“Rambam or Maimonides”

Abstract

The chapter discusses the reaction of German Jewish Orthodoxy to the liberal Maimonides renaissance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – analysing the reading of Maimonidean philosophy by Orthodox thinkers such as Samson Raphael Hirsch, Josef Gugenheimer, Simon Eppenstein, Joseph Wohlgemuth and David Z. Hoffmann. It will be argued that although those reactions evolve from Samson Raphael Hirsch’s outright rejection of the Guide in 1836, to a meaningful orthodox cooperation in cross-stream research projects concerning Maimonides’ work at the beginning of the twentieth century, there generally remains a clear difference between the liberal and orthodox interpreters of the Guide: Orthodox readings almost always retreat to supernatural Sinaitic revelation as the source of Judaism’s essence, and would rather accuse the Guide of dissembling argumentation in order to address Jews perplexed by philosophy than attribute any kind of non-traditionalist position to the author of the Mishneh Torah.

It will be demonstrated that even the most objective and apparently non-apologetic attempts to reclaim Maimonides for Orthodox Judaism must ultimately and inevitably end in an outspoken rejection of rationalism and a return to ‘arbitrary’ revelation. It is this misunderstanding between the Reformers and neo-Orthodoxy that causes the continuous debates between the two camps discussed in this chapter: that for the traditionalist side it is self-evident, and neither open for argument nor subject to formal proof, that the intuitive discovery of ‘God’s will’, and the therefore assumed fact that the commandments are the product of this will, is the bedrock foundation for the obligation to keep them faithfully.

Interestingly, the more philosophical implications of this antagonism are reflected, as will be shown in an appendix to the chapter, almost par for par in the well-known debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann about the relevance of religious philosophy in the modern world.

Appendix: The Debate Between Julius Guttmann and Leo Strauss

The well-known controversy between Julius Guttmann and Leo Strauss about the relevance of religious philosophy in the modern world reflects almost par for par the antagonism between a rational theology as a compromise between religious considerations and philosophical necessities on the one hand, and the non-rational insistence on the supernatural character of revelation next to rational philosophy on the other.⁷⁶ Supporting the latter view, Leo Strauss had devoted a full chapter of his “Philosophy and Law” (1935) to a thorough and harsh criticism of Guttmann’s classic “Die Philosophie des Judentums” from 1933, which proposed the former position. Guttmann, in turn, formulated a lengthy response to Strauss’s attack only after 1940, when he was already teaching in Jerusalem, but never published it. This response, which was finally made public after being obtained from Guttmann’s Nachlaß in 1976, was not less aggressive than Strauss’s essay, at least regarding its content: Strauss’s main assessment, that the only possible alternatives in religious philosophy are Orthodoxy or atheism, is “lacking in every justification” – so declares Guttmann in what can be read as a powerful defense of Reform theology and its mediation between religion and philosophy – a defense based on the Maimonidean example.⁷⁷

Leo Strauss accused Guttmann, the neo-Kantian and student of Hermann Cohen, not only of supporting the failure, as it seemed to Strauss, of harmonizing philosophy and religion within a modern religious philosophy of Judaism, Strauss extended his criticism also to the reading of medieval Jewish philosophy by the liberal school of Jewish scholars – in what seems to be a circular argument. Since for Strauss, religious orthodoxy cannot be disproved rationally, to “internalize” irrational assumptions of belief (revelation or creation), as the liberal theologians undertook, will only abrogate those beliefs and destroy the authenticity of religion.⁷⁸ But this strict anti-Reform claim caused a serious dilemma for Strauss: Maimonides seems to say in the Guide over and again that precisely this rational internalization of dogma is at the core of his intention in the treatise. Ironically, Maimonides, and especially his teachings in the Guide, is the shield bearer for both sides of the debate. Strauss demands a ‘return to Maimonides’ because he believes that the Guide contains the key to the most effective solution of the problem of the relation between philosophy and religion, while Guttmann saw Maimonides’ thought rather as a certain stage in the continuous progress towards, but (in a Kantian way) never-to-be-completed solution of this same problem. While for Guttmann, Maimonides’ main concern is an exegetical one – the contradiction between the peshat and a metaphorically hidden, true meaning of the Bible – for Strauss it is entirely a legal one. Strauss is asking two questions that are actually not far from Hermann Cohen’s approach to the authority of the Torah, discussed above: Is there a commandment to speculate about religious truths – and: Is there rational authority for revelation? But in answering those questions completely differently from Cohen, Strauss reveals what he identified as the ultimate key for finding the correct relationship between belief and thinking, between revelation and speculation, which is to say, between religion and philosophy. Medieval Jewish philosophy, including that of Maimonides, Strauss claims, saw the validity of revelation first and foremost as a political issue. There is no commandment to philosophize about religion; revelation, for Strauss, is entirely a ‘postulate of political reason’. The ‘objective truth’ of revelation must be accepted in its irrationality not because of speculative results, but because of political and social necessities, where the absolute authority of the law is the core issue. The difference between the adept philosopher (or the prophet) and the uneducated masses, whom Maimonides refers to frequently, is not a bridgeable, empirical disparity, which will eventually be closed in Messianic times, as the Cohen school has read Maimonides – for Strauss it is insurmountable and must therefore be hidden under the claim of the invulnerable superiority of the law over philosophical conclusions. Such a position must necessarily lead to a theory of extreme esotericism concerning Maimonides on the part of Strauss. Given the incompatibility of revelation and philosophy, only esoterically can a rational approach to religion be found, an approach that will more or less end up as speculative atheism; or, in Maimonides’ case, at best in the acknowledgment of Aristotle’s unmovable first cause of the world.⁷⁹

Guttmann’s answer to this theory is clear: Maimonides had not only intended the harmonization of religion and philosophy, he in fact achieved such a synthesis with most of the teachings of the Guide. In the same way as Geiger and Graetz before him, Guttmann holds that in Judaism, philosophical thought about religion in the light of the Guide became “an inseparable part of the religious tradition itself.”⁸⁰ Philosophical speculation was seen in Judaism, at the latest after Maimonides’ arguments, as commanded by the Law itself, and the intellectual interpretation of religious contents was practiced by many legal authorities – in the same way that the Reform Movement had always claimed was the case in justification of its own halachic efforts. While Strauss had to deny Maimonides’ declared intention of harmonization between Bible and reason, Guttmann’s approach only needs to find an explanation for the apparent internal contradictions that the Guide contains concerning some matters of Jewish tradition. Here Guttmann also retreats to the position of the liberal interpretation, formulated by many thinkers from the Breslau School: those contradictions are not intentional but “innocent failures” to provide a consistent solution, given the limited philosophical tools that were available to Maimonides.⁸¹

For Guttmann, Maimonides never acknowledged the primacy of revelation over reason, and always attempted what Guttmann calls a ‘coordination’ of the two concepts in his philosophy. The difference between this approach and modern philosophy is that medieval thinking “retained so much elemental belief in revelation” that, even if the autonomy of reason is supposed to authenticate revelation, the conclusions of this process actually dictate the way reason is used from the start.⁸² For Strauss, however, the difference from modern philosophy is categorical: Enlightenment had introduced the belief that reason is entirely self-sufficient, thereby building up the insurmountable antagonism between reason and revelation. Here, every attempted synthesis (as by Mendelssohn) is only “a veiled capitulation” by true religion, every ‘internalization’ of religious principles (as by the Reformers) only “a concealed denial of the apparently restored foundations of faith.”⁸³ Judaism, for Strauss, can only have the character of pure and non-intellectualized belief in tradition, the alternative of which is atheism.⁸⁴ To deny this consequence, and to attempt to find a way of reconciliation of orthodox dogma and rational thought, amounts to philosophical dishonesty.

This now is the point where Guttmann voiced his strongest criticism of Strauss’s views. Although by the 1940s he had departed from many convictions of his teacher Cohen, Guttmann’s answer cannot be read but as a broad defense of what has been the firm position of liberal German Jewish theology throughout the nineteenth century – Guttmann’s intellectual home – and what found in Cohen its most eloquent representative. “If Orthodoxy is rooted only in faith”, Guttmann writes, “then it is a dogmatic claim to power that no other form of faith is possible next to it. It is a petitio principii to view every faith that is not bound by dogma as a mere ‘mediation’ [Vermittlung] between Orthodoxy and unbelief, and to stigmatize it, because of its mediating character, as dishonest.”⁸⁵ The intellectual comfort that a philosophical idea of God offered to religious thinkers from many different centuries is strictly rejected by Strauss; he denies the existence of God exactly because of the comfort that this idea offers, according to Guttmann.⁸⁶ Strauss however upholds revelation, according to Guttmann, only because he cannot believe in the self-sufficiency of reason. Moreover, claims Guttmann, Strauss’s pessimistic outlook on the world in general and on the intellectual abilities of humankind in particular dictates that faith can only arise from man’s feeling of impotence. But if this is true, the content of revelation becomes indeed irrelevant, as long as the legal character of revelation meets man’s need for authority.

This legal formalism cannot be the last word on modern religious philosophy, according to Guttmann. Both Maimonides and the liberal theological tradition of the nineteenth century had always emphasized not only the eternal value of the actual content of Biblical revelation, but to an even greater degree the ethical meaning of the purpose of divine legislation. Thus, for Guttmann, philosophical thinking, even in modernity, must surely include religion – seen here as an intellectual activity – since philosophy is supposed to cover all aspects of human reason. Gaining knowledge of God, in Maimonides’ sense, is a religious obligation for Guttmann, and inasmuch as philosophy must cover religious thought, religious thought must be applied to the world using the methods of philosophical speculation.⁸⁷