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.

A photograph of a diorama of the Barcelona Disputation of 1263 in the Anu Museum in Tel Aviv (Wikimedia). Though this event, which I’ve written about several times before, is only tangentially related to the Maimonidean controversies, it makes use of a format, the Scholastic disputation, which both nurtured and was nurtured by the same currents undergir…