Maimon’s Autobiography

Contemporary readers of Maimon’s autobiography included Goethe, Hegel, and Schiller, but it made the greatest impression on nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish readers who had suffered a similar crisis of faith and were struggling to modernize Jewish culture or find their feet outside of it. Thus, Mordechai Aaron Ginzburg (1795–1846) and Moshe Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910) both saw Maimon as their great predecessor, the archetype of the modern Jewish heretic, or apikores, who had described the pathologies of traditional Jewish society and made a successful—or almost successful—break with it. Both of them patterned their own influential Hebrew autobiographies after Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, as did the Yiddish philologist Alexander Harkavi (1863–1939) a generation later.

As its many readers over the last two centuries will attest, Maimon’s autobiography really is, as Eliot (and Deronda) had said, “wonderful”—by turns a brilliantly vivid, informative, searing and witty, even hilarious account of his life as a Talmudic prodigy from—as he put it in a letter to Immanuel Kant—“the woods of Lithuania,” a literally preadolescent husband, an aspiring kabbalist-magician, an earnest young philosopher, a bedraggled beggar, an urbane Berlin pleasure-seeker, and, eventually, the philosopher of whom Kant would write “none of my critics understood me and the main questions so well as Herr Maimon.” In fact, some of the incidents and encounters Maimon narrates are so entertaining and incredible that one is tempted to read his book as a picaresque novel, a Jewish Tom Jones. Yet in virtually every instance in which it is possible to verify an incident, source a quotation, or identify a figure to whom he has coyly referred only with an initial—the drunken Polish Prince R., the charismatic “New Hasidic” preacher B. of M., the supercilious Jewish intellectual H., the censorious Chief Rabbi of Hamburg, as well as far less famous individuals—Maimon’s account checks out. In our notes to Paul Reitter’s translation, we have tried to document this without being too obtrusive, or needlessly cluttering the text.

The only previous English translation of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte appeared in 1888. The translator, a professor of Moral Psychology at McGill University named J. Clark Murray, elided a few difficult passages in the first volume of the Autobiography and cut the preface and ten chapters on the philosophy of Moses Maimonides with which Maimon had begun the second volume. He also cut the comical, puzzling allegory with which Maimon concluded the second part of his autobiography. These chapters were, Murray wrote in his preface, not “biographical” and “excite just the faintest suspicion of ‘padding’”¹⁴ Although Murray’s translation has been reprinted, pared down, excerpted, and anthologized for well over a century now, Reitter’s translation is, astonishingly, the first complete, accurate English translation of Maimon’s autobiography into English.15 In fact, both of the (complete) twentieth-century German editions, as well as the excellent Hebrew translation, consign Maimon’s philosophical, theoretical, and historical chapters to appendices.¹⁶ Consequently, although Maimon’s autobiography has been widely read and cited as one of the most important and interesting first-person accounts of both Jewish life and European thought at the cusp of modernity, few have read it as Maimon intended—despite the fact that it is his deeply self-conscious account of his own life and thought.¹⁷

Of course it is easy to understand why nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century readers would find it odd for a writer to place even a philosophically incisive ten-chapter outline of Moses Maimonides’ medieval classic The Guide of the Perplexed at the center of his autobiography, and understandable that they would prefer Maimon’s rollicking, bumptious, and bitterly sardonic accounts of his escape from his traditional upbringing (bizarre local superstitions, debauched noblemen, corrupt clerics, secret societies, and so on) to philosophical exposition. But here, as elsewhere, it is the odd detail of a text that is the key to its interpretation. After all, Maimon did take the great twelfth-century philosopher’s name as his own in an extraordinary act of literary homage (and chutzpa). Moreover, it turns out that his understanding of Maimonides’ Guide is both philosophically astute and a key to understanding his book, both as an autobiography and as a critique of contemporary Judaism.

This passage is couched in the intellectual language of the Enlightenment, with its allusion to Newton’s third law of motion, insistence upon thinking for oneself as the key to moral development, and disdain for melancholic and ecstatic (schwärmerisch) religion. But even here one can see both hints of Maimon’s unique philosophical position and clues to the deep narrative structure that underlies the picaresque adventures he recounts. These can both be summed up in his idea of perfection (Vollkommenheit), which is not simply a vague ideal but a precise medieval Aristotelian doctrine he took from Maimonides, wrestled with all of his life, and employed in his influential attempt to revise Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

This doctrine is, for present purposes, that true knowledge of an object consists in contemplation of its essence or form. In such an act of cognition, not only is the knowledge identical to its object (since the object of knowledge is abstracted from its matter), but insofar as the knower is identified with this thought he (or she) too is a part of this identity. In this ideal sense, only God, or, more precisely, what Aristotelians call the Active Intellect, can be said to truly know something. In the act of knowing, says Maimonides in a passage Maimon will patiently explicate several times over his career, the “representing subject, His representations, and the objects He represents,” are identical.19 Humans can only occasionally and fitfully approximate such epistemic perfection, but when they do and grasp (or are grasped by) a universal truth, they take part in the divine thought and receive at least a taste of immortality. This is the sort of perfection that Maimon says is “the precondition for true blessedness,” a term that he takes from another great heretic who was deeply influenced by Maimonides’ Guide on these matters, Benedict de Spinoza.²⁰

Thus when Maimon says that he brought his earliest Hebrew philosophical manuscript in which he worked through this and related philosophical and kabbalistic doctrines, “as a monument of the human mind’s striving for perfection, regardless of all the obstacles placed in its way,” he means it both autobiographically and philosophically.²¹ Much of his earliest thinking was on the plausibility and ramifications of this ideal of perfection, and his autobiographical story is not just a string of adventures in which he bests establishment figures, fools, and frauds of all sorts, but the story of his attempt to attain this ideal.—Though, as we shall see, he will eventually conclude that it is a kind of regulative ideal, or necessary fiction, rather than a real human possibility.²²

This is, in fact, both a deliberately buffoonish riff and a principled theoretical rejection of the worldly philosophy of fellow Enlightenment thinkers (and their fashionable epigones) who are obsessed with the mastery of merely empirical phenomena (vacuum chambers, electrical currents) in favor of a classical, or, more precisely, Maimonidean contemplative ideal. The combination of idiomatic good humor, philosophical high seriousness, and literary allusiveness with which Maimon expresses himself is uniquely his own and, in Reitter’s felicitous translation, occasionally reminds the modern English reader of no one as much as Saul Bellow, another bumptious Jewish outsider.

In the final sentence quoted above, Maimon writes that “I left my people, my homeland, and my family to seek the truth.” As he expected at least a certain kind of reader to recognize, this translates God’s call to Abraham—“Go forth from your land, and your birth place and the house of your father” (Genesis 12:1)—from the second person to the first, and so from a command to an act of human autonomy. The allusion, however, is not merely biblical, for Maimon is also drawing upon Maimonides’ famous account of Abraham as the first philosopher, whose alienation from his native pagan culture was a prerequisite for true philosophy.²⁴ The self-conscious irony, even blasphemy, of the allusion is that Maimon’s story was also one of movement in the other direction, away from the faith of Abraham, although it was never really that simple, and Maimon was profoundly aware of this.

In Karl Philipp Moritz’s brief editorial introduction to Maimon’s autobiography, he wrote that Maimon’s story showed how “even in the most oppressive conditions, the capacity to think can develop into a mature human intellect.” What gave the book added value, he wrote was

As we shall see, Maimon’s sense of what constituted true educational formation and enlightenment (Bildung und Aufklärung) of the Jewish people or anyone else was substantially different than those of Moritz or Maimon’s erstwhile colleagues and benefactors in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala). For Maimon, genuine enlightenment consisted entirely in the study of mathematics, the sciences, and serious philosophy. However, the interpretation of Maimon’s autobiography as an exemplary tale bearing a cultural moral Maimon himself would not have endorsed was repeated with increasing crudity over the years. Thus, Heinrich Graetz, the leading nineteenth-century historian of Judaism wrote that Maimon was a “striking example” of the Jewish capacity for culture:

He rose from the thickest cloud of Polish ignorance to pure philosophical knowledge, attaining this height by his unaided efforts, but owing to his skepticism, he fell prey to shocking errors.²⁶

This is, of course, nonsense, both as literary interpretation and as intellectual history. Maimon was the son of a recognized rabbinic scholar and himself a Talmudic prodigy in a time and place in which such learning held both cultural prestige and tangible rewards. Moreover, when, as an adolescent and young adult, he rejected the Talmudism to which he was heir (and which he regarded as, among other things, a noble form of religious “Stoicism”), Maimon turned to alternative medieval conceptions of Judaism in Kabbalah and Maimonidean rationalism, which were no less rigorous and scholastically complex. Even the Hasidic court of the Maggid of Mezritsh, which he visited as a young man around 1770, was, enthusiastic practices notwithstanding, made up of a cadre of spiritual elitists devoted to a complex and highly original theosophical tradition. Moreover, the Maimonidean philosophy that was to remain Maimon’s polestar throughout his peripatetic life afforded a vision of pure rationalism that was only available to traditional readers of medieval rabbinic texts such as himself. Indeed, as Maimon well knew, even his radicalization of Maimonides had precedents among the medieval Jewish interpreters of his Guide of the Perplexed such as the fourteenth-century Averroist Moses Narboni, whom he quotes in his autobiography and whose commentary was published alongside Maimon’s own commentary, Giv’at ha-Moreh (1791), which was the first substantial work of modern philosophy written and published in Hebrew.

The behavior of a man when he is alone with his family is very different from his behavior when he is in the presence of a great king. Whoever strives for perfection should know that the greatest of all kings, namely, the reason that God has given him, resides within him.²⁸

Maimonides would seem to be employing the standard rabbinic admonition that one should regard his stand before God with as much, or more, awe as one would before a flesh-and-blood king.²⁹ But, as Maimon noticed, his master had actually given the tradition a radical twist: “the greatest of all kings” here, is not God, but rather, “the reason that God has given man.”³⁰

Maimon’s loyalty to this monarch is almost boundless. Thus, he accepts a strong version of the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” (that is, the claim that everything must be rationally explicable, or alternatively, that there are no brute facts).³¹ In the middle of his explication of Maimonides’ Guide, he writes

The world may be, in terms of time, finite or infinite; still, everything in it (as consequences of the highest wisdom) must be explainable through the principle of sufficient reason. How far we can actually get in achieving this is beside the point. Those things that Maimonides, working with the astronomy of his day, regarded as inexplicable, new discoveries (particularly Newton’s system) equip us to explain quite well. The highest order in the arrangement of the world’s structure is for us a necessary idea of reason, which, through the use of reason with regard to objects of experience, we can approach but never reach.³²

Maimon’s chapter on this “secret society,” which he described along the lines of the Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasons as the attempt to create a new way of life based upon a genuine “system of perfection,” remains one of the most historically valuable and apparently accurate first-person accounts of the early Hasidic movement.³⁴ It was also a provocation directed at his contemporary enlightened Jewish readers, who, to say the least, would not have regarded the new movement as having a philosophical basis. Indeed, although Maimon’s account is highly critical, at one point he calls these enthusiastic Hasidim “enlighteners” (Aufklärer) with generally “accurate ideas of religion and morality.”

This pantheistic, or acosmic, idea was illustrated for Maimon by the enthusiastic young initiate who presented a highly original interpretation of a biblical verse describing the prophet Elisha at the time of prophetic inspiration:

He continued, full of spiritual excitement: “As the player (musician) played, the spirit of God came to him” (2 Kings 3:15). They [the Hasidic teachers] interpret this verse as follows: As long as a person tries to act as an independent being, he will not be able to receive the Holy Spirit. He must act as merely an instrument. Thus the meaning of the passage is: When the player ןגנמה—the servant of God—becomes identical to the instrument ןגנ ילכ, the Holy Spirit will come to him.³⁶

As Maimon explains in a footnote, this is a clever bit of philosophical exegesis because both the act of playing and the musical instrument played upon are designated by the same word, and “the Hebrew character that is used as a prefix can be taken to mean both with and the same.” According to this Hasidic homily, one must annul the boundaries of the self as an independent being in order to make oneself an organ of God. Thus, the player, the played, and the act of playing are one and the same, just as the knower, the known, and the knowing, are according to Maimonides.

Nonetheless, after a few weeks in the Maggid’s court, Maimon became disillusioned by what he took to be the lack of intellectual seriousness on the part of the Hasidic followers and their political manipulation by the Maggid and his disciples. Yet the idea of a monist, or acosmist, understanding of Maimonides’ dictum, in which knower and the known can be identified because they are ultimately aspects of the same single substance, would stay with him.

Seven chapters earlier, in his account of Maimonides’ discussion of the triple identity of the knowing subject, the object of knowledge, and the act of knowing, Maimon remarks that the “intelligent reader” will be able “to see where all this is going.”³⁸ What he seems to mean by this is that Maimonidian philosophy taken to its logical conclusion and the kabbalistic core of Hasidism, when purified of its obscure symbolism, both point toward the radical monism of Spinoza.³⁹

This idea also seems to lie beneath the surface of Maimon’s ambivalent elegy for his “great friend” Moses Mendelssohn, the leading figure of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala). It is clear that Maimon was deeply grateful to Mendelssohn for his intellectual patronage and gentle, considerate manner. Unlike Herz and others, Mendelssohn regarded Maimon as an intellectual peer, not an amusing cultural novelty, a kind of “dog that has learned to say a few words” and is suddenly found to be philosophizing in what Maimon elsewhere describes as “a grammatically deficient mix of Hebrew, Yiddish-German, Polish, and Russian.”⁴⁰

From his close reading of Maimonides, his medieval interpreters, Spinoza, and his own personal experience, Maimon was always very sensitive to the connections between politics and theology. Indeed, he described the first chapter of his Maimonidean synopsis as “Theologica Politica,” perhaps the first description of political theology as an intellectual field or literary genre.

Later, when Maimon’s erstwhile patrons, men like Markus Herz who represented the commonly accepted versions of Jewish Bildung and Aufklärung, complained of Maimon’s vocational aimlessness (though he had studied pharmacology and medicine for three years, he had no interest in becoming a pharmacist or physician), his willingness to spread “harmful ideas and philosophical systems,” and his dissolute life (he coyly admits in this chapter to having frequented brothels), Mendelssohn rebuked him. But, at least in retrospect, Maimon would have none of it.

I countered the first reproach by reminding him that from the very beginning, I had explained to my friends that my special upbringing had left me uninterested in practical undertakings and made me prefer the quiet, contemplative life. . . . “As to the second point,” I continued, “my opinions and philosophical systems are either true or false. . . . Yet it isn’t the harmful character of my views that has led these men to turn against me; rather, it’s their inability to understand my ideas and their desire to avoid the humiliation of admitting this. As to the third reproach, I say to you, Herr Mendelssohn, nothing less than: We are all Epicureans.⁴²

The pastor finds Maimon to be “too much of a philosopher to be a Christian,” which is, perhaps, more precisely true than he knows (though, of course, it is Maimon who wrote this dialogue). For, his plangent, chutzpadik self-dramatization notwithstanding, Maimon was drawing upon precise doctrines in Maimonides’ philosophy of religion, which he had summarized only a few chapters earlier: Religious law is instrumental and its ultimate goal is the attainment of intellectual perfection, which is the true understanding of the universe and consequent worship of its creator resulting in “eternal happiness.” However, such an achievement is only possible for a healthy individual living in a well-ordered society. Religious beliefs are thus valid to the extent that they approximate metaphysical truths or are conducive to the governance of that society.⁴⁵ As Maimon writes near the outset of his commentary to Maimonides’ Guide, Giva’t ha-Moreh, which he had published only two years earlier, “know that the true good is the acquisition of perfection [kinyan hashelemut] . . . and whatever other thing is a means to this acquisition of perfection is good in relation to it.”⁴⁶ Thus, if one needs to be a Christian to flourish intellectually in Germany in the 1780s, then Christianity is—on this radical reading of Maimonides—better than Judaism in “practical application,” as long as one does not have to commit to articles of faith that violate reason.47

It should be noted that although Maimon was, here as elsewhere, self-consciously making an argument that he did not expect his interlocutor to fully understand, his offer to convert did have a specific sociohistorical context. Rumors that Mendelssohn himself might accept some such Arian or Socinian version of enlightened Christianity had swirled about Enlightenment circles for almost two decades. Nor was Maimon’s offer to convert to a demystified Christianity the last of its kind in eighteenth-century Germany. In 1799, David Friedlander (a disciple of Mendelssohn and a patron of Maimon) famously made a somewhat similar offer to the liberal Protestant pastor Wilhelm Abraham Teller on behalf of some of the leading Jewish families of Berlin, though their aspirations were decidedly more social than metaphysical.⁴⁸

Maimon presumably had the same radical argument in mind when he was later summoned by Raphael Kohen, the Chief Rabbi of Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck, who confronted him about having abandoned his wife and family, as well as traditional Judaism:

He received me with a great show of respect. When I told him about my childhood and family in Poland, he began to wail out lamentations, wringing his hands: “Oh! Can it be that you are the famous Rabbi Joshua’s son? I know your father very well. He is a pious and learned man. And I know you, too. I tested you on a number of occasions when you were a boy, and I found you so full of promise. Oh! How is it possible that you have changed so much!” (Here he pointed to my shaved beard). I replied that I felt honored to know him—I remembered his examinations well. My actions, I maintained, had no more run counter to religion (properly understood) than to reason.49

Later still in Breslau, when his wife and now-adolescent son David arrive to force him to return home or finally grant her a divorce, Maimon describes teaching his son some passages from the Guide of the Perplexed, and trying “to show him that enlightening the mind and reforming religious customs would bring much more good than bad.”

Maimon also attempts to use his wife’s demand to raise several hundred thalers from his patrons, ostensibly in order to return to Poland in a position to be financially independent from his traditionalist relatives and their community. Early in the Autobiography, Maimon had written that “the majority of Polish Jews are scholars, that is to say devotees of idleness and contemplation (every Polish-Jewish boy except the most obviously incapable is raised to become a rabbi).”⁵⁰ Of course, this wasn’t really true—or rather it was only true of the elite rabbinic class into which Maimon had been born—but, despite the derisiveness of his characterization, it is clear that Maimon never moved beyond the idea that someone should support him, so that he could remain in “idle contemplation,” of one kind or another.⁵¹ Thus, in an earlier chapter, he reports that “the happiest and most successful period in my life” was when, after already having abandoned his family, he was supported by the Rabbi and Jewish community of Posen as a distinguished scholar. If he really was considering return to Poland with his wife and son, perhaps this was what Maimon had in mind, though it is unlikely that a few hundred thalers would have sufficed. In the end, he raised enough to give his wife a modest settlement and granted her the divorce she had been awaiting for more than a decade. Here, perhaps, is the place to note that in this account, and elsewhere in the Autobiography, there is a persistent note of misogyny.⁵²

Maimon understood his life to be a search for intellectual perfection, and yet he told it as a comical story of social frustration. In at least some of his philosophical writings, he similarly described the act of cognition as the impossible attempt of the human, finite intellect to grasp its object in the way that the divine, infinite intellect does. Maimon dedicates the final chapter of the Autobiography, which like the chapters on Maimonides, has never been previously translated into English to “those readers who were bored by my earnest account of the More Newochim.” It is a bizarre allegory called “The Merry Masquerade Ball,” which brings together Maimon’s deep engagement with Maimonidean philosophy, Kabbala, the European tradition of the Goddess Natura, Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” and his own ambivalence about ever truly fitting into enlightened society. Maimon’s fable begins as follows:

One day, in . . . , a ball was held to honor a famous woman. Although no one had actually seen this woman, she was reputed to be of exceptional beauty, but also extremely difficult. She was like a will-o’-the-wisp; the more one thinks oneself to be nearing her favor, the farther away from it one finds oneself. And as soon as one believes one possesses it fully, it vanishes completely. Her name, which should uttered in a respectful tone, is Madame M . . . . or, to say the same thing another way, the chambermaid Ph’s lady. Because she is, as mentioned, invisible, we know of her beauty only by what comes from the mouth of her gossipy maid, and we can call her by no other name.

All the cavaliers gathered at the ball jostled for the honor of dancing with this lovely woman. Her taste wasn’t known, so in an attempt to please her, all kinds of dances were tried out.

At the end of the exposition of The Guide of the Perplexed with which he prefaced the second part of his autobiography, Maimon had quickly unpacked the famous parable of the king and his palace, which Maimonides had written as “a kind of conclusion,” to the work as a whole, as an account of human perfection. A successful dance with Madame Metaphysics would, apparently, be something like speaking face-to-face with Maimonides’ king. Maimon also almost certainly had in mind the famous parable from the classic work of medieval Kabbala, the Zohar, which tells of “a beautiful young maiden upon whom no one has set eyes,” and her secret lover who must penetrate her veils and riddles until he is “a perfect human being, a true husband of Torah, for to him she has uncovered all her mysteries, holding back nothing.”⁵⁵ Finally, in his earlier chapter on the “secrets of religion,” Maimon had compared the famous inscription on the pyramid of Sais, “I am all that is, was, and will be; no mortal has lifted my veil,” with the biblical God’s self-description to Moses, both of which, to Maimon, meant “nothing other than that there was a single ‘immediate cause of all Being’.”⁵⁶ Only a few years earlier, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant had written that perhaps this ancient inscription was the most sublime thing ever said.⁵⁷

After some characteristic Maimonian slapstick—Monsieur Ph. (Pythagoras) insisted that everyone “dance with ruler, triangle, and compass in hand”; Monsieur Pl. (Plato) insisted that “it was impossible to win the honored lady’s favor if one didn’t keep one’s eyes on certain images floating around the hall (which no one other than him could see)”; Monsieur L. (Luecippus, a materialist) “gave up on the storied lady” and danced with the chambermaid, and so on—Kant arrives on the scene.

An elaborate costume ball given at an intellectual salon was just the kind of social expression of enlightened society in which Maimon was incapable of participating gracefully. He was chronically unkempt, often drunk, and continued to speak German with a pronounced Yiddish accent while gesturing like a Lithuanian Talmudist (his friend Sabbattia Wolff fondly recalled him swaying and chanting over a mathematical treatise by Euler).⁵⁹ Even his German philosophical prose was constantly veering into a kind of rabbinic commentary or even metacommentary. So there is, perhaps, a poignancy on the surface of this allegory that reinforces its moral: the modern aspiration for metaphysical truth, to dance with Madame Metaphysics, is no less naïve than the desire to conjoin with the Aristotelian active intellect or cleave to the Shekhina of the Kabbalists. However, the final lines of Maimon’s autobiography decline even that much narrative closure: “I wonder how this strange masquerade ball ended.”

In 1795, Maimon found his last patron, a free-thinking count named Adolf von Kalckreuth (1766–1830), who invited him to his Berlin residence, and, later, to move to his estate in Lower Silesia, where Maimon stayed for the rest of his life. This was probably the longest period in his adult life in which he stayed in one place, and accounts differ as to how he spent the time. Some depict him as living in a drunken stupor, his main companion a dog who Maimon claimed was, like him, a philosophical eclectic and to whom he promised to leave his library.⁶⁰ On the other hand, he published his last major work, Kritische Untersuchungen über den menschlichen Geist (1797) in these years, and kept up an active philosophical correspondence until the end of his life.

His body was delivered to the nearby Jewish community of Glogau. He was, according to a local tradition, buried as a heretic. Children are said to have been encouraged to throw stones at the coffin while shouting “apiqores!” When Count Kalckreuth inquired about the funeral, he was, by one account, told that Maimon had been buried in a special area marked traditionally for philosophers, an ironic joke Maimon himself might have appreciated.⁶² Count Kalckreuth was not satisfied and apparently had a memorial stone erected in his honor.⁶³ Maimon’s friends, Lazarus Ben-David and Sabbattia Wolff, wrote memoirs, and his philosophical work is of permanent value, but, for many, Maimon has been remembered largely because of his own “wonderful piece of autobiography.”⁶⁴

Finally, a few words are in order about how we have edited and annotated Maimon’s text. As noted above, previous editions and translations of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte treated it with a fair measure of paternalism, even disrespect, deleting parts of the text and appendicizing others. The present English text is a translation of the original edition as published in 1792 and 1793 (the original page numbers are inserted in square brackets in the body of the text).

¹ George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Hertfordshire, 1996), p. 320, and Israel Abrahams, “George Eliot and Solomon Maimon,” in Abrahams, The Book of Delights and Other Papers (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1911), pp. 242–46.

² Alan Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press), p. 10, and see Marcus Mosely, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), especially pp. 56–65.

³ For Berdichevksy’s appreciation for Maimon, see Kitvei Micha Yosef bin Gurion: Ma’amrim (Tel-Aviv, 1960), pp. 201–15.

⁴ Conversely, the great twentieth-century rabbinic thinkers, Rabbi Yosef Rosen (the Rogatchover Gaon) and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik both had their first serious exposure to modern philosophy in Maimon’s commentary to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, Giv’at ha-Moreh (1791). Maimon’s Giv’at ha-Moreh was, in fact, required reading in Soloveitchik’s 1950–51 lectures on Maimonidian philosophy at Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Maimonides: Between Philosophy and Halakha (New York: Ktav, 2016), edited with an introduction by Lawrence J. Kaplan, pp. 40–41, 65–68.

⁵ Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Conscious Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (1944), pp. 98–117.

⁶ The Jewish loss-of-faith, or “off the derech,” memoir has had an extraordinary resurgence in the last few years. Among the most accomplished of these works are Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: My Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Shulem Deen’s All Who Go Do Not Return (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015).

⁷ Herman Potok, The Rationalism and Skepticism of Salomon Maimon. University of Pennsylvania, PhD thesis, 1965. His work was supervised by the distinguished Hebrew University philosophers Hugo Bermann and Nathan Rotenstreich.

⁸ This litany is meant to be suggestive of how important Maimon’s autobiography was for modern Jewish literature and thought, not exhaustive. A full account of the book’s reception history remains a desideratum. For a brief suggestive discussion, see Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), ch. 5.

⁹ The question of the year of Maimon’s birth has been the subject of some dispute. We follow Sabbattia Wolff’s early memoir, Maimoniana oder Rhapsodien zur Characteristik Salomon Maimons (Berlin, 1813), p. 10. C.f. the discussion of P. Lahover in his introduction to the Hebrew translation of Y. L. Baruch, Hayyei Shelomo Maimon (Tel-Aviv, 1941), p. 9 n1.

¹⁰ An undated twentieth-century brochure published by the Gymnasium contains the text of two educational certificates for Maimon, the first of which is dated November 1783, and describes Maimon as “a young man of the Jewish nation, named Solomon from Lithuania.” The second, dated February 1785, refers to him as “Salomon Maimon, born in Lithuania,” cited in Samuel Hugo Bergman, The Philosophy of Salomon Maimon, trans. Noah Jacobs (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 2 n2.

¹¹ Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte. Von ihm selbst geschrieben und herausgegeben von K. P. Moritz. In zwei Theilen. (Berlin: bei Friedrich Vieweg dem ältern, 1792–93).

¹² “Fragmente aus Ben Josua’s Lebensgeschichte. Herausgegeben von K. P. Moritz,” Gnothi sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte, Bd. 9/1 (1792), pp. 24–69.

¹³ The quote is taken from Maimon’s heading for bk. 1, ch. 13, below p. 49.

¹⁴ J. Clark Murray, “Translator’s Preface,” to Solomon Maimon, Autobiography (London, 1888), p. xxxvi.

¹⁵ Murray’s translation of the Autobiography was further truncated by the distinguished classicist Moses Hadas for the publisher Schocken in 1947, reprinted in paperback in 1967. (Hadas was, incidentally, described by his student Norman Podhoretz as a “lapsed rabbi” in his autobiography, which was probably indebted to Maimon in its depiction of his journey from parochial Brooklyn to cosmopolitan Manhattan, see Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 44.) Michael Shapiro republished and introduced a full version of the Murray translation for Illinois University Press in 2001, and the standard sourcebook for English-language courses in modern Jewish history, Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), reproduces excerpts from Murray’s translation, as does Lucy Davidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, reprint ed., 1996).

¹⁶ Jakob Fromer, ed., Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (Munich, 1911); Zwi Batscha, ed., Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1984), and see P. Lahover, ed., Hayyei Shelomo Maimon, trans. Y. L. Baruch (Tel-Aviv, 1941).

¹⁷ For Paul Reitter’s reflections on the challenges of translating Maimon, see, in addition to the Translator’s Note above, pp. xi–xii his “The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and the Task of the Retranslator,” in his Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

¹⁸ See below introduction to bk. 2, pp. 127–28.

¹⁹ See below, bk. 2, ch. 4, pp. 153–54 explicating the famous “knower, knowing, and the known” passage in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, 1:68. Cf. Maimon, Giva’t ha-Moreh, ch. 68, and Hesheq Shelomo, pp. 125–26.

²⁰ We are aware that we are compressing a universe of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology into a teacup-sized paragraph for present expository purposes. This tradition begins with Aristotle’s famously cryptic passage in De Anima 3:5 about cognitive activity (and passivity). For a classic discussion of its reception in medieval philosophy and Maimonides in particular, see Shlomo Pines, “Translator’s Introduction,” to his translation of the Guide of the Perplexed (Chicago, 1963).

²¹ Although it was lost after the dissolution of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums by the Nazis, Maimon’s manuscript, which he gave the biblical title Hesheq Shelomo (The Desire of Solomon), resurfaced in 1984 when it was revealed that the Hochschule rabbinics professor Alexander Guttman had smuggled a valuable cache of rare books and manuscripts with him to America in 1939 and was attempting to sell them in a Sotheby’s auction. On the subsequent controversy over the disposition of the manuscripts, see H. C. Zafren, “From Hochschule to Judaica Conservancy Foundation: The Guttman Affair,” Jewish Book Annual 47 (1989), pp. 6–26. Hesheq Shelomo is now held in the manuscript collection of the National Library of Israel, MS 8°6426.

²² On the ideal of perfection in Maimon, see the editor’s introduction to Gideon Freudenthal, ed., Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), p. 15. For an interpretation that makes it central, see Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), which this introduction draws upon and revises.

²³ See below preface to bk. 2, p. 123.

²⁴ See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:29, especially pp. 516–17, and cf. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Idolatry 1:2.

²⁵ Moritz, editor’s preface, p. xxxvii.

²⁶ Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956), trans. Bella Löwy and Philipp Bloch, vol. 5, p. 407.

²⁷ Guide 3:52| Pines 2:629.

²⁸ Maimon, Autobiography, 2:10, p. 190.

²⁹ See, for example, Mishnah, Avot 3:1.

³⁰ In the Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza employs similar imagery when speaking of “the majesty of reason” (ch. 15| Geb. 3/188).

³¹ On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, see Melamed, Yitzhak Y. and Martin Lin, “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/sufficient-reason/.

³² P. 170. Italics added.

³³ For an account that shows how the pattern of Maimon’s early life persisted into the nineteenth century, see Imannuel Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study among Lomdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century,” in David Kraemer, ed., The Jewish Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 153–78.

³⁴ Maimon’s account remains a key primary text in the study of early Hasidism. See, for instance, David Assaf, “The Teachings of Dov Ber of Mezrich in Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography,” Zion 71 [Hebrew], Ariel Mayse, “Beyond the Letters: The Question of Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch,” (Harvard Dissertation, 2015), and, most recently, Melamed, “Spinozism, Acosmism, Hasidism: A Closed Circle,” in Amit Kravitz and Jörg Noller, eds., The Concept of Judaism in German Idealism (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018).

³⁵ Maimon, ch. 19, p. 86.

³⁶ On this passage, and Maimon’s interesting account of both Hasidism and Kabbalah more generally, see Moshe Idel, Between Hasidism and Magic (State University of New York Press, 1995), especially pp. 196–200.

³⁷ Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 11, pp. 195–96. For the identification of his interlocutor as Markus Herz, see Martin L. Davies, Identity or History: Marcus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), p. 10n28. For an exposition of Maimon’s unique reading of Spinoza, see Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004), pp. 67–96.

³⁸ Bk. 2, ch. 4, p. 154.

³⁹ For Spinoza’s own discussion of the Maimonidean doctrine of the identity of knowing subject, the act of knowing, and the known object, see Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 2, proposition 7, scholium.

⁴⁰ Maimon, bk. 1, ch. 21, p. 109.

⁴¹ Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 11, p. 197.

⁴² Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 13, pp. 208–9.

⁴³ Hugo Bieber, Heinrich Heine: A Biographical Anthology, trans. Moses Hadas (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1956), p. 196.

⁴⁴ Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 14.

⁴⁵ See, especially, Maimon, bk. 2, chs. 9 and 10, summarizing Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3:25–34 and 3:51–54.

⁴⁶ Maimon, Giv’at ha-Moreh, S. H. Bergmann and Natan Rotenstreich, eds. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities), p. 35, commentary to Maimonides, Guide 1:2. (Italics ours.)

⁴⁷ Moses Narboni, the medieval Averroist commentator whose commentary to the first part of the Guide appeared alongside Maimon’s, hints at the validity of such an argument albeit only in the face of medieval martyrdom, not modern discrimination. See the discussion of Bernard Septimus, “Narboni, and Shem Tov on martyrdom” in Isidore Twersky ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 2, pp. 447–55, concentrating on the commentary to Guide 3:11 and 3:34.

⁴⁸ Interestingly, Maimon seems to set his account of his encounter with the Lutheran pastor at roughly the same time as Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem controversy in 1783. For David Friedlander’s offer, see Friedlander, Sendschreiben an seine Hochwürdigne, Herrn Oberconsistorialrat und Probst Teller zu Berlin, von einigen Hausvaetern jüdischer Religion (Berlin, 1799), partially translated in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, op. cit., pp. 115–20. On this historical episode and its repercussions, see the classic discussion of Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).

⁴⁹ Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 14, p. 219 below. Maimon does not name Kohen in this passage but expects that at least many of his Jewish readers will recognize him as a leading rabbinic opponent of the Jewish Enlightenment.

⁵⁰ Maimon, bk. 1, ch. 19. The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 17b and Megilah 3b) stipulates that a scholar is not allowed to live in a town that has less than ten batlonim (literally idlers, i.e., scholars whose only vocation is study and whose living is paid by the community).

⁵¹ For the demographic realities with regard to the number of Talmudic scholars on the Polish-Lithuanian ground see Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (London: Littman, 2014).

⁵² Thus, Maimon only mentions the beauty of two women, his late mother and his wife, but both only in the context of their being the objects of sexual desire by non-Jews. See also Maimon, bk. 2, ch. 13, in which “a foolish old woman falls in love with me,” pp. 205 and 213–14. He does, however, censure the misogyny he allegedly observed among Hasidim at Mezritsh, on which see below, bk. 1, ch. 19, p 97.

⁵³ For Maimonides’ discussion of the deaths of Moses, Miriam, and Aaron, see Guide of the Perplexed, 3:51.

⁵⁴ This chapter should be compared to Maimon’s sketch of the history of philosophy in his introduction to Giv’at ha-Moreh.

⁵⁵ For the parable of the ulimta shapirta ve-leit lah einayin (literally “the beautiful maiden without eyes”), see Zohar 2:99b (Mishpatim).

⁵⁶ Maimon, bk. 1, ch. 20, pp. 104–5 below, and see the notes there.

⁵⁷ Critique of Judgment, § 49 (Ak. 5:316).

⁵⁸ Maimon, bk. 2, concluding chapter, p. 243.

⁵⁹ Wolff, Maimoniana, p. 89.

⁶⁰ Noah Jacobs, “Solomon Maimon’s Life and Philosophy,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore, vol. 4, no. 2 (1959), p. 60.

⁶¹ P. Tscheggey “Über Salomon Maimon und seine letzten Stunden,” Kronos einem Archiv der Zeit (1801), pp. 20–46, reprinted in Wolff, Maimoniana, and adapted by Herbert Friedenthal in a curious work, The Everlasting Nay (London, 1944). As several readers have noted, Tscheggey’s account is perhaps indebted to Boswell’s famous account of his encounter with David Hume on his death bed a quarter-century earlier. See Socher, Radical Enlightenment, p. 50 and fn. 113. Nonetheless he does report some of Maimon’s characteristic thoughts and phrases, so it should not be dismissed.

⁶² For accounts of these rumors about funeral, see Simon Bernfeld, Michael Sacks (Berlin, 1900), p. 3; Jakob Fromer ed., Salomon Maimons Lebensgeschichte, pp. 35–40; Noah Jacobs, “Salomon Maimon’s Life.” Gideon Freudenthal has rediscovered entries on Maimon’s burial from the registers of the local burial society, which describe him as being interred “gegen dem Scheißhaus, in see “Hitpatchuto shel Maimon me-ha-Kabbalahle-ratzionalism philosophi [Maimon’s Development from the Kabbalah to Philosophical Rationalism]” in Tarbitz 80 (2012): 105–71.

⁶³ The sandstone neoclassical memorial was destroyed during World War II and reconstructed in 2013. See D. Brylla, “Salomon Maimon has a Memorial,” Philosophia (2014) vol. 42, pp. 593–95.

⁶⁴ For a concise, penetrating account of Maimon’s philosophical development, see the afterword to this volume by Gideon Freudenthal. For an insightful discussion of his place in the generation of philosophers who followed Kant, see Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).