Newsletter Special: Rabbi Jose Faur, "Anti-Maimonidean Demons"

[David Shasha]

Friends,

 

            The most important Sephardic sage is the great Moses Maimonides.  His remarkable career gave us a massive literature that remains one of the cornerstones of all Jewish thoughts and legal scholarship.

 

            Almost immediately upon publishing these classic works, Maimonides was viciously attacked by the Ashkenazi rabbis for supposed doctrinal violations.  What these rabbis were objecting to was the rational-scientific method that emerged in the Judeo-Arabic synthesis in the high Middle Ages. 

 

            The Ashkenazi rabbis, living outside the sphere of the Muslim world, were developing many ideas relating to mysticism and religious philosophy that conflicted with the Maimonidean teachings.

 

            Rather than examine the validity of these new ideas which were often couched through the canny use of pseudepigraphic attribution of contemporary writing with ancient figures, the Ashkenazi rabbis undertook a direct frontal assault on Maimonides and his teachings.

 

            In my teacher Rabbi Jose Faur’s article “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” we discover the roots and meanings of this attack on the rationalist-scientific Judaism.  Emerging from anti-rational and anti-scientific mystical obscurantism, the Ashkenazi rabbis and their many Sephardic allies demonized Maimonides and effectively suppressed many of his advances in Jewish scholarship.

 

            “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” is an indispensable article for those trying to better understand the fraught relation between rationalism and mysticism and the way in which the Maimonidean tradition was mercilessly attacked by Ashkenazi rabbis and intellectuals.

 

 

 

 

David Shasha