Maimonides for Today

The Guide to the Perplexed:
A New Translation
by moses maimonides, translated and with commentary by lenn e. goodman and phillip i. lieberman
stanford university, 704 pages, $50

From Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses. This aphorism, popular in rabbinic literature from the Middle Ages until today, draws a comparison between the biblical legislator and his worthiest medieval successor. It is almost impossible to overstate the prominence, the influence, the sheer overbearing presence in Jewish history of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), known in Hebrew as Rambam and in the Latinate West as Maimonides. In just about every branch of Jewish endeavor, the “Great Eagle” reigned supreme. As a rabbinic leader, he commanded unrivaled authority across the Jewish world, laying down communal precedents that are followed to this day. As a polymath of wide renown, he produced writings on medicine, science, and philosophy that were considered authoritative by colleagues and successors across various civilizations. As a courtier and leading physician in the retinue of the sultan of Egypt, he attained a degree of respect for his personage and community that has been matched by few since. As a Jewish legal authority, he penned the first and greatest code of Halakhah, whose massive authority has hardly dimmed in the centuries since its composition. As a Jewish philosopher, he revolutionized the entire field through his reformulation of core Jewish concepts in a rationalistic and scientific key. One might justly state, in the rabbinic idiom so familiar to him, that after Maimonides there is only commentary.

Among his many mammoth achievements, Maimonides has the distinction of composing history’s most influential work of Jewish philosophy. Initially penned as a series of responses to a student’s quandaries, this work appeared under the title Dalālat al-Hā’irîn, generally rendered as Moreh Nevukhim in Hebrew, and The Guide to the Perplexed in English. The perplexities in question arose from the encounter between two intellectual arenas to which Maimonides was devoted: the Judaism of the Bible and Talmud on the one hand, and Greco-Arabic science and philosophy on the other. How, wondered many literate Jews of the period, is one to navigate such an encounter? Are traditional notions of revelation, miracles, and creation ex nihilo philosophically defensible? Does God more resemble Aristotle’s austere singularity or Moses’s attentive law-giver? Can the puzzles of divine omniscience, human free will, and theodicy be pieced together in a way that injures neither religion nor philosophy? The Guide seeks to guide us between the inspired traditions of the Judaic religion (to which Maimonides dedicated his soul) and the rational deliberations of medieval metaphysics (to which he dedicated his brain). His philosophically sensitive reconsideration of biblical and rabbinic theology, combined with his religiously receptive interventions in the philosophical debates of his time, helped to generate a rationally oriented Judaism that has delighted some and infuriated others.

Maimonides’s Guide has vivified and divided world Jewry for eight centuries. Some have celebrated it as the apogee of enlightened religious thought. Jewish scholars wishing to engage seriously with the intellectual challenges of their day, as well as those seeking to foster positive attitudes towards worldly engagement, have invariably regarded Maimonides as their principal inspiration. Thinkers of other religions have similarly admired this work, none more so than Thomas Aquinas, whose theological writings contend with “Rabbi Moses” at every turn. Others, however, abhorred and condemned the Guide. Traditionalists claimed that Maimonides corrupted the purity of the Jewish faith by interweaving foreign ideas into its native tapestry. Later thinkers, including Spinoza, would criticize the Guide as an untenable halfway house, satisfying neither those seeking religious edification nor those pursuing knowledge through rational inquiry. Yet since its publication, every rabbi, philosopher, and literate layman excogitating within the boundaries of the Jewish tradition has had to situate himself in relation to Maimonides. Philosophically speaking, the Guide became Judaism’s North Star.

Like many significant Jewish works of its era, the Guide was written in Judeo-Arabic—a patois in decline even then, as the Christian Reconquista from the north, coupled with fanatical Islamic conquerors from the south, began to throttle the great Iberian-Jewish civilization from which Maimonides hailed. Due to this, almost all readers of the Guide have had to rely on translations, whose quality has varied greatly. Translators of this text face an unusual problem, over and above the routine difficulties attending the translation of any intricate and complex work of philosophy: The Guide is an avowedly esoteric work. Its true teachings, as the author notes in the introduction, are buried deep within its non-sequiturial chapters, labyrinthine digressions, and peculiarly evasive or truncated answers. Every translator is thus faced with the Herculean—some might say Sisyphean—task of presenting the unpresentable, of imposing order on the Guide’s philosophical and linguistic unruliness. Few have dared to attempt it; fewer still have succeeded.

The record of English translations, of which until now there have been only two, is particularly lamentable. The first attempt, dating from 1881, is of limited use to the contemporary reader, given its ponderous Victorian prose and highly literalist mode of translation. The second rendering was undertaken by the French-Israeli philosopher Shlomo Pines in 1963. This version, the standard for English readers since its publication, is in many ways deeply unsatisfactory. Though a renowned philosopher and Arabist, Pines was a newcomer to the English language. His sentences were clunky and unreasonably wordy, and his slavish devotion to translating Arabic terms identically in all cases produced paragraphs that verge on the incomprehensible. Pines also declined to provide serious footnotes, an indispensable requirement for a work as intricate and allusive as the Guide.

Most importantly, the Pines translation was overseen and introduced by Leo Strauss (1889-1973), the great German-Jewish political philosopher who found refuge in the United States after fleeing the Nazi onslaught. Strauss, perhaps the most original and influential Maimonides interpreter of his century, portrayed the medieval philosopher as one of history’s great subversive writers. In his essay Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss posited that many of history’s great intellectuals were compelled, by fear of falling afoul of political or ecclesiastical authorities, to disguise artfully their true opinions. This mode of esoteric writing—which buries incendiary ideas beneath layers of paradox, opacity, and misdirection—ensures that only the few readers sophisticated enough to navigate the textual edifice would have the privilege of entering its inner chambers. Such, according to Strauss, was the true mode of communication adopted by Plato, al-Farabi, Spinoza, and yes, Maimonides. The true Maimonides, in Strauss’s view, was a philosophical radical who swaddled his heretical, neo-Aristotelian views within the comforting mantle of devotional pieties and faux-rabbinic concerns. The multi-layered complexities of the Guide thus functioned as a philosophical haze through which only the most discerning reader could penetrate, concealing Maimonides’s scandalous conclusions from public view. Strauss’s theory exerted an unjustified influence over many, including Shlomo Pines, whose translation clearly presumes the Guide to be an ultimately misleading work, an Aristotelian wolf in the guise of a rabbinic sheep.

Between Pines’s cumbersome English and Strauss’s subversive esotericism, Anglophone readers of Maimonides have been long in need of a fresh representation of the Guide. It is therefore with celebration and no small measure of relief that we finally welcome a readable, enlightening version of Maimonides’s philosophical magnum opus. The Guide to the Perplexed: A New Translation, translated by Lenn Goodman and Phillip Lieberman—a philosopher and a historian, both professors at Vanderbilt University—is little short of a revelation. Even to those who, like me, are not competent to adjudicate the technical excellence of this new translation, it remains clearly a cut above the rest.

First, the Goodman-Lieberman translation is eminently lucid. Having been translated for good sense rather than terminological fidelity, it presents the Guide as smooth, comprehensible, and surprisingly engaging. Freed from the dungeon of previous translations, Maimonides the pedagogue and writer finally appears. The Goodman-Lieberman translation never loses sight of the fact that the Guide was written as a letter to his beloved student. It retains the informalities, the personal asides, the flashes of polemic that so enliven the original. While naturally containing a great deal of philosophical and religious jargon, it does much to humanize the text, presenting its passages in such a manner that it might be read profitably by almost anyone. The translators’ use of colloquial English is a great liberation—sometimes to a fault. If any criticism may be laid at the door of these translators, it is that they occasionally permit themselves more latitude than is necessary. Maimonides was not above using colorful language to describe his opponents, but it seems a stretch to imagine the medieval sage raging against “sophomoric blockheads” or “numbskulls” engaged in “crackbrained” activities.

The best part of this translation, however, is its footnotes. Like all good intellectual historians, Goodman and Lieberman are acutely aware that the Guide remains orphaned without proper context. A true appreciation of Maimonides’s contributions requires expertise in, at the very least, the Hebrew scriptures, the form and content of rabbinic literature, the full range of Greek philosophy (especially Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic thought), the broad sweep of early Christian and Islamic writings, and all the pre-Maimonidean Jewish philosophers of the medieval era. More dauntingly still, a full appraisal of Maimonides’s impact demands a knowledge of all that was written in the Guide’s shadow, including vast swaths of Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and secular philosophy of the past eight centuries, as well as much contemporary scholarship of religion. The Goodman–Lieberman edition’s extensive and erudite framework of footnotes shepherds the reader through these imbricated contexts. In addition to furnishing all the relevant sources, these notes contextualize Maimonides’s words within a vast intellectual discourse that sweeps from the scribes of Ancient Israel to the lyceums of Athens to medieval houses of study to modern universities and journals. The fortunate reader will enjoy the company of Plato and Rabbi Akiva, Augustine and Ibn Tufayl, Kant and Lessing, Strauss and Wolfson, all the while appreciating Maimonides’s role as a central node in a set of ever-expanding intellectual networks. These meticulous notations, along with the grace and concision with which they illumine the text, are worth the price of admission.

Yet the Goodman–Lieberman footnotes do more than simply present the discursive context of Maimonides’s ideas. They also contain interventions. The translators marshal textual and philosophical arguments against those who, in their eyes, stand guilty of promoting erroneous or skewed readings of the Guide. A splendid example is one lengthy footnote (pp. 326–328) that addresses the dilemma of Divine omnipotence and human free will. A somewhat ambiguous passage in the Guide appears to ascribe all proximate causes of events—be they human volition or the workings of nature—to the ultimate power of God’s command. Previous works, including the Pines translation, have interpreted this passage as a rejection of all human agency. Yet for Goodman and Lieberman, along with all moderate and sensible readers of Maimonides, such a rendering is unacceptable. The Goodman–Lieberman footnote, touring the length and breadth of Western intellectual history, demonstrates that this reading both misconstrues the original Arabic and elides a key philosophical distinction at the heart of Aristotle’s notion of volitional acts. According to this more plausible reading, Maimonides’s God does indeed constitute the ultimate cause—in the sense that he compels human beings to make choices based on all the circumstances and considerations faced by them. Yet the decisions themselves, along with their consequences, are borne by us alone.

In proffering such a reading, the Goodman–Lieberman edition ushers Maimonides far closer to conventional religious thought, harmonizing him with the major thrust of the biblical and rabbinic traditions. This, in the final analysis, is perhaps the greatest gift of this edition of the Guide. It stands as a trenchant rebuttal not only to previous translations—which it has thoroughly supplanted—but also to commentators who sought to drive a wedge between Maimonides the philosopher and Maimonides the rabbi. The Goodman–Lieberman Maimonides not only speaks with great lucidity and verve, but is more recognizable to those of us who have spent years studying Maimonides’s other religious writings. Situated far closer to the intellectual boundaries that characterized his own religious tradition for centuries, he is revived as an exemplar for contemporary believers.

Of course, no translation pleases everyone. Readers more qualified than I will quibble over the Goodman–Lieberman edition’s presentations and interpretations. There are a thousand possible versions of Maimonides, and this translation naturally presents but one. Yet no sensible reader could gainsay this remarkable linguistic, philosophical, and pedagogical accomplishment. This translation, along with its introductions and notes, will undoubtedly become the standard edition of the immortal Guide. Goodman and Lieberman have finally provided Maimonides with a fitting mouthpiece in the English tongue. Thanks to their efforts, Judaism’s Great Eagle may soar anew.

J. J. Kimche is a PhD candidate specializing in Jewish intellectual history at Harvard University.

Image by Blaisio Ugolino, public domain. Image cropped, filter added.