Two Themes in Maimonides's Modifications to His Legal Works.

• Author: Herman, Marc

Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) composed three major works that attempted in different ways to address the entirety of Jewish law: Commentary on the Mishnah, usually dated to 1168, and in the ensuing decade Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah. Given the enormity of this task and the at times divergent goals of these works, it was perhaps inevitable that Maimonides would change his mind about matters large and small. Even in his lifetime, readers of his works were aware of changes in Maimonides's views as well as his--often incomplete--attempts to "correct" earlier "mistakes." Drawing on the longest surviving Maimonidean manuscript, his personal copy of Commentary on the Mishnah, which most paleographers have concluded is an autograph, (1) as well as his Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah, this article traces adjustments that Maimonides made in two areas: the meaning of Hebrew and Arabic technical terms and the sources and status of particular laws. Close attention to these topics uncovers numerous cases of Maimonides's silent rejection of his own earlier linguistic choices, interpretations of rabbinic literature, and legal positions, revealing a great medieval mind "in perpetual motion." (2) The autograph of the Commentary covers five of the six orders of the Mishnah, missing Seder Tohorot and scattered mishnaic chapters here and there, and contains countless corrections and emendations, the vast majority in the author's own hand, (3) providing an unparalleled window into Maimonides's thought process.

Although Commentary on the Mishnah, Book of the Commandments, and Mishneh Torah all concern Jewish law, these three books have different agendas and arrangements. The Judeo-Arabic Commentary chiefly explicates the Mishnah, the third-century foundational document of rabbinic literature, but also contains many digressions that address theological and other matters that the Mishnah treats sparingly. The Judeo-Arabic Book of the Commandments attempts to identify the 613 commandments given to Moses at Sinai, a number drawn from rabbinic literature around which Maimonides organizes Jewish law in this work and in Mishneh Torah. And the Hebrew Mishneh Torah constitutes Maimonides's complete statement of Jewish law, written, in his words, "so that no other work (hibbur) should be needed for ascertaining any of the laws of Israel." (4) Maimonides's efforts to establish consistency within his legal corpus complicates the obvious suggestion that divergent goals account for some of the contradictions between these texts. Nevertheless, given that concerns to organize and set forth Jewish law shaped his Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah, it is likely that factors such as genre and Maimonides's objectives do explain certain differences. (5)

Scholars have long been aware that Maimonides edited his works with care. Saul Lieberman pays close attention to Maimonides's changes to Commentary on the Mishnah (6) and Yosef Qafih meticulously documents each instance in his edition. (7) Ensuing scholarship has sought programmatic motives for Maimonides's alterations to the Commentary and his later rejections of earlier positions. Aaron Adler points to factors such as Maimonides's increased engagement with the Jerusalem Talmud, greater confidence to disagree with the heads of the Babylonian academies (geonim), and a more critical attitude toward anonymous voices in the Babylonian Talmud. (8) Tzvi Langermann argues that Maimonides "softened" an early rejection of miracles as he struggled with the question of the creation or eternity of the world and adjusted Commentary on the Mishnah accordingly. (9) Shamma Friedmann suggests that Maimonides revised an earlier interpretation of one mishnah in light of Rashi's commentary on the Talmud. (10) Simon Hopkins demonstrates that Maimonides often sought to improve the language and style of the Commentary, rendering the text into a higher Judeo-Arabic register. (11) And a series of scholars show that drafts of the Commentary preserved in the Cairo Genizah bear witness to Maimonides's massive editorial process. (12)

This article argues that Maimonides's intense interest in solving problems related to the enumeration of the commandments, which he engaged at length in Book of the Commandments and, to a lesser extent, in Mishneh Torah, led him to make myriad emendations to Commentary on the Mishnah and to reconsider his earlier lexicon. That is, when writing Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah in the decade after completing the Commentary, (13) Maimonides tackled, or concocted, questions that he had no reason to consider in the Commentary. After first reviewing the dating of these three works, I explore Maimonides's edits to the fair copy of Commentary on the Mishnah and his rethinking of legal problems as he wrote Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah.

DATING MAIMONIDES'S WORKS

The colophon of an early manuscript of Maimonides's commentary on Seder Tohorot (the mishnaic order for which the autograph does not survive), copied "letter for letter, word for word" from the fair copy of Commentary on the Mishnah, reports that Maimonides "finished" this work in 1168. (14) The marginalia in the fair copy mostly date to after the completion of what may be termed the "body" of this work, but several scholars have suspected that parts--or even all--of the fair copy itself may postdate 1168. (Accordingly, the colophon may refer not to the preparation of the fair copy but to the completion of an earlier draft.) A relevant piece of evidence for this is that Maimonides referred to Book of the Commandments twice in the Commentary, once in the body and once in the margin. (15) At least one scholar assumes that this indicates that Maimonides began working on Book of the Commandments before completing the Commentary, (16) but others note that this could merely indicate that he produced parts (?) of the fair copy of the Commentary after beginning Book of the Commandments. (17) Malachi Beit-Arie also observes that Maimonides wrote the fair copy on two types of paper, one native to the Maghreb and the other more eastern in origin. (18) There is a reason that the textual history of the Commentary has been dubbed "the most complicated" of any Judeo-Arabic work. (19)

The dates that scholars assign to Commentary on the Mishnah (1168), Book of the Commandments (by 1178), (20) and Mishneh Torah (1178) (21) should probably be understood in a narrow sense; they may only refer to the completion of a first draft or perhaps to Maimonides's granting of access to copy his work. Lieberman and Qafih already have demonstrated that Judeo-Arabic manuscripts and medieval Hebrew translations of the Commentary frequently bear witness to many changes that Maimonides made to that text. (22) Likewise, although no autographs of Book of the Commandments survive, comparison between, for example, Moise Bloch's nineteenth-century Judeo-Arabic edition and Moses Ibn Tibbon's medieval Hebrew translation suggests that the manuscript tradition preserves changes that Maimonides himself made to this work. (23) If we indeed possess the "final" edition of Book of the Commandments, contradictions between this work on the one hand and Mishneh Torah and the late emendations to Commentary on the Mishnah on the other, as well as the reports of two of the earliest readers of Book of the Commandments, Daniel ben Se'adya ha-bavli (fl. early thirteenth century) and Abraham Maimonides (1186-1237), seem to indicate that at some point Maimonides ceased editing Book of the Commandments. (24) It was no simple matter to add or remove a commandment since Maimonides sought the enumeration of precisely 613 commandments. Eliminating some of the inconsistencies between Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah that Daniel ben Se'adya identifies would require such corrections; therefore it is possible that Maimonides chose to leave these difficulties unresolved rather than rework the enumeration as a whole. (25) Echoing his father, Abraham Maimonides declared that Mishneh Torah, not Book of the Commandments, contains Maimonides's final views. (26) Perhaps this statement hints that late in life, Maimonides no longer brought Book of the Commandments in line with his newly adopted positions. Maimonides also subjected Mishneh Torah to ongoing, though apparently incomplete, review, as is clear from even the best editions. (27)

SEMANTIC CHANGES

Changes in word use between Commentary on the Mishnah and Book of the Commandments primarily pertain to the technical terminology that Maimonides uses to think through the enumeration. With the partial exception of Hefes ben Yasliah (late tenth century?), whose own Book of the Commandments Maimonides appears not to have had in its entirety, Maimonides was the first to enumerate the commandments in a systematic manner. (28) Other writers had offered scattered reflections on some of the difficulties inherent in enumeration, but Maimonides had no true predecessor in this regard, largely because he deployed the enumeration in innovative ways. As Gerald Blidstein writes, Book of the Commandments "may well have been the most pioneering of Maimonides' works." (29) Maimonides realized that his groundbreaking endeavor demanded a new vocabulary in order to articulate the conceptual problems of enumeration, and he manipulated his technical terminology to do just that.

Two simple and two more complex examples of sematic changes between Commentary on the Mishnah and Book of the Commandments reveal Maimonides's development of a new Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic terminology. The first is his use of the Hebrew word misvah, lit. commandment, which Jewish writers from the rabbis on did not always use in such a specific way. (30) In Commentary on the Mishnah, Maimonides is occasionally sensitive to a more technical meaning of misvah as "distinct, enumerated commandment," as when he categorizes the blue and white strings of...