an astronomical chapter of the Guide written by someone who had invested several years studying the issues involved.

Now my paper was not badly received, and I do not insist that [End Page 301] everything I wrote there was correct and exhaustive. Nonetheless I am quite perplexed by the relatively huge body of literature that has swelled around that chapter, all of which, to the best of my knowledge, rejects my main conclusion, which is that Maimonides did not close the door on a solution to the cosmological quandary. The literature that has ballooned around this chapter is not due to a surge of interest in medieval Arabic astronomy, although, in fact, that field of research has blossomed in recent decades. Instead, the spike in interest is due to the resounding effect of perhaps the most seminal study on Maimonides published in the last half-century, namely, Shlomo Pines’ “The Limitations of Human Knowledge.”2 It thus comes to me as a great shock that Pines’ article is not cited in Kraemer’s study devoted to this chapter, not even once.3 The bibliography takes up thirteen pages. Dante is there, so is Marcel Proust, and a long list of better known or lesser known scholars; but Pines’ article, which fixed the reading—and the key misreading, to which I will come shortly—of all subsequent scholarship is absent.

The reason for my perplexity is quite simple, and it ties in directly with one of the hermeneutic principles enunciated by Professor Kraemer in his paper. In the “Epistle Dedicatory” at the beginning of the Guide, Maimonides writes to Joseph ben Judah:

When you came to me … I had a high opinion of you because of your strong desire for inquiry. … I said however: perhaps his longing is stronger than his grasp. When thereupon you read under my guidance texts dealing with the science of astronomy and prior to that texts dealing with mathematics, which is necessary as an introduction to astronomy, my joy in you increased. … When thereupon you read under my guidance texts dealing with the art of logic, my hopes fastened upon you, and I saw that you are one worthy to have secrets of the prophetic books revealed to you.

(trans. Pines, p. 3) [End Page 302]

Maimonides addresses Joseph directly, as “you.” Joel Kraemer comments on this style of writing: “Maimonides designed his model reader in Joseph, the primary ‘you’ in the treatise. He wrote the Guide for Joseph ben Judah and those like him By singling out Joseph, he indicates the kind of person he wrote for, what he knows, and what he does not yet know, what perplexes him and how he should proceed in his studies.”4

I fully agree, and so I ask: if Maimonides felt that Joseph was worthy enough to have the secrets revealed to him only after he had proven his mettle in astronomy, how can anyone who has not studied that science thoroughly, or even cursorily, consider himself to be the model reader of the Guide? How can he or she hope to understand the secrets that Maimonides has in mind? Shouldn’t any self-respecting, intellectually honest individual, having read the “Epistle Dedicatory,” realize that the secrets of...

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