January 22, 2006

'Maimonides,' by Sherwin B. Nuland

Architect of Judaism

Review by ANTHONY JULIUS

MAIMONIDES lived from about 1135 to 1204, first in cities in Spain, then in Morocco and Palestine, and finally in Egypt, where he eventually became the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and its principal teacher. As Jewry's pre-eminent legal authority and philosopher, he was humane and tough-minded, a comfort to Jews and a chastiser of heresy. He wrote that it was incumbent upon a Jew restricted in the practice of his worship to depart for another place, as he himself had been repeatedly forced to do at the hands of the Almohads, a violent Islamic sect that took control of the Spanish peninsula in 1148 and gave non-Muslims the choice of conversion or death. But he also wrote: "If a man asks me, 'Shall I be slain or utter the formula of Islam?' I answer, 'Utter the formula and live.' "

Maimonides transformed Judaism, composing its Thirteen Principles of Faith. The celebrated 12th principle - "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming" - has entered popular consciousness. His "Guide for the Perplexed," written in Arabic and completed in 1190, further recast Judaism, offering a philosophical interpretation of the Scriptures far removed from the conventional readings of his (and indeed our own) times.

Today, Maimonides stands for an austerely intellectual doctrinal Judaism, the castigation of all forms of idolatry and the combining of Jewish learning with secular science and philosophy (in his own times, this meant Aristotle). Maimonides is also known for having been studied intensively by Leo Strauss, the teacher of neoconservatives, who championed and built upon Maimonides' distinction between esoteric and exoteric learning, wisdom for the few and a practical piety for the many. Sherwin B. Nuland's concise account of Maimonides endeavors to find "the common ground on which Maimonides can walk together with a man or woman of today."

Nuland writes sympathetically, one Jewish doctor considering this most extraordinary of Jewish doctors, who began to practice medicine in 1175 after the death of his brother (and the loss of the family fortune) in a shipwreck sent him into a profound depression. Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and author of "How We Die," among other books, is a careful and appreciative expositor, and has taken the trouble to read the critical literature. His book is a guide for those perplexed by Maimonides, as well as those ignorant of him. It is also a useful guide to Jewish ethics. It was good, for example, to be reminded that the punishment in Jewish law for using incorrect weights and measures in business is more severe than the punishment for sexual immorality, because the latter is a sin only against God, while the former is a sin against one's fellow man. There is, of course, a secular ethics implicit in this distinction waiting to be developed (as it would be, centuries later, by John Stuart Mill).

Nuland's book is the second in a series entitled "Jewish Encounters," whose projected volumes will feature Jewish writers on topics ranging from military Jews and the Jewish body to self-hatred and anti-Semitism, the Hebrew alphabet and the dairy restaurant. In this attractively heterogeneous list, one might imagine Maimonides, the great systematizer, standing for a lost Jewish unity. He would probably not have been happy to find himself in such eclectic company, however. A somewhat forbidding aspect of Maimonides' thought is his severity in the matter of heresy.

His relentless rationality and contempt for superstition is also forbidding, though perhaps not quite so antipathetic to modern sensibilities. He was fierce with Jewish thinkers who embraced obscurantism. This is one of my favorite passages from "The Guide for the Perplexed": "There is a group of human beings who consider it a grievous thing that causes should be given for any law; what would please them most is that the intellect would not find a meaning for the commandments and prohibitions. What compels them to feel thus is a sickness that they find in their souls, a sickness to which they are unable to give utterance and of which they cannot furnish a satisfactory account. For they think that if those laws were useful in this existence and had been given to us for this or that reason, it would be as if they derived from the reflection and the understanding of some intelligent being. If, however, there is a thing for which the intellect could not find any meaning at all and that does not lead to something useful, it indubitably derives from God; for the reflection of man would not lead to such a thing. It is as if, according to these people of weak intellects, man were more perfect than his Maker; for man speaks and acts in a manner that leads to some intended end, whereas the Deity does not act thus but commands us to do things that are not useful to us and forbids us to do things that are not harmful to us."

Notice the tone of disparagement, amounting to contempt for his intellectual adversaries. Maimonides' writing has a polemical edge: he is impatient with stupidity, especially a stupidity masquerading as piety. The argument in which he is intervening here concerns the question of whether there are reasons for the commandments, specifically those commandments (such as the law forbidding the mingling of wool and linen) not amenable to immediate justification. For Maimonides, even the most puzzling commandments have an instrumental purpose, teaching right opinions, moral qualities or proper civic conduct.

Maimonides was concerned with maintaining the simple faith of the uneducated. The arduous business of philosophy, the esoteric understanding of religious truth, was not for them. He had no conviction that the profound truths of Judaism were within equal reach of all Jews. Maimonides was a bold and (to use an anachronism) fundamentally undemocratic thinker.

Nuland does not concern himself with the tension between what Maimonides stood for and what modern Judaism stands for; and though he remarks on it, he does not explore the implications of the tension in Maimonides' own thought between the few and the many, the esoteric and the exoteric. Still, his book remains a deeply satisfying and humane introduction to the greatest of Jewish thinkers.

Anthony Julius is a lawyer in London and the author of "T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company