Bringing Maimonides to Oxford

At the dawn of the sixteenth century, Moses Maimonides's Mishneh Torah was the guiding law book for many Jewish communities, but not all. Generally, those living in the Arabic speaking world saw Maimonides's code as the final word in Jewish law. David Ibn Abi Zimra (d. 1573), who was the leading rabbi in Egypt for much of his life, declared that in Egypt the law followed Maimonides for it was 'the place of the master,' where Maimonides had lived.' Joseph Karo (d. 1575), the renowned author of Shulhan ' Arukh and a child of the Spanish Expulsion, reported that Iberian Jews had relied on the Mishneh Torah in monetary matters,^ By 1536, Karo had emigrated to Safed in the Land of Israel. There he said of Maimonides, 'he is the teacher and master of the place in this entire kingdom and all the Arab kingdoms and we live according to his word' (D''n voai).' Elsewhere Karo called Maimonides the 'lion of the Land' of Israel and declared that Jews who lived there, as well as those in the 'Arabic-speaking lands and the west' (msom jxOD'DXtxn), followed his Mishneh Torah.T he printing history of the Mishneh Torah reinforces the regional use of Maimonides's code at the dawn of the early modern age. Despite its length and the necessarily large initial investment required to produce the work, the Mishneh Torah was among the first Hebrew books printed. It appeared at the very beginning of Hebrew printing in Rome in the early 1470s and was reprinted in pre-Expulsion Spain (ca. 1480), in Soncino in northern Italy (1490), and in Constantinople (1509), with majestic volumes following in Venice in 1524-1525, twice more in 1550-1551, and again in 1574-1575-Sections of the work, such as the laws of ritual slaughter, also appeared as standalone volumes. Works printed in the northern Italian regions supplied communities far beyond their borders, but it is noteworthy that Maimonides's legal magnum opus was not published in the German-speaking lands or eastern Europe during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.' Costs or shortages of materials do not seem to have been the issue. The entire Babylonian Talmud, including the commentaries of Rashi, the twelfth-and thirteenth century Tosafists, and other legal material, which required reams and reams of paper and had to be set in type by hand, was published a number of times in Cracow and Lublin in the early seventeenth century, * ' Apparently, there was not the same demand for Maimonides's Mishneh Torah in these communities as there was elsewhere. This was not a new development. Historically, the Mishneh Torah had not enjoyed the same status in the Ashkenazic world, that is, the cultural sphere of German Jewry, as it

When Maimonides' Mishneh Torah (Code of Jewish Law) reached Lunel, France, a group of scholars composed twenty-four objections to his positions. Surprisingly, Maimonides' rejoinder opened with an unusual rhymed prose epistle with effusive praise for his correspondents and artistic and complex language. In this book, Charles Sheer offers the first annotated translation of the entire epistle: he uncovers the biblical and midrashic passages modified by Maimonides that became the language of his Iggeret, and explicates its ideas in the context of Maimonides' other works and compositions of the late Middle Ages. He illustrates how Maimonides, in a most personal fashion, shared with these scholars his ideological struggle between his love for Torah study and "hokhmah" (philosophy, wisdom). This Grand Epistle reveals much about this towering figure and provides a moving portrait of him during his last decade. Learn more & purchase: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/out-of-series/maimonides-grand-epistle-to-the-scholars-of-lunel

2012

Between 1295 and 1305 two rather diff erent individuals —one the nephew of Arnau de Vilanova, an academic physician trained at Montpellier, the other a Jew converted to Christianity and practicing at the papal court— undertook independently to translate into Latin all the medical works of Maimonides, above all his short works on asthma, on poisons, on coitus, and on hemorrhoids. In these works, taken as a whole, Maimonides passed along details drawn from the whole spectrum of life in Egypt in his day, ca. 1200. A comparative study of the translations of these two individuals allows us to study the kind of picture of Islamic life that they chose to present, and how they depicted Maimonides himself, to a European readership.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2009

blogs.bu.edu/mzank, 2018

This blog post summarizes my approach to Maimonides that I use in a seminar I teach at Boston University. The students were prompted to present on a significant text from our readings, or on their term paper. I decided to set myself a task as well, namely, to articulate the arc of the course, and explain what I hoped to achieve. The result is perhaps the first step toward a prospectus of a book.

Featuring Highlights from the Hartman Family Collection of Manuscripts and Rare Books, 2023

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-golden-path-9781802077889?cc=us&lang=en& Among the intellectual luminaries dotting the millennia of Jewish history, none shines brighter than Maimonides (1138-1204). He was a rabbi, jurist, Talmudist, philosopher, physician, astronomer, and communal leader, and produced a myriad of writings on halakhah, theology, medicine, and philosophy that have attained near-canonical status. We have more source material from or about Maimonides than possibly any other Jewish figure in the medieval period, and more has been written about him than perhaps any other Jew in history. Epithets like the 'Great Eagle' and the 'Western Light?' and the glorifying statement 'From Moses to Moses, none arose like Moses?' reflect centuries of authority, influence, and fascination. The Golden Path traces the impact and reception of Maimonides and his thought through a study of materiality, specifically the production and dissemination of textual objects. It consists of two sections: a descriptive catalogue of an exceptional private collection of manuscripts and rare books; and essays from leading scholars on aspects of Maimonides's cultural context, influence, and appropriation through disparate eras and geopolitical spheres. Combining intellectual, reception, and book historical research, the heavily illustrated volume explores his effects in assorted social and political circumstances, across diverse intellectual and cultural environments.

Moses ben Maimon [known to English speaking audiences as Maimonides and Hebrew speaking as Rambam] (1138–1204) is the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period and is still widely read today. The Mishneh Torah, his 14-volume compendium of Jewish law, established him as the leading rabbinic authority of his time and quite possibly of all time. His philosophic masterpiece, the Guide of the Perplexed, is a sustained treatment of Jewish thought and practice that seeks to resolve the conflict between religious knowledge and secular. Although heavily influenced by the Neo-Platonized Aristotelianism that had taken root in Islamic circles, it departs from prevailing modes of Aristotelian thought by emphasizing the limits of human knowledge and the questionable foundations of significant parts of astronomy and metaphysics. Maimonides also achieved fame as a physician and wrote medical treatises on a number of diseases and their cures. Succeeding generations of philosophers wrote extensive commentaries on his works, which influenced thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton.