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Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism (Paperback, New edition)
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Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism (Paperback, New edition)
Series: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Many books on Maimonides have been written and still more will
appear. Few present Maimonides, as Menachem Kellner does against
the actual religious background that informed his many innovative
and influential choices. He not only analyses the thought of the
great religious thinker but contextualizes it in terms of the
'proto-kabbalistic' Judaism that preceded him. Kellner shows how
the Judaism that Maimonides knew had come to conceptualize the
world as an enchanted universe, governed by occult affinities. He
shows why Maimonides rejected this and how he went about doing it.
Kellner argues that Maimonides' attempted reformation failed, the
clearest proof of that being the success of the kabbalistic
counter-reformation which his writings provoked. Kellner shows how
Maimonides rethought Judaism in different ways. It is in
highlighting this and identifying Maimonides as a religious
reformer that this book makes its key contribution. Maimonides
created a new Judaism, 'disenchanted', depersonalized, and
challenging; a religion that is at the same time elitist and
universalist. Kellner's analysis also shows the deep configuration
of Judaism in a new light. If, as Moshe Idel says in his Foreword,
Maimonides was able to 'reform so many aspects of rabbinic Judaism
single-handedly, to enrich it by importing such dramatically
different concepts, it shows that the profound structures of this
religion are flexible enough to allow the emergence and success of
astonishing reforms. The fact that, great as Maimonides was, he did
not overcome the traditional forms of proto-kabbalism shows that
the dynamic of religion is much more complex than subscribing to
authorities, however widely accepted.'
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