Manekin, Charles H. and Daniel Davies eds., Interpreting Maimonides: Critical Essays

he medieval intellectual culture is a vast landscape inhabited by towering minds like Moses Maimonides. Maimonides was a complex and prolific intellectual figure. As a Jewish scholar, he was conversant in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic languages and was well at home with intellectual skirmishes with his Jewish and Islamic counterparts. The range of Maimonides’ i ntellectual depth and breadth cannot be overstated as shown by his impact on the writings and debates which shaped the cultural atmosphere of Europe in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. This book presents a way to critically engage the medieval thinker from various perspectives over a span of 14 chapters (an introduction and 13 essays) that comprise this opus. In his portrait of Maimonides, Herbert A. Davidson (“Maimonides and the Almohads”) depicted the Jewish thinker as a mind well steeped in the writings of Averroes, Avicenna as well as al-Ghazali not to mention the well revered Corpus Aristotelicum . Very much like Aristotle himself, Maimonides was a person whose fascination with science was matched only by his passion for and interest on other cerebral pursuits. This he displayed at a very tender age leading to a career dedicated to learning medicine, mathematics, and astronomy along with the studies of the Jewish religious and legal texts. Among his very early works which sealed his scholarly reputation were the Book of Commandments and the Misneh Torah . An important aspect of Maimonides’ oeuvre was the ease and seamless maneuver with which he moved from theology to philosophy and other secular sciences. His magnum opus, Guide of the Perplexed is the best demonstration of this intellectual dexterity. Maimonides viewed the relationship between theology and other disciplines, especially, philosophy, in terms of their organic unity, a position he shared with the almohads, his purported influencers. 2 The close affinity between Maimonides