Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker.

• Author: Kiener, Ronald C.
• Position: Book review

Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker. By SARAH STROUMSA. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009. Pp. xx + 222. $39.50.

Sarah Stroumsa's Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker is an impressive collection of six chapters, some based on previously published studies, revised and coordinated into a sustained and cohesive presentation. Taken together, these six chapters amount to a comprehensive portrait--but not a complete biography--of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), known in the Latinized West as Maimonides, and to Jewish devotees by his Hebraized acronym RaMBaM. Over the centuries, Maimonides as the focus of both hagiography and scholarship has been dissected into his many constituent components but rarely comprehended as the sum of his parts. This past decade, at least three authors have attempted something approaching totalistic accounts Halbertal--(in Hebrew), Davidson, and Kraemer (both in English) but--none constitute a portrait of the man.

Stroumsa admits she does not intend to offer a comprehensive biography, but she does present a "cultural biography" of Maimonides--"an integrative intellectual profile"--giving the reader a sense of the scope of the cultural influences that produced his literary output. By attempting to do less, Stroumsa may have done more. Stroumsa attributes to Maimonides both a panoramic gaze and a careful pen. Not only does Maimonides regularly inform us of his sources, but using Stroumsa's encyclopedic approach and presumption that Maimonides read everything he could or might get his hands on, we are forensically made aware of an even more prodigious context for his writings. Stroumsa seeks not only to tell us what Maimonides was reading and likely thinking as he staked out his philosophical, theological, and scientific positions, she more than a few times hints that it is possible to recover a sense of his personality and character, to understand what drove his choices and his cryptic allusions.

In an earlier monograph, Stroumsa had characterized Rabbi Saadia Gaon (born in a satellite of Cairo, trained rabinically in Palestine, mature career in Iraq) as "the first Jewish Mediterranean thinker." Maimonides (born in Spain, educated in North Africa, mature career in Cairo with a visit to Palestine) seems a far more persuasive figure for bearing such a characterization. Of course, those who...