The Maimonidean Controversies: Series Introduction
🎓 Judaism is still grappling with apparent conflicts between human reason and Torah, but the past has a set of test cases for us to explore as we go about it: the Maimonidean Controversies.
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In this issue:
What’s So Controversial about One of the Most Prominent Rabbis in Jewish History?
Medieval Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism
Major Instances of Controversy
The Maimonidean controversies refer to the series of internal debates about the reception of the works of Rambam—but really, about the role of human reason and that which we today call science—that began in his lifetime and continue, arguably, to this day. They are not, individually or collectively, discrete events. Only historic hindsight can recognize them as a series, stretching geographically as they do across the Jewish world, from Spain to Yemen, from France to Egypt. Nor were they all focused on the same issue, but covered a range of interrelated topics, from the halachic to the rarified philosophical. What makes these various conversations, or controversies as they have come to be termed, “Maimonidean” is their genesis in the several outstanding, even radical, moves that Rambam made as a halachist and thinker. These moves brought contemporary non-Jewish thought into traditional genres of Jewish writing and prompted widespread debate about how to regard knowledge and modes of thought from outside the Jewish tradition.
What’s So Controversial about One of the Most Prominent Rabbis in Jewish History?
On first glance, Rambam should be about the least controversial of all famous rabbis. His halachic masterwork, the innovative law code Mishneh Torah, is accepted by all sectors of the observant Jewish world as an authoritative source of halacha (though not usually the binding opinion on a given topic). Everyone from Chabad to the Reform movement claim Rambam as an inspiration, a feat achieved by the scant few. His Moreh ha-Nevuchim (Guide of the Perplexed) is the definitive book of Jewish philosophy, becoming a bestseller as recently as the 2010s when Micah Goodman wrote Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism: Secrets of The Guide for the Perplexed, published in Hebrew in 2010 and translated into English in 2015.
What, then, thrust Rambam into the limelight at the center of a multifarious, ongoing cultural debate? Rambam did a number of surprising things. Enfolded within his Mishna commentary is a thirteen-point creedal statement that aims to codify beliefs incumbent upon every Jew. While Biblical and rabbinic literature is suffused with theological ideas, nowhere is a required set of statements laid out, or even articulated as such. The very notion of articulating religious truth propositions (to use Tamar Ross’s apt phraseology) comes from within the rationalist tradition inherited from the pagan Greeks and Romans.
The choice to focus on the Mishna by dedicating a commentary to it is in itself a powerful statement born of a significant shift in Rambam’s thought. As a young man, he had begun writing commentaries on the Talmud, of which fragments survive in manuscript.1 At some later juncture, he became interested in the apodictic Mishna as a source of law as opposed to the meandering, dialectical Gemara. His Mishna commentary was not just a study aid to understanding the Mishna, but a prelude to a much larger project: a standalone work aside from which a student or rabbi, once equipped with it, would need consult only the Tanach itself, as Rambam wrote in his introduction to Mishneh Torah:
כְּלָלוֹ שֶׁלַּדָּבָר, כְּדֵי שֶׁלֹּא יְהֶא אָדָם צָרִיךְ לְחִבּוּר אַחֵר בָּעוֹלָם בְּדִין מִדִּינֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; אֵלָא יִהְיֶה חִבּוּר זֶה מְקַבֵּץ לְתוֹרָה שֶׁבְּעַל פֶּה כֻּלָּהּ, עִם הַתַּקָּנוֹת וְהַמִּנְהָגוֹת וְהַגְּזֵרוֹת שֶׁנַּעֲשׂוּ מִיְּמוֹת מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּנוּ וְעַד חִבּוּר הַתַּלְמוּד, וּכְמוֹ שֶׁפֵּרְשׁוּ לָנוּ הַגְּאוֹנִים בְּכָל חִבּוּרֵיהֶן, שֶׁחִבְּרוּ אַחַר הַתַּלְמוּד. לְפִיכָּךְ קָרָאתִי שֵׁם חִבּוּר זֶה מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה – לְפִי שֶׁאָדָם קוֹרֶא תּוֹרָה שֶׁבִּכְתָב תְּחִלָּה, וְאַחַר כָּךְ קוֹרֶא בְּזֶה, וְיוֹדֵעַ מִמֶּנּוּ תּוֹרָה שֶׁבְּעַל פֶּה כֻּלָּהּ, וְאֵינוּ צָרִיךְ לִקְרוֹת סֵפֶר אַחֵר בֵּינֵיהֶם.
To summarize: [The intent of this text is] that a person will not need another text at all with regard to any Jewish law. Rather, this text will be a compilation of the entire Oral Law, including also the ordinances, customs, and decrees that were enacted from the time of Moses, our teacher, until the completion of the Talmud, as were explained by the Geonim in the texts they composed after the Talmud. Therefore, I have called this text, Mishneh Torah [with the intent that] a person should first study the Written Law, and then study this text and comprehend the entire Oral Law from it, without having to study any other text between the two.
Rambam, Introduction to Mishneh Torah, English trans. by Eliyahu Touger
Circumventing the Gemara was a bold, arguably radical move, and a big part of the early Maimonidean controversies was criticism of that very choice, as well as Rambam’s editorial decision to leave out the sources of his rulings—much as does the statement-based Mishna on which he modeled his code, which the Gemara does so much work to unpack.
Open up the Mishneh Torah, and you will find, of course, that it begins not with the laws of awakening in the morning, as does the fourteenth-century code, Arbaa Turim, on which the definitive Jewish law code, Shulchan Aruch, is based—but rather with ideas. Read a bit further in Sefer ha-Mada, the “Book of Knowledge,” with which Rambam chose to open his fourteen-part work, and you’ll find, of all things, medieval astronomy. Another bold move made by Rambam was to integrate contemporary rationalist thought, akin to our modern scientific method, into a Jewish law code, and, in fact, to put it up front and center. This made a powerful statement that the task of integrating human reason with Divine revelation was a cornerstone of a Torah-driven life. This integration came to a fore in Moreh ha-Nevuchim, a work written late in Rambam’s life, which sought to explain to exceptionally curious, perceptive, and well-studied students how to reconcile apparent contradictions between Torah and reason.
The name given by scholars to the cultural movement sparked by Rambam’s integration of rationalism and Torah is Maimonideanism. Inspired by Rambam’s project, Maimonideanism became an entire worldview. It found expression in philosophical commentaries on Tanach, in allegorical sermons that framed Torah narratives as abstract philosophical parables, in systematized approaches to Jewish law, and, somewhat later, into discussions of dogma as it applied to Judaism. Maimonideanism took root in places as far apart as Sefarad and Yemen, and especially in the crossroads community of Jewish Provence (the southern third of present-day France), which lay between Sefarad and Ashkenaz and absorbed and integrated cultural currents from both.
Medieval Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism
The engine behind Rambam’s grand experiment was medieval Aristotelianism—which was only somewhat contiguous with the ancient works of Aristotle many of us were prompted to visit in university. Earlier in the medieval period, Jewish philosophical thought in Spain and northern Africa had been dominated, under the influence of Islamic philosophical currents, by the works of Plotinus (204/5–270 C.E.), a late-antique philosopher whose basis was, confusingly, the classical Athenian pagan philosopher, Plato. In the Middle Ages, the works of these two figures were conflated such that the movement surrounding Plotinus and his massive masterwork, The Enneads, understood itself to be Platonic. (The term “Neoplatonism” is a coinage of early academic scholarship of the nineteenth century, aiming to clarify the difference between the movement surrounding Plato, “Platonism,” and that surrounding Plotinus, “Neoplatonism.”) Though Hellenistic and pagan in origin, Neoplatonism’s core ideas, especially the idea of all worldly things emanating from the ultimate Source via the Active Intellect into Soul and then material being (“From the One, many”), was consonant with monotheistic thought.
One of the reasons for the early dominance of Neoplatonism in medieval Islamic thought, through which it also reached Jewish audiences, was that Neoplatonic tracts were translated earlier into Syriac (a form of Aramaic used by a variety of eastern Christian churches) and then into Arabic. (This, in turn, was due to their aforementioned consonance with monotheism.) However, later in the Middle Ages, the works of Aristotle became more widely known in the Arabic-speaking world chiefly through the man dubbed “The Commentator,” Ibn Rushd (1126–1198, to be known to the Latin West in the Latinized form Averroes). Rambam and Ibn Rushd tend to be viewed by academics as kindred spirits of a sort, two worldly Andalusi intellectuals both enthralled with the harmonization of Aristotle’s teachings with their revealed traditions, Judaism and Islam, respectively. Like Rambam, Ibn Rushd became tangled in controversy in his lifetime; when his prominent, mystically-minded opponent Ibn Ghazali penned an anti-Aristotelian tract called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, Ibn Rushd responded with the impeccably titled The Incoherence of Incoherence. Though Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian writings are known as commentaries, they were often epitomes—here a technical term meaning that he summarized Aristotle, usually writing substantial summaries. They allowed for near-full contact with Aristotle’s ideas.
Aristotle’s ideas were not wholly unknown to Islamicate culture; some of his works had been translated early and others were subsumed into Neoplatonism due to misattribution (that is, Neoplatonists thought they were the works of Plato).2 But they became much more widely disseminated in the twelfth century. In particular, the set of Aristotelian writings about natural philosophy, the “Physics,” was snatched up by the eager rationally-minded folks of the Arabic-speaking world. The reason for the eagerness was the powerful method of examining the world that this set of works explained. Not yet empirical in the sense of the modern scientific method, Aristotelian methodology nevertheless used powers of reason to systemically probe the world and prompt discovery, address contradiction, and make sense of the phenomena around us. Once procured, it was irresistible to the curious and brainy. Though Aristotelianism has been superseded in our own time—not in small part due to its own success—the convincing nature of scientific thinking remains a key aspect of the experience of what we have come to call the “religious” in the modern world.
Major Instances of Controversy
There are two particular outbreaks of controversy surrounding Rambam and his Aristotelianism that are often thought of when the Maimonidean controversies are mentioned. The first occurred in the 1230s, during the lifetime of Ramban, whose position on the debate is fascinating; we’ll look at it more deeply in this series. At that time, denunciation of the Moreh led to its public burning in Montpellier at the hands of Christian friars (probably; the historical record is not as solid as we’d like, as we’ll see). This quieted the intensity of the controversy as the Jewish community reeled from the violent interference of Christians in internal Jewish affairs. It did not, however, go away. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, another massive controversy broke out, again emanating from Montpellier in southern France. A small-time Provençal rabbi managed to hook the great Rashba into the debate, which eventually led to a hollowed-out ban passed in Barcelona. Here again, the movement lost steam due to outside forces, in this case, the French general expulsion of 1306. However, its premature ebbing did not reflect the continuing fire of the debate, which continues to burn, sometimes as embers and sometimes as fully fledged bonfires.
These two events are far from the only controversies, but they are perhaps the most discrete, well-defined in time and place, and well-documented. However, we also have documentation, some of it extensive, about less distinct instances of cultural debate and controversy over the works of Rambam and the philosophers he so admired. Barbs began to be traded in Rambam’s lifetime, notably by Ramban and Raavad, but also in Egypt and Babylonia. They included exchanges of letters, critical glosses (hasagot), reports, and more. They continued throughout the thirteenth century, peaking again in the last two decades of that century, before coming to a head in 1304. In the later fourteenth century they would begin to be blamed for the mass conversion that created the Converso class (Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity), and from there, they wind their way into early modernity.
Reads and Resources
There is a huge volume of writing about the Maimonidean controversies, but there has not been a complete narrative history written since Joseph Sarachek 1935 treatment, Faith and Reason: The Conflict on the Rationalism of Maimonides. (My dissertation involved a close examination of the 1304-1307 controversy and I am ever mulling turning it into a more comprehensive history…) Sarachek is still solid, though, and if you’re curious about the controversies, he’s a great place to start.
They have been partially published in various imperfect editions.
Similarly, some works attributed by Aristotelians to Aristotle were not genuine works, and in some cases were Platonic.