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Volume Editor:
The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma.
Volume Editor:
The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma.
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This paper will offer a systematic reconstruction of al-Ġazālī’s Sceptical Argument in his celebrated Deliverer/Delivered from Going Astray [al-Munqiḏ/al-Munqaḏ min al-Ḍalāl]. Based on textual evidence, I will argue that the concept of certainty [yaqīn] in play in this argument is that of the philosophers—most notably Ibn Sīnā—and that it is firmly tied to demonstration [burhān] and hence to the materials of syllogism [mawwād al-qiyās]. This will show that contrary to what many scholars believe, this Sceptical Argument is al-Ġazālī’s discovery of a latent sceptical problem in Muslim philosophers’ epistemological theories based on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics that escaped even the agile mind of al-šayḫ al-raʾīs Ibn Sīnā. This reconstruction will also shed some light on the widespread assumption that al-Ġazālī anticipates Descartes’s sceptical considerations in the First Meditation. I will argue that not only do the two thinkers use incompatible strategies to reach their respective sceptical conclusions, but both their conclusions and their use of God in refuting them are also essentially non-identical. The conclusion is that the two sceptical arguments are essentially different.
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The current study aims to understand the effect of Naḥmanides’s typological interpretation on his judgment of the characters of Jacob and Esau. While he tends to evaluate most biblical figures in a nuanced fashion, commending the actions of many non-Israelite figures and criticising the patriarchs for their immoral behaviour, we see a pivotal deviation with respect to the Jacob-Esau narrative. In contrast to the complex moral portrayal arising from the biblical story itself, Naḥmanides does not judge Jacob critically, while he harshly condemns Esau. This exception is understood in the context of Naḥmanides’s typological exegesis, which interpreted the Jacob-Esau narrative as prefiguring the events between the Jewish and Christian collectives. The contemporary relevance Naḥmanides places on this narrative, coupled with the messianic significance he attributed it with, prevented him from judging Jacob and Esau in a more complex manner.
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This paper delves into the concept of imitatio Bibliae—the imitation of the Bible—in the context of magical operations, specifically nigromancy. By examining a multitude of related texts with rich textual traditions across both Hebrew and non-Hebrew languages, it seeks to explore how the individual segments and the physical embodiment of the Bible were leveraged by practitioners to augment the efficacy of their rituals. At the heart of the discourse is the proposition that practitioners leveraged the intrinsic sacredness of the biblical text and the spiritual stature of characters like King Solomon to imbue their operations with a sense of sanctity and validity. The material form of the holy text was regarded as a potent instrument, with its sanctified presence and material existence providing the rituals with additional validation and potency. The analysis will also highlight the use of oath-taking within magical rituals to summon and bind demons, reflecting a unique facet of imitatio Bibliae. By offering these insights, this article will provide a nuanced understanding of the interplay between magical practices and religious texts, ultimately broadening the traditional boundaries of magical and religious discourse.
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This paper contributes to the growing scholarly understanding of the early thirteenth- century Arabic-to-Hebrew translation movement by examining the person, contextual milieu, and translational ethos of Solomon ibn Daʾud (active ca. 1205–1233). Solomon, who translated works by Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn Rušd, furnished each translation with an introductory section. These three prefaces outline his original theory of translation, which offers an alternative to Ibn Tibbon’s and Maimonides’s models that is somewhat closer to al-Ḥarizi’s perspective. Furthermore, they offer a glimpse into the complex personality of an author who claimed to be the first to translate medical works into Hebrew despite the existence of Maimonides’s works, which were already in circulation, and who spuriously claimed to have commentated on Ibn Sīnā when in reality, he was plagiarising an earlier commentary on the former by Ibn Rušd.
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In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides states that the pious should avoid pride and anger, but that if the pious individual is also a leader, then it may be necessary for them to simulate anger and pride for educational or political reasons. These pious leaders should not feel angry or arrogant within themselves, but they should know how to simulate those traits when necessary to motivate or correct those they are leading. This paper argues that these few lines on pious leadership reveal the foundational premise of Maimonides’s entire approach to leadership throughout the Mishneh Torah, in the examples of the king, the judge, the teacher, the parent, the slave-master, and the wealthy. Each of these individuals has a hierarchical position in a community, such that they have power and responsibility over others. However, the relationship between their public and private personas differs depending on the nature of the institution they lead.
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This article focuses on the convert literature that appeared between 1574 and 1582 under two names, Paulus of Prague and Elchanon Paulus of Prague. These two authors seem, on the strength of both their letters and their published writings, to be the same person, who chose to adopt a second identity apparently in order to advance his career as a professional convert first within the circle of Protestant pastors in Nuremberg, as well as among professors at the universities of Leipzig and Helmstedt, and later among Catholics in Vienna. The biography of Elchanon Paulus von Prague is suggestive of a new space available to converts in the German lands during the late sixteenth century, one in which conversion had become a precarious but viable occupation in its own right. His published works were considered capable of fulfilling didactic objectives in a variety of denominational settings and show an increasing interest in kabbalistic techniques in support of Protestant and Catholic dogmas.
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This paper addresses the question of rabbinic etiquette [derekh ereṣ] as it emerges in two of the minor tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, Derekh Ereṣ Rabbah and Derekh Ereṣ Zuṭa (post seventh century), and places it in the broader scholarly discussion of etiquette literature. In light of their literary reception, it contextualises these rabbinic texts in the cultural frame of medieval Christian savoir-faire manuals and analyses classic and current scholarship on etiquette literature, with particular attention to the comparison between Christian European courtesy and Islamic Egyptian adab. In order to overcome an alleged clash of civilising processes, this article explores theoretical models of behavioural codification that can be applied to the Derekh Ereṣ tractates as literary products, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Both habitus and derekh ereṣ describe a lifestyle learned through practice that distinguishes a given socio-cultural elite. Derekh ereṣ only became a definite behavioural ideology on the medieval literary reception of the Derekh Ereṣ tractates, which were codified and disseminated in Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth century during a phase of textualisation affecting not only Christian culture, but also Jewish culture.
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This article examines the sceptical dimension of Salomon Maimon’s theory of invention. It suggests the following: (i) Most of Maimon’s methods are intended to increase the degree of certainty that we can attribute to propositions, but not to achieve apodictic certainty. (ii) Maimon’s various forms of scepticism, for example, doubt and the antinomies, should be considered as belonging to a scale of doubt wherein degrees of certainty and probability can increase and decrease. (iii) His methods of invention offer various means for increasing the degree of certainty, such as finding more connections to other propositions and analysing whether a condition expressed in a proposition is true or whether it is only a pseudo-condition. (iv) The method of transforming problematic propositions into true propositions indicates that Maimon’s sceptical stance sometimes made way for rational dogmatic thought, since this transformation is in the opposite direction of what is usually advocated by sceptics.
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The status of Hebrew as lešon ha-qodeš, the “holy tongue,” is unquestionable. Still, orthodox leaders, writers, and rabbis did not determine a clear ideology regarding the modernisation of the language, especially in its early stages. Nonetheless, the fact that national and Zionist activists in Russia, Germany, and Jerusalem focused on the linguistic aspect put the Orthodox leadership in a curious position. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they were concerned by modern Hebrew education initiatives, which threatened the traditional value system. In the struggle against secular knowledge and national teaching, they found themselves opposing Hebrew. The Orthodox press argued against the Hebraists and the excessive importance they granted to the language above other traditional values.