Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn

Overview

Recall questions on Maimonides, the Mishneh Torah, the Thirteen Principles and the Guide for the Perplexed, Mendelssohn's translation, immortality and the Haskalah, Hatam Sofer's objection, and Cohn-Sherbok, Robinson and Goodman.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who was Maimonides?

   Model answer

   Moses ben Maimon, known in Hebrew as Rambam, born in Cordoba in 1138 and dying in Egypt in 1204. He was simultaneously a legal authority, a philosopher and a working physician, serving the household of the vizier in Cairo, and he is generally regarded as the most influential Jewish thinker since the closing of the Talmud.

2. 2

   What was the context in which Maimonides worked?

   Model answer

   His family fled Cordoba when the Almohads imposed conversion on non-Muslims, moving through Morocco and briefly to the Land of Israel before settling near Cairo. He therefore wrote as a refugee from religious coercion, inside a sophisticated Arabic-speaking intellectual culture where Aristotle was read seriously by Muslim and Jewish thinkers alike, and he composed most of his philosophical work in Arabic for that readership.

3. 3

   What is the Mishneh Torah, and why was it controversial?

   Model answer

   It is his complete code of Jewish law, written in clear Hebrew and organised by subject across fourteen books, covering every area including laws that could not be practised without a Temple. Its boldness was that it gave rulings without citing sources or recording the debate, so a reader could look up the law directly. Opponents objected that this would kill Talmud study by making the arguments seem unnecessary.

4. 4

   What are the Thirteen Principles, and where do they come from?

   Model answer

   They appear in an introductory essay to his Arabic commentary on the Mishnah, a work of his twenties that explains the text and draws out the conclusion of each debate. The principles state that God exists, is one, is incorporeal and eternal, and alone is to be worshipped; that prophecy is real and that Moses was the greatest prophet; that the Torah was given by God and will not be replaced; that God knows human actions and rewards and punishes; that the Messiah will come; and that the dead will be restored to life. Setting out required beliefs at all was an innovation, and later thinkers argued about both the list and the enterprise.

5. 5

   What is the Guide for the Perplexed, and what does it argue about how we may speak of God?

   Model answer

   It is his major philosophical work, written in Arabic for the reader who has both a religious education and a philosophical one and finds them in conflict. He warns that it is not for beginners and writes deliberately unsystematically. Its most influential argument is that no positive attribute can truly be predicated of God, since any quality ascribed would introduce plurality into a being who is absolutely one; we may say what God is not, and describe God's actions in the world, but any statement of the form God is such-and-such misleads.

6. 6

   What arguments did Maimonides give for God's existence?

   Model answer

   He worked from Aristotelian premises about the physical world: that motion requires a mover and that an infinite chain of movers is impossible, giving a first mover who is not himself moved; and that contingent things which might not have existed require something whose existence is necessary. He then used the same reasoning to establish that this being must be one, without body and without parts. Notably he set these arguments out while allowing the world to be eternal, so that his case would hold even on his opponents' assumptions.

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