By Abraham P. Socher
With outstanding chutzpa and deep philosophical seriousness, Solomon ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed himself after his medieval highbrow hero, Moses Maimonides. Maimon was once possibly the main marvelous and positively the main debatable determine of the late-eighteenth century Jewish Enlightenment. He scandalized rabbinic gurus, embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn, provoked Kant, charmed Goethe, and encouraged Fichte, between others. this can be the 1st examine of Maimon to combine his idiosyncratic philosophical idealism together with his well known autobiography, and together with his early unpublished exegetical, mystical, and Maimonidean paintings in Hebrew. In doing so, it illuminates the highbrow and religious probabilities open to a eu Jew on the flip of the eighteenth century.
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Additional resources for The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy
Sample text
L 4 His ge11eral claim that the Haskala drew upon the moderate fideistic "Hispano-Jewish" tradition of thought, epitomized by a medieval figure like Judah Halevi, is suggestive but underestimates the importance of more radical voices in that same tradition (including Maimonides and his followers). More crucially, it underestimates the extent to which the radical and moderate voices were part ofa single discourse that the Maskilim were attempting to renew in radically changed social circumstances.
In 1781 or 1782, Maimon set out, once again, for Berlin. I have sketched Maimon's place in enlightened Berlin Jewish society in the introduction. Maimon describes his introduction to Mendelssohn as having taken place after he sent him a refutation of Christian Wolff's lIse of the Principle of Sufficient Reason to establish God's existence. The essay was written in Hebrew and compared the system ofWolff and Leibniz, to which Mendelssohn adhered, unfavorably with the Aristotelian n1etaphysics of Maimonides.
11oreover, it begins vvith a recitation ofthe names ofEmden's forefathers, whose purpose seems to be to embed Emden within a larger fan1ily narrative. "They were a holy seed," he writes, "men ofdiscernn1ent and purity amidst times ofdecrees and destruction.... " 102 The book then turns to a long biographical account of Emden's father, whose life, he claims, set the pattern for his own. The contrast with Mendelssohn's determination to distance himselffrom his father and grandfather's traditional irrationality could not be clearer.