Maimonides

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A treatise reached a young scholar one chapter at a time. Its author, in Fustat, had taught the man face to face by hints, and when distance separated them he kept the method, sending the argument out in installments addressed to one prepared reader and meant to lose anyone else who read over his shoulder. The student was Joseph ben Judah ibn Shimʿon; the writer was Moshe ben Maimon, whom the Latin West would call Maimonides and Hebrew tradition the Rambam; the work was the Dalalat al-Ha’irin, the Guide of the Perplexed. It was built, by its own account, to be overheard without being understood — a book whose disorder is its doctrine.

Córdoba to Fustat

Moshe ben Maimon was born in Córdoba in 1138, into a line of judges, the son of the dayyan Maimon. He was a child when the Almohads took the city in 1148 and ended the long convivencia of Andalusian Jewry under a regime that allowed neither open Judaism nor open Christianity. The family became wanderers — through the south of Spain, across to Fez in Morocco, briefly to the land of Israel — before settling in Fustat, the old city beside the new Cairo, by the late 1160s. The flight marks his thought as much as his biography: he wrote for a Jewry that could no longer assume its own continuity, and the question of what a community must know to survive its dispersion runs under everything he built.

In Egypt the family’s fortunes turned on the death of his brother David, a trader in precious stones lost at sea with the household capital. Maimonides took up medicine, and rose: he became a physician to the court of Saladin, attached to the household of the vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil, and was recognized as ra’is al-yahud, the head of the Egyptian Jewish community. His own letters describe a crushing regimen — riding to Cairo to attend the court by day, returning to a hall of waiting patients and petitioners by night, too spent on the Sabbath even to study undisturbed. He died in Fustat in 1204; tradition carried his body to Tiberias for burial, where his grave remains a place of pilgrimage. The phrase later cut into Jewish memory — that from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses — measures the size of the shadow he threw across the tradition that followed.

The corpus and its gradient

Maimonides’ three great works are arranged, deliberately, along a slope from the open to the hidden, and the slope is itself part of the teaching.

The Commentary on the Mishnah, finished in Arabic in 1168, is the most public. Yet even here the philosophy is seeded: its introduction to the tenth chapter of Sanhedrin, the chapter called Pereq Heleq, sets out the Thirteen Principles of Faith — God’s existence, unity, incorporeality, eternity, and the rest — that would pass into the liturgy as the Yigdal hymn and the Ani Maamin confession and become, for much of later Judaism, the nearest thing the tradition has to a creed. The prefatory Eight Chapters (Shemonah Peraqim) give a compact Aristotelian psychology and ethic of the mean. Whether the Thirteen Principles state Maimonides’ settled theology or a simplified version pitched to those who could not follow the Guide is itself an unsettled question among his readers, and one he may have intended to leave so.

The Mishneh Torah, completed in Hebrew around 1178, is the colossus: a complete, systematic code of the whole of Jewish law, arranged by subject, written in a clean Mishnaic Hebrew, designed so that a reader might learn the entire halakhah from the written Torah and this one book without threading the sea of the Talmud. The ambition drew its own resistance — to compress the give-and-take of the Gemara into ruled conclusions looked to some like an attempt to make the tradition’s reasoning dispensable. And the code does not begin with ritual. It opens with the Sefer ha-Madda, the Book of Knowledge, and within it the Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, whose first chapters lay down the existence and unity and incorporeality of God as matters of demonstrated science before a single commandment of practice is reached. The law, in this architecture, rests on metaphysics.

The Guide of the Perplexed, composed in Judeo-Arabic around 1185–1190, is the explicitly esoteric work. It is addressed not to the community but to a single kind of reader: one already firm in the Law and trained in philosophy, who finds the literal sense of scripture and the conclusions of demonstration pulling him in opposite directions until he stands, as the title has it, perplexed. To such a reader Maimonides offers neither the surrender of philosophy nor the surrender of Torah, but a way of reading that dissolves the conflict — at a price the rest of the corpus is built to manage. A late Treatise on Resurrection (c. 1191) was forced from him by the charge that his rationalism had quietly denied the bodily resurrection; he answered that he had affirmed it all along, while conceding how little he had said.

The secrets recoded as science

His single most consequential move is an act of identification. The Mishnah (Hagigah 2:1) restricts the public teaching of two subjects: maʿaseh bereshit, the Account of the Beginning behind Genesis 1, may not be expounded to more than one; maʿaseh merkavah, the Account of the Chariot behind Ezekiel’s vision, may not be expounded even to one unless he is wise and understands of his own knowledge. The Talmud guards the same ground with the tale of the four who entered the pardes, the orchard of esoteric knowledge, from which only Rabbi Akiva returned whole. For the centuries between, these were the canonical seals on the tradition’s most dangerous learning, and what lay behind them was imagined as throne-mysticism, cosmogony, the ascent of the visionary.

Maimonides reads them otherwise. Maʿaseh bereshit, he states plainly, is natural science — physics. Maʿaseh merkavah is divine science — metaphysics. He says it in the Commentary on the Mishnah, again in the Yesodei ha-Torah (2.11 and 4.10), and again across the Guide. The secrets of the Torah, in their highest reach, are the very subject matter the Greeks pursued under those names. The rabbinic restriction stands — these things remain perilous to the unprepared — but the peril is re-coded. It is no longer the danger of a Hekhalot ascent gone wrong; it is the danger of metaphysical error in a mind not first schooled in logic, mathematics, and the study of nature.

The move cuts two ways at once, and both edges matter. It naturalizes Jewish esotericism: the sodot ha-Torah, the hidden meanings, turn out to be Aristotle’s. And it Judaizes Greek science: physics and metaphysics are not foreign imports but the lost inner stratum of Israel’s own learning, scattered when the nation went into exile and persecution. The patriarchs, on this account, knew these sciences before the Greeks named them, and the rabbinic ban on writing them down is precisely why the tradition appears to have fallen silent. When, in Part III of the Guide, Maimonides at last makes good on his promise to interpret the chariot, he reads Ezekiel’s living creatures and wheels and the gleaming hashmal as the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos — the spheres, their movers, the separate intelligences. He prefaces the reading with an extraordinary apology: that he is recording in writing what the Sages forbade to write, justified only because the qualified students have been scattered and the doctrine would otherwise be lost. The most sealed subject in Judaism is expounded in a text that denies, as it expounds, that any exposition is taking place.

The art of contradiction

The Guide announces its own method, and the announcement is the key to reading it. In its introduction Maimonides warns that the secrets cannot be set down in continuous prose; they appear, flash, and vanish again, and the most a writer can honestly offer is ru’us al-fusul, chapter headings — pointers enough to guide the ready, too little to instruct the unready. He instructs himself, further, to scatter the secrets through the work rather than gather them, so that the prepared reader will recognize and assemble what is dispersed while the unprepared meets only an unsystematic surface.

Then comes the passage that has organized every serious reading since. The introduction closes by listing seven causes for the contradictions that appear in any book — and Maimonides openly admits that two of them operate in his own. The fifth is pedagogical: a teacher of difficult matters must begin with a simplified, even an imprecise account, correcting it only later. The seventh is the esoteric cause proper: in the most obscure matters it is sometimes necessary to conceal a teaching in one place and disclose it in another, even to present a question as settled one way here and the opposite way there, so arranged that the ordinary reader will not notice the contradiction at all. With this declaration Maimonides hands his readers a license, and a demand: where the Guide contradicts itself, the contradiction may be a signal, not a slip. The medieval commentators read him so — Samuel ibn Tibbon, who made the first Hebrew translation, the Moreh ha-Nevukhim of 1204, prepared in consultation with the author himself; Judah al-Harizi, whose looser version followed in 1213; and the line of expositors after them. The form of the book performs its content: a text that cannot safely systematize its highest matter, and so refuses to.

Negative theology, prophecy, and the Greek-Arabic inheritance

At the center of the Guide stands a theology of pure negation. No positive attribute, Maimonides holds, can truly be predicated of God; to say that God is wise or living or powerful is not to add a quality to the divine essence — which is one without composition — but only to deny its privation, to say what God is not. Each name peeled away leaves the worshipper nearer to a silence that is itself the higher praise. This is the apophatic register at its most rigorous, the via remotionis pressed until language gives out, and it set the austere terms against which a later, more imaginative Jewish mysticism would define itself.

His account of prophecy is no less philosophical. The prophet is not, in the first place, the recipient of an arbitrary intrusion from above but a human being whose intellect and imagination have been perfected to the point where they can receive the overflow from the Active Intellect — the last of the cosmic intelligences — the imagination then translating what the intellect grasps into the images and parables of revelation. The frame is the one Maimonides took from the philosophers of Islam: above all al-Farabi, whom he named, in a famous letter, the thinker to study before all others, and Avicenna, whose reworking of Aristotle gave him much of his cosmology and psychology. Against the Mutakallimun, the practitioners of kalam — the dialectical theology of Islam, with its world of atoms recreated each instant and its arguments for creation built on premises he judged unsound — he turned a long and dismissive critique. His Aristotle, as later scholarship has stressed, came largely through Arabic paraphrase and through Avicenna rather than from the Greek; he belongs wholly to the great current of Greek learning carried into Arabic and then into Hebrew, the same current that bore Averroes, his Andalusian near-contemporary, whose commentaries on Aristotle reached Maimonides only late. He stands, too, in a longer Jewish line that runs back through Saadia Gaon, who had first tried to reconcile Torah with reason in Arabic, to Philo of Alexandria, who had read Moses through Plato a millennium before.

The Strauss question

What, then, did Maimonides actually believe? On this his readers divide, and the division has not closed.

One tradition reads him as a sincere synthesizer — a thinker who held, in good faith, that reason and revelation issue from a single truth and therefore cannot finally conflict, and whose guardedness is pedagogical caution, not concealment of heresy. Against this stands the reading associated above all with Leo Strauss, who took the seventh cause at full strength. In Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) and in the long introductory essay to Shlomo Pines’s 1963 English translation, Strauss argued that under orthodoxy and the threat of persecution philosophers learned to write so that the surface satisfied the many while the truth lay between the lines for the few — and that Maimonides was such a writer, his orthodox surface (creation in time, particular providence, miracle) covering a secret teaching close to the radical Aristotelianism of the falasifa, on which the Torah is a divinely sanctioned political and pedagogical instrument rather than a literal record of supernatural events.

The reading has been the dominant frame and the dominant target. Pines himself later turned skeptical from a different angle, arguing that Maimonides held human knowledge of metaphysics to be severely limited, so that the Guide’s deepest teaching is the bounding of philosophy rather than a concealed dogma. Herbert Davidson, in his study of the man and his works, holds that Maimonides knew less first-hand philosophy than Strauss supposed and had little reason to dissimulate, and that the supposed secrets are the commonplaces of medieval science. Marvin Fox and Kenneth Seeskin defend the sincere-synthesizer view; Aviezer Ravitzky shows that Ibn Tibbon already read the Guide esoterically, which complicates any flat dismissal of esotericism; and Moshe Halbertal, mapping the kinds of concealment a text can practice, grants Maimonides a real esotericism without the closet-radical conclusion. That the Guide is esoteric in some sense is not in dispute — its author says so. Whether its hidden teaching is a thoroughgoing heterodoxy or a guarded but honest reconciliation is the contested question, and the strongest readers stand on both sides of it.

Two esotericisms

The Guide was finished just as another way of reading the Torah’s secrets was crystallizing. In Provence and Catalonia, in the same generation, the earliest Kabbalah was taking form — the Sefer ha-Bahir, the circle of Isaac the Blind, the Geronese masters Azriel of Gerona and his fellows — and by the end of the thirteenth century Castilian kabbalists, Moses de León among them, would produce the Zohar. Gershom Scholem, and after him Moshe Idel, read this rise as in large part a response to Maimonidean rationalism: a reclaiming of the inner meaning of Torah from the philosophers by offering the very same restricted subjects a different, theosophical content. Where Maimonides found metaphysics in maʿaseh merkavah, the kabbalists found the dynamic inner life of the sefirot, the ten emanations welling from the hidden Ein Sof; where he offered negation, they offered a richly symbolic, re-mythologized divine. Scholem called Kabbalah a counter- history to philosophical Judaism — a re-mythologization of what philosophy had drained of myth. The opposition was not total: Abraham Abulafia, whose ecstatic Kabbalah of the divine names took the Guide as a foundational text, read Maimonides as a fellow esotericist, and Maimonides’ own son Abraham led a Sufi-inflected pietism that claimed his father’s mantle. But the dominant relation between theosophical Kabbalah and the Guide was a rivalry for the title of the true sod, the genuine secret of the Torah.

That rivalry broke into the open as the Maimonidean Controversies, a chain of bans and counter-bans running from the 1180s into the fourteenth century. The fiercest wave came in 1232, when rabbis of northern France, urged by Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, placed the Guide and the Sefer ha-Madda under the ban; the Maimonidean communities of Provence and Spain answered with counter-bans, and that same year the Dominicans at Montpellier publicly burned the two books — a shock that chastened even some of the philosophers’ opponents. The last great wave came in 1305, when Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, the Rashba, forbade the study of Greek natural science and metaphysics to anyone under the age of twenty-five, exempting Jewish philosophers and the study of medicine. The quarrel was never simply philosophy against mysticism; it ran through questions of communal authority, the fear of allegorizing the commandments out of practice, and the pressures of Christian polemic. But its lasting work was to harden two permanent forms of Jewish esotericism — one philosophical, with the Guide for its canon, one theosophical, with the Zohar and later the Safed kabbalah for theirs.

The same prestige that made him a target made him, in time, a trophy. From the late fourteenth century a legend circulated that Maimonides, near death, had met a kabbalist and recanted his rationalism for Kabbalah. Scholem traced its earliest traces to the years after the Spanish Expulsion and showed it for what it is — a kabbalistic appropriation of the great rationalist’s authority, not a fact of his life. It survives because it answers a wish: that even the architect of the philosophical Torah should, at the last, have come home to the secret.

The texts and their readers

The Guide reached the modern world through several channels. The Judeo-Arabic original was first edited, with a French translation and critical notes, by Salomon Munk in three volumes from 1856 to 1866 — Le Guide des égarés, still the indispensable scholarly base for the original text, now freely readable through the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The standard public-domain English remains Michael Friedländer’s translation, issued in an annotated three-volume first edition (1881–1885) and a one-volume revised edition stripped of its notes (1904); the 1904 text circulates widely, including through the Internet Sacred Text Archive. Shlomo Pines’s exacting 1963 translation, with Strauss’s introductory essay, became the scholarly standard in English and remains in copyright; a fresh rendering by Lenn Goodman and Phillip Lieberman appeared in 2024. The medieval Hebrew of Ibn Tibbon and al-Harizi carried the work through the centuries of its Jewish reception, and the early printed editions of the Ibn Tibbon version are the text of record for that long afterlife.

The scholarship is correspondingly vast. The synthetic and the esotericist readings are joined in Kenneth Seeskin’s survey of Maimonides for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the Islamic philosophical context — al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes — is laid out in a companion survey on the influence of Islamic thought. The identification of the chariot with metaphysics, and its working-out across Guide III, is treated in Howard Kreisel’s study of the account of the chariot in the volume The Cultures of Maimonideanism. The Strauss reading and its afterlife are examined in Beau Shaw’s analysis of Strauss on the literary character of the Guide. Herbert Davidson’s Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (2005), Marvin Fox’s Interpreting Maimonides (1990), Josef Stern’s The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (2013), and Moshe Halbertal’s Maimonides: Life and Thought (2014) carry the debate forward; Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) frame the rationalist- kabbalist tension; and Marc Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology (2004) and Menachem Kellner’s Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought (1986) press the question of how exoteric the Thirteen Principles really are. These belong to the wider field of Jewish philosophy that Maimonides, more than anyone, set its medieval course.

Read straight through, the Guide will not yield a system, and it was not meant to. Its author dispersed his highest teaching on purpose, trusting that the reader fit to receive it would gather the flashes and complete what he had only begun, while the reader unfit for it would carry away a surface and be unharmed. The perplexed for whom he wrote were never to be cured of perplexity all at once; they were to be taught how to read until the chapter headings, scattered across three parts and seven kinds of contradiction, drew together into a single line they could follow without being burned by it.

→ Related: Aristotle · Al Farabi · Avicenna · Averroes · Apophatic Theology · Kabbalah · Gershom Scholem · Abraham Abulafia · Saadia Gaon · Jewish Philosophy · Ein Sof · Prophecy