Shlomo ben Yehoshua (1753–1800), an Ashkenazic Jew better known as Solomon Maimon, has been of great interest to modern Jews and to the historians who study them. He has also played an important role in the history of modern philosophy as an early critic and commentator on Kantian philosophy. His famous Lebensgeschichte has been reprinted and translated into Hebrew and into English (although incompletely); his commentary on Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed has been reprinted a number of times, and his entire corpus is readily available in most university libraries. A quick search on RAMBI and in the Philosopher's Index will yield dozens of articles and a number of monographs in a number of modern scholarly languages. But much of this thicket of material consists of specialized studies that look at one aspect of Maimon's life and career: his autobiographical self-presentation, his Maimonidean commentary, his reading of Kant, his portrait of an early hasidic court, his role in the Berlin Haskalah (or perhaps lack thereof), and so on.

The best-known aspects of Maimon's career—his commentary on the Guide, his critique of Kantian philosophy, and his autobiography—are usually presented separately. Some of this is no doubt attributable to distinctive intended audiences and different reception histories. The Hebrew commentary on the Guide, Givat ha-Moreh, was certainly aimed at a Jewish audience and had most of its reception among the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Maimon's work on Kant was presented in German to a largely non-Jewish philosophical audience. His German autobiography reached many audiences. While aimed at non-Jews, it was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish and became a blueprint for later maskilic autobiographies. A fourth major aspect of Maimon's work, his interest in Kabbalah, while noticed by some scholars and treated in a recent monograph by Meir Buzaglo, has by and large not been integrated into the study of Maimon.Footnote ¹ By tackling all these aspects of Maimon's career and by showing the ways in which they relate to each other, Abraham Socher's work makes an especially valuable contribution.

Most crucially, Socher argues that Maimon's commentary on the Guide represents a revival of the radically rationalist interpretation of Maimonides. Socher suggests that “Maimon's commentary promised to help remotivate not merely a canonical work of Jewish philosophy but also the world and vocabulary of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse” (81). Indeed, according to Socher, Maimon's commentary effectively represented a proposal that “Haskalah” be understood as an adoption of the radical interpretation of Maimonides.

Socher's presentation of Maimon as a reviver of a medieval tradition offers an important contribution to an ongoing discussion in the historiography of the Jewish Enlightenment movement that seeks to historicize the Haskalah's vision of itself as novel. Like his mentor, the late Amos Funkenstein, Socher emphasizes the importance of medieval Jewish philosophy in the Haskalah and asks how to interpret the presence of medieval philosophical discourse in a modernist movement. But, in contrast to the portrait offered by other scholars, Socher points to Maimon as an example of the ways in which a deep engagement with medieval Jewish thought can lead not to conservatism or moderation but to radicalism.

But how much does the presence of some “radical voices” (including such an interesting one as Maimon's) require us to change the overall portrait? Socher is undoubtedly correct that the moderates and the radicals among the Jewish thinkers of the eighteenth century “shared a set of distinctive texts, arguments, and concepts—in short, a world of discourse—at the center of which stood Maimonides' medieval Aristotelianism” (57). But the Maimonideanism transmitted in the early modern period seems to have been largely of the moderate variety that assumed a synthesis of Torah and philosophy. In this sense, Maimon's revival of a radical Maimonides constitutes a countercultural move. Yes, Maimon serves as a reminder that not all maskilim were Halevian fideists—a reminder that many readers (including this one) should heed. Yet, as Socher acknowledges, Maimon was “idiosyncratic” and not typical, despite the success of the Givat ha-Moreh in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, Socher has deepened our understanding of the Haskalah and its relation to previous intellectual traditions by showing that even the most radical figure in the Haskalah was intimately connected to the “world of discourse” of medieval Jewish philosophy.

In fact, Socher's treatment of Maimon's life (or at least his self-presentation of it) offers an argument for why Haskalah philosophy is more closely tied to medieval philosophical traditions than other Enlightenment movements. According to Socher, the language of medieval Jewish philosophy was the lingua franca of intellectual debate in eighteenth-century Eastern European Judaism—the world from which Maimon emerged. By focusing on some of Maimon's writings from the period of his earlier career as a yeshiva student and then (briefly) a hasid before his famous arrival at the gates of Berlin, Socher offers us the suggestion that other eighteenth-century Jewish intellectual movements were also informed by the questions and even the vocabulary of the medieval philosophers. Socher's intriguing proposal is that we should understand divisions between Hasidism, mitnagdism, and Haskalah (in part) as an argument over a medieval question of how best to attain perfection (shlemut) and happiness (‘osher).

While Maimon may have been recognized as an important critic of Kant in his own day, in fact, his German writings were largely ignored until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was at this point that Maimon was revived as one of the “founders of German idealism” (107). While Socher offers a brief reception history of Maimon the Kantian interpreter, his major interest here lies in linking Maimon's Kantian critique to his “Jewish” writings as a kind of “German Idealism in a Maimonidean Key,” the title of the third chapter of the book. Not only does Maimon write commentaries on Kant in the style of traditional Jewish commentaries, but also, according to Socher, he offers a version of idealism that is best read in light of medieval theories of the active intellect. While some may quibble over aspects of Socher's reconstruction, the question posed here is an important one: How did medieval Aristotelian discourse, refracted through medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers, penetrate the (Jewish) debate over Kantianism? Through Socher's reading of Maimon, we have a fresh perspective on how modern Jewish philosophy remains intricately linked to premodern discussions.

Reading Maimon's Lebensgeschichte as a self-conscious attempt to shape philosophical opinion, Socher successfully navigates the thorny interpretive and methodological issues involved in using autobiographies as historical sources and moves us beyond tired debates over whether this or that scene is “accurate.” Among other contributions, Socher is able to show us why Maimon's presentation of himself as a rube needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Socher's major interest in the autobiography is the way in which it constitutes a master text for interpreting not only Maimon's life but his philosophical accomplishments as well. A close reading of the attitude toward books in the autobiography allows Socher to demonstrate the ways in which Maimon's move toward Enlightenment constitutes only a partial break with the traditional textuality of early modern Ashkenazic culture. And Socher argues for reading the last chapter of the autobiography—usually excluded from modern editions—as a carefully crafted conclusion that links Maimon's pursuit of modern metaphysical philosophy to the language and conceptual world of medieval philosophy and Kabbalah. That chapter consists of an allegorical story of a masked ball at which men seek to dance with the beautiful masked mistress of the house, “Madame M[etaphysics].” Here, Socher convincingly argues, Maimon rewrites the allegory of the king in his palace at the end of the Guide of the Perplexed and the story of the beautiful maiden in the Zohar to present an allegory of the history of philosophy: While previous philosophers tried various dances to win the favors of the masked lady, and some ignored the lady and went after her chambermaid (Physics), Maimon will not make such mistakes.

While a fuller reception history of Maimon's works could be written, Socher's last chapter serves us well as a preliminary report taking us through Maimon's “Literary Afterlife” from the German republic of letters to the Eastern European Haskalah and into twentieth-century scholarship. Socher also surveys some of Maimon's appearances in novels, from Daniel Deronda to The Chosen—where undoubtedly more learned about him than from the doctoral dissertation on Maimon completed by Chaim Potok a few years earlier.

Socher offers his monograph as a contribution to intellectual and cultural history and not as a chapter in the history of philosophy. That there really is a difference between the two disciplines can be seen by comparing this book to works that offer reconstructions of Maimon's thought as a coherent system of philosophyFootnote ² or that focus on his contribution to the “Copernican revolution in philosophy” brought about by Kant.Footnote ³ Some recent work does treat the historical context of Maimon's philosophical work and points out the importance of his knowledge of premodern Jewish philosophy.Footnote ⁴ But these works mainly suggest heuristic devices toward better understanding of Maimon's thought. For Socher, a better understanding of Maimon's thought is a heuristic for broader understanding of the modern Jewish experience.