Maimonides was not the first rabbinic
scholar to take an interest in philosophy, but he was unique in being a
towering figure in both areas. His law code, the Mishneh torah, stands
with Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian Talmud as one of the two most
intensely studied rabbinic works coming out of the Middle Ages, while his Guide
of the Perplexed is the most influential and widely read Jewish
philosophical work ever written.



Admirers and critics have arrived at
wildly divergent perceptions of the man. We have Maimonides the atheist or
agnostic, Maimonides the sceptic, Maimonides the deist, Maimonides the
Aristotelian, the Averroist, or proto-Kantian. We have a Maimonides seduced by
the blandishments of 'accursed philosophy'; a Maimonides who sowed the seeds
that led to Spanish Jews' loss of faith and mass apostasy and who was therefore
responsible for the demise of Spanish Jewry; a Maimonides who incorporated
philosophical elements into his rabbinic works and wrote the Guide of the
Perplexed not to propagate doctrines to which he was personally committed
but in order to rescue errant souls seduced by philosophy; a Maimonides who was
the defender of the faith and defined the articles of Jewish belief for all
time.



In his own estimation, Maimonides was
neither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devoted
rabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single,
harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental to
the lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidson
examines Maimonides’ efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalist
worldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile.