Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works by Herbert A. Davidson (Oxford University Press) offers a thorough survey of the life and writings of this most influential Jewish thinker. The work gives a refreshing account of his life and influence with a close survey of all existent writings. In the process some surprising facts about his life and times come to the fore as well as some common myths are dispelled. Important for beginner and scholars alike.

Moses Maimonides, rabbinist, philosopher, and physician, had a greater impact on Jewish history than any other medieval figure. Born in Cordova, Spain, in 1137 or 1138, he spent a few years in Morocco, visited Palestine, and settled in Egypt by 1167. He died there in 1204. Maimonides was a man of superlatives. He wrote the first commentary to cover the entire Mishna corpus; composed what quickly became the dominant work on the 613 commandments believed to have been given by God to Moses; produced the most comprehensive and most intensely studied code of rabbinic law to emerge from the Middle Ages; and his Guide for the Perplexed has had a greater influence on Jewish thought than any other Jewish philosophic work. During the last decades of his life, he conducted an active medical practice, which extended into the royal court--the Sultan Saladin is reported to have been his patient--and composed some ten or eleven works on medicine. This book offers a fresh look at every aspect of Maimonides' life and works: the course of his life, his education, his personality, and his rabbinic, philosophical, and medical writings. At a number of junctures, Davidson points out that information about Maimonides which has been accepted for decades or centuries as common knowledge is in actuality supported by no credible evidence and often, more disconcertingly, is patently incorrect. Maimonides' diverse writings are frequently viewed as expressions of several distinct personas, uncomfortably and awkwardly bundled into a single human frame; the present book treats his writings as expressions of a single, integrated, albeit complex, mind.

Ethics of Maimonides by Hermann Cohen, edited by Almut Sh Bruckstein (Modern Jewish Philosophy and Religion: Translations and Critical Studies: University of Wisconsin Press) (Hardcover) Hermann Cohen's essay on Maimonides' ethics is one of the most fundamental texts of twentieth-century Jewish philosophy, correlating Platonic, prophetic, Maimonidean, and Kantian traditions. Almut Sh. Bruckstein provides the first English translation and her own extensive commentary on this landmark 1908 work, which inspired readings of medieval and rabbinic sources by Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.
Cohen rejects the notion that we should try to understand texts of the past solely in the context of their own historical era. Subverting the historical order, he interprets the ethical meanings of texts in the light of a future yet to be realized. He commits the entire Jewish tradition to a universal socialism prophetically inspired by ideals of humanity, peace, and universal justice.
Through her own probing commentary on Cohen's text, like the margin notes of a medieval treatise, Bruckstein performs the hermeneutical act that lies at the core of Cohen's argument: she reads Jewish sources from a perspective that recognizes the interpretive act of commentary itself.
Excerpt from Foreword: Without students, there are no teachers. For about ten years, interest in Franz Rosenzweig has been growing, not only in Jewish studies, but in-deed, in other contexts, including philosophy, theology, and German stud­ies. Part of that interest arose in relation to Emmanuel Levinas, who, though never Rosenzweig's student, clearly expressed a deep debt to Rosenzweig, and especially to The Star of Redemption. Levinas, whose moment of fame in France is now being echoed in North America, repre­sents a specifically Jewish inflection of postmodernism. Rosenzweig, on the other hand, lived in that fecund and difficult moment of Weimar Germany—the years before the Shoah—and died in 1929. Rosenzweig, however, is not the topic of the book that lies in your hands; this work is written by Rosenzweig's own teacher, Hermann Cohen. The book before you is a decisive refutation of Rosenzweig's view of his own teacher—and at the same time a vindication of the teacher, and even of the student.

Thus we are drawn from student to teacher, to learn from the teacher and become students. There are many lines back to Cohen, and were we ourselves not interested in becoming students, interested not in the teach­ing but only in the history of teachers, we would still need to study Cohen. Rosenzweig hails him as a Columbus (and I would, as a Coper­nicus), and claims that Cohen was the first truly Jewish philosopher who discovered a new route, a new thinking. Like a Columbus, it is Cohen who discovered the new possibility and exigency of thought, discovering a land for the voyages not only of Levinas and Rosenzweig, but also of Buber and Benjamin and, in different ways, of Scholem, Strauss, Pines, and many others.

Cohen is not merely the first, he is also the teacher of those who follow. His teaching, moreover, is one that reflects a decisive need in phi­losophy itself, a need to engage with Judaism. Judaism for Cohen is defined through its literary sources and so retains a certain kind of par­ticularity even as it enters into conversation with, or better a correlation with, or still more clearly, even as it is translated into, philosophy. This disruption of the Greek/German philosophical tradition happens so seamlessly and so adroitly in Cohen, that even students like Rosenzweig could overlook Judaism's role in Cohen's systematic philosophical works. But what seems obvious to postmoderns, that an engagement with otherness should disrupt philosophy's authority, is developed in a complex and in its own way disturbing fashion in Cohen's work. For Cohen will not compromise on universality and on reason (and in this remains a modern, even a modernist), but at the same time he negotiates with the specificity of Jewish sources, and not merely as warehouses for properly philosophical ideas, but as texts and, indeed, as originary sources for a reasoning that knows ideas that are foreign to the Greek tradition. What happens when such ideas become translated into philos­ophy, when, for example, the messianic age becomes the idea of human­ity, or when atonement becomes the way of individuating the self, is a reorientation for philosophy itself.

The 1908 essay "Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis" (Ethics of Mai­monides) is one of Cohen's central teachings of this new thinking. It is here translated into English for the first time, and the translator, Almut Sh. Bruckstein, has provided not only a translation and a commentary, but also an extremely valuable introduction, in which she explains why Cohen undertook to write this essay in 1908. She situates it not only in the Maimonides project of the German Jewish intellectuals, but also in Cohen's own career. Cohen's task is to listen again to Maimonides, but to listen in order to let him address Cohen's contemporary philosophical and religious scene. Cohen does make historical claims per se, that Maimonides innovated in relation to his philosophical context, or as biblical interpreter, but such claims are vastly overshadowed by Cohen's discov­ery of a full range of ethical insights, insights that almost leap across the generations to address Cohen and his contemporaries. The essay is a reframing of the histories of ethics, of philosophy, and of religion—starting with Socrates, and demanding a revisiting of the tension between Aristo­tle and Plato.

The essay makes its case with the Protestant philosophical and theo­logical establishment of Cohen's time—arguing for the philosophical su­periority of a rationalist theology—or, as Cohen would prefer, of a critical idealism. The possibility for a better philosophical position start­ing from the origin of the Good beyond Being, from an ethics arising in reason, is made to conform with a radical but legitimate reading of the Jewish tradition—Maimonides'. For Cohen understands the task in his time to be just this reorientation of philosophy.

Almut Bruckstein has produced a book that will allow us to become students of Cohen—a book that lets Cohen teach us. By finding ways to bring Cohen's argument into our intellectual world (a mere hundred year jump), Bruckstein is brilliantly imitating what Cohen does for Mai­monides in his essay.

Such a text is not a simple one, nor is it an easy one to present today. Bruckstein had an immediate task of producing a translation of the essay. The problems of translation are explored in her introduction, but given the interplay between Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and then German, the target language of English has been pushed in decisive and important ways. To hear Cohen in English, to think with him in our philosophical vocabulary, and to hear the resonances in English of what he tried to do in his own German rendering of ideas and phrases, words, and technical jargon, requires an ear or an eye that is used to reading and thinking in disparate languages at the same time, and even more to going across the languages. What Bakhtin, a follower of Cohen, called polyglossia is all the more performed in the feat of translation here.

This book, moreover, is not only a translation: it is also a commen­tary. Cohen becomes our teacher due to the work of the commentary. Cohen struggled to find a way for Maimonides to teach Cohen, to teach his world. And Bruckstein has struggled to find a way for Cohen to become our teacher. What is this struggle? It happens on several levels all at once.

First, Cohen wants to teach us the history of philosophy, but for many readers the key philosophers are not familiar. Bruckstein has to provide not only citations but also explanations and her own readings of Cohen's readings to let us get close to the teaching about the history of philoso­phy. Second, Cohen also presumes a familiarity with medieval thought in the three religions—and such thought is technical. For many readers any technical thinking is off-putting, but even for those who are inclined to such rigorous thinking, the medieval version is still simply foreign. If we become bogged down or remain simply allergic to such technical discus­sions, we will not be able to learn from Cohen. Bruckstein manifests the sort of mastery of those texts that allows her to explain complex and technical materials clearly. But third, and most important, Cohen is a critical idealist. His philosophical convictions seem outdated to most readers. Cohen cannot teach us unless he is allowed to address us, and to escape from the pigeon-hole that reduces him to an antiquarian curiosity.

We are not, in general, prone to consider ourselves idealists, and yet Bruckstein offers in her reading of the Platonism of Cohen, as a critical idealism, a reach forward to some of the thinking that often character­izes postmodern thought. She draws deeply from the various texts of Cohen's system, pausing to explain the reasoning and the innovation of Cohen's logic. At the same time she does not compromise Cohen's claims: rationality, the centrality of the Good beyond Being, the ideas, and more, are all developed and explored in the commentary. The task is not to make Cohen say just what we want, but to make what he does say first intelligible and then even plausible.

Thus what we see in Cohen's own work is echoed in Bruckstein's corn­mentary: an effort to let the historical background of the prior work (Maimonides in Cohen's case, and Cohen in Bruckstein's) fuel an inter­pretation that brings the prior work into our contemporary conversation. The teacher is looking for a student: and the commentator takes up this task. Bruckstein's book works by juxtaposing a translation of Cohen's effort and her commentary: a doubling of the reading and in­terpreting of Cohen. There are repetitions here, and more, there is recitation here. The problems of translation lead well beyond what I could describe, but the problems of commentary point in one deeper direction as well. The paradigmatic nature of Jewish textual tradition must be ex­plored, and while Cohen depends on it in his essay, it is Bruckstein who best develops an analysis of it in her introduction and commentary.

For the task of citation is precisely in tension with reason, in a dialec­tic that speeds reason on its way, and which undergirds the claims that originate in a citation by building the reason up through it. The citation of Jewish texts in a philosophical essay, even the citation of philosophi­cal texts, seems to hide the writer from the demanding call of reason in a thicket of authority. But for the text to exercise any role it must first be cited. And what happens then? Bruckstein, in the introduction to this volume, writes: "We render account of ourselves in facing an ancient text. But the ancient text, which has been trusted in such a way, is not really the issue when it is being cited. No ancient past, but rather the commentary in the very context of which the citation has been invoked, is defended by the citation. Nothing concerning the original narrative is signified by the citation other than that which the interpretation itself has constructed."

The text is introduced not to defend the past, but to take responsibil­ity for giving an account, for providing a reason, to the reader—of the commentary. Jewish tradition discovered in its commentaries that the fu­ture readings and meanings are invoked and stand judgment over all tra­ditional texts. What Cohen calls idealizing interpretation is framed precisely by the need to place the past under our judgment for the sake of the future. While the Jewish texts (and Cohen's genius is to extend the practice to philosophical texts as well) are cited as sources for reason, it is reason that will reconstrue the meanings, will cultivate the highest pos­sible reading of these texts—the readings that find the tasks of ethics.

Cohen extended this process of citation and cultivation of the tradi­tion, not as mythic, but as demythicizing, to the philosophical tradition, and so he began his essay with Socrates, and with the tension of Plato and Aristotle. He explored how the traditions of Greek and Arabic phi­losophy were tributaries to Maimonides' thought. His own rereading of the philosophical traditions refuses a reduction of their history to the vic­tory of the dominant or surviving interpretations. Because the past is not a security for a commentary, Cohen's commentary discerns discontinu­ities and unrealized rationality in previous texts. To explore the tributary is to find rich backwaters, and even little streams that run more purely than the main river.

But Bruckstein has offered us insight into the main tributary that Cohen muted: the Jewish textual tradition. While Cohen cites the me­dieval Jewish philosophers, it is Bruckstein who provides extensive com­mentary on the talmudic and biblical materials that inform the medieval discussions. She explores that other tributary, offering careful and chal­lenging readings of the Jewish pretexts to readers who often might be unaware of those texts. This is not merely a question of historical research, although it involves extensive research, but it is still more a reconstruc­tion of the conflictual interpretative tradition, in direct parallel to what Cohen did for the other two tributaries of philosophy. She provides what is only hinted at in Cohen's essay, allowing this book to offer a full cur­riculum for Jewish philosophy.

Because the process of citation opens the text to the future, and makes the commentary give reasons, Bruckstein's exploration of the river leads beyond Cohen, too. It leads, indeed, and this is the final element of Bruckstein's commentary, to a discussion of the one hundred years of Jewish thought and Jewish existence that separates Cohen from her readers, his would-be students. The commentary leads on to Rosenzweig and to Levinas, even to Derrida. It finds its non-foundational ethics, its ethics of responsibility for the other, its new thinking of Judaism and philoso­phy, as a renewed source (spring or tributary) for the ongoing river of Jewish thought. Bruckstein examines the way that contemporary Mai­monides scholarship takes a stand with or against Cohen's Platonizing reading of Maimonides. In discrete references, she links Cohen's mes­sianism to contemporary debates in Israeli society about democracy and religion. She traces the river, thus, not only back, but also forward to our time, and lets Cohen's voice register in our contemporary scene.

The critical nature of these connections and river explorations is made clear in the very first citation by Bruckstein. For she cites Cohen's stu­dent, Rosenzweig, in fulsome praise of Cohen, and yet the fact of this book, with translation and commentary of an earlier essay by Cohen, is a refutation of Rosenzweig. It seems that no single factor has prevented us from reading Cohen, from studying him in order to learn his teaching, as much as Rosenzweig's reading of Cohen. Rosenzweig read Cohen as having exceeded his own philosophy in his last works on Judaism, particularly Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism. Rosen­zweig, therefore, refused to see, even in the volumes of Cohen's Jewish writings that include the essay "Charakteristik der Ethik Maimunis" (Ethics of Maimonides), volumes for which he (Rosenzweig) was writing the introduction, that Cohen had framed a philosophical Judaism and a Jewish philosophy as the center of his own system, and not as a belated effort at the end of his life.

Almut Bruckstein cites Franz Rosenzweig, then, in an ironic gesture at the very start of her book. And to reread the context of her citation from Rosenzweig will allow us to learn not only about citation and about the development of Jewish philosophy in the twentieth century, but also, or perhaps especially, about the task of commentary and letting a teacher teach.

I cite Rosenzweig's essay "Hermann Cohen's Nachlaßwerk" (1937, 294):

In order to write about Cohen's work and its meaning, one would perhaps have to actually write a new work from the same starting point. And someone will do that. Jewish books have not only their fate as do all books, rather they also have a special Jewish-book fate. I envision Cohen's book printed in Hebrew folio-editions of the sev­enth millennia, printed in Siberian and Fuegian, in New Guinean and Cameroon editions, editions in which Cohen's word is drowning in a flood of three, four commentaries that surround it from all sides.

First, the plain sense of this text: Rosenzweig claims that the ultimate meaning of Cohen's Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism lies in the future, in a new book. One can hardly overlook that this piece was written and published in 1921, the very year of Rosenzweig's own new work: The Star of Redemption. But one might just as well consider Buber's I and Thou, or Levinas's Totality and Infinity—books that are new works but have the same starting point. But Jewish books have more than this re­lation to their successors, they have a special Jewish-book fate: to be commented upon. Thus Rosenzweig imagines an edition of Cohen in the next Jewish millennium (three hundred or so years out) surrounded by com­mentaries. Not rivers, now, but a sea, a flood—like a Talmud of its time. Rosenzweig, moreover, imagines translations into the most diverse and "un-Jewish" of places, in languages around the globe. Cohen's thought will be at home both among the Jews and amongst all the world—it will have achieved the true cosmopolitan readers, will further the development of knowledge and so of humanity that Cohen so esteemed.

What happens, then, in Bruckstein's citation? Bruckstein obviously chose this passage because it is a prophecy of her own work—a transla­tion and a commentary on Cohen. Her work here is a fulfillment of Rosenzweig's prophecy. She is reluctant, however, to include the phrase that might link her own English translation (of a different Jewish writing by Cohen, but the point is all too similar) with the outlandish transla­tions for non-European humanity—because this English translation is not in the realm of the exotic, but precisely directed to communities of readers who have already been fed by the various tributaries of thought flowing in the book.

This citation, moreover, also vindicates Cohen—for despite Rosen­zweig's praise, Bruckstein, along with many others, has had to defend and reread the teacher's writings from Rosenzweig's too-dominant reading. She shows us that even a student's reading of a teacher's work cannot merely be cited. The commentary must reengage both the text and its interpretation. The study of the river of Jewish philosophy extends be­yond the tributaries, through Cohen and then on to the course of the river in our day. But such study is not simply a historical study: reason calls us to interrogate the interpretations and the currents. Commentary serves not merely to name the linkages, but also to disrupt the course, and to heighten our responsibility for following the teachings that the previous students did not learn. Such a recourse to the text, and to the recovery of unlearned teachings, is the characteristic of the Jewish textual tradition—a characteristic that Cohen developed in the philosophi­cal tradition, and that Bruckstein here develops in relation to modern Jewish philosophy. To let the teaching teach; to produce the students who will be able to learn. This foreword itself can only allude to this sub­tle and rich task that is Bruckstein's task in offering us Cohen's vital essay and was Cohen's task in teaching us the ethics of Maimonides. -Robert Gibbs