Maimonides' Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief.

• Author: Griffel, Frank
• Position: Book Review

By RALPH LERNER, Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2000, Pp. 221, $35.

Maimonides (1135-1204) a figure of enlightenment? Well, not exactly in the sense of the eighteenth-century Enlighteners, but as a popular instructor who brought "some basic notions of philosophy within the ken of ordinary men and women"(p. 11). It is Maimonides' educational work addressed to a popular readership that Ralph Lerner interprets in a 95-page monograph followed by 109 pages of English translations. The writings discussed are the "Epistle to Yemen," the "Mishneh Torah," the "Treatise on Resurrection," the "Letter on Astrology" and the "Guide of the Perplexed." Lerner also interprets a work by the thirteenth-century Maimonidean Shem-Tov ben Joseph Ibn Falaquera, and Joseph Albo's "Book of Roots" of 1425. Some of the translations am provided by other authors and are thus reprinted from their earlier or future publications, such as/eel L. Kramer's translation of the "Epistle to Yemen," Hiltel G. Fradkin's of the "Treatise on Resurrection" and Steven Harvey's translation of Shem-Tov's "Epistle of the Debate." Lerner himself provides the translations of the introduction and the first book of the "Mishneh Torah" and the "Letter on Astrology" (the latter also a reprint from his 1963 co-edited book on Medieval Political Philosophy).

The suggestion that Maimonides and, in a larger picture, the rationalist wing of medieval theology followed a similar agenda to that of the Enlightenment movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not new. It first came up in Hermann Reuter's Geschichte der religiosen Aufklarung im Mittelalter in 1875. Germany has always been a fertile ground for such an interpretation, particularly after Horkheimer and Adorno in 1944 presented their interpretation of the enlightening role of premodern mythology. In 1988 Friedrich Niewohner published a small book on Maimonides: Aufklarung und Toleranz im Mittelalter (Heidelberg: Schneider) which follows very much the same project that Lerner pursues in this book. Niewohner's initial interest in Maimonides' writings was prompted by his role during the European Enlightenment. Maimonides was a major inspiration for Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and Jewish Enlighteners like Moses Mendelssohn regarded the works of Maimonides as a driving force in the project of haskala, i.e., Jewish Enlightenment. The printing and distribution of a bilingual Hebrew-German edition of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah by the imperial Russian Ministry for Popular Education in 1850-52 shows that Maimonides' works were still considered powerful tools in the struggle between maskalim and orthodox Jewry during the middle of the nineteenth century.

Parallel to Niewohner's interpretation of Maimonides as an enlightenist there has been a similar reinterpretation of rationalist medieval philosophy and theology as a whole. The development was started by one of the most influential historians of philosophy in Germany, Kurt Flasch, with his 1989 book Aufklarung im Mittelalter? Die Verurteilung yon 1277 (Mainz: Dieterich) where Flasch presents the 219 theses of Bishop Tempier's 1277 condemnation as articles for an enlightening program of the rationalization of knowledge. In...