CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MAIMONIDES AND ETHICAL MONOTHEISM: THE INFLUENCE OF THE GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED ON GERMAN REFORM JUDAISM IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

George Y. Kohler

In the religious philosophy produced by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, no idea was more important or would have greater infl uence than ethical monotheism. Nineteenth-century German-Jewish thinkers considered it the unique mission of the Jews to preserve and teach pure monothe- ism to the world. They also considered it a key element in promoting internal reforms within the Jewish community. In liberal Judaism, as it developed from a lay movement at the beginning of the century into a rabbinical, theological, and even philosophical enterprise towards the end of the 1800s, the traditional emphasis on the legal aspect of Juda- ism was replaced by an insistence on the social, universal, and above all ethical teachings of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinical literature. Those teachings, it was argued, are based on the strictest monothe- ism; and the Jewish concept of God was considered the key to human morality. The most profound representative of this new theology was Her- mann Cohen. It was his philosophical defi nition of ethical monothe- ism that would shape the liberal movement’s conception of God for many decades to come. Yet what is interesting to note is that Cohen’s most important source for his defi nition of ethical monotheism was Maimonides, more specifi cally, Maimonides’ complex and often puzz- ing discussion of divine attributes in Guide 1:50–59. Although Cohen was not the fi rst Wissenschaft scholar to focus attention on this the most abstract part of the Guide (as we will show below), it was largely because of his radical reinterpretation of it that Maimonides would continue to play a major role in debates about the true essence of Judaism, ethi- cal monothesism, and Reform into the twentieth century. Indeed, his 310 george y. kohler infl uence can be felt even in the current fascination with Maimonides’ doctrine of attributes in contemporary scholarship.1 The recovery, or really rediscovery, of Maimonides’ Guide of the Per- plexed for German Jewry began in 1742, when Rabbi David Fraenkel, the teacher of Moses Mendelssohn, arranged for the publication of a new edition of Maimonides’ work by the Wulff printing press—almost 200 years after its previous printing. The Fraenkel edition included the (by then) traditional medieval commentaries by Shem Tov b. Joseph ibn Shem Tov, Profi at Duran (Efodi) and Asher Crescas. In 1791 a new edition was produced by Isaac Euchel, featuring the fi rst printing of the radical medieval commentary by Moses Narboni together with Solomon Maimon’s Giv{at ha-Moreh.2 Another forty years later, in 1838, when German Jewry was deeply engaged in debates about religious reform, the fi rst German translations of the Guide appeared—and from the very moment of their publication, Maimonides’ work was embraced by reformers in support of their ideas and aspirations. As expressed by Simon Scheyer, who translated Part III of the Guide into German, the reformers saw striking parallels between Maimonides’ time and their own: As then, when, resulting from the marriage of Wissenschaft and religion, a certain ambition manifested itself to understand the spirit of Holy Scripture and to defi ne the relation between the positive part of Judaism and its theoretical doctrines and ethical commandments on the one hand, and the relation between the original content of Mosaism to it historical development on the other hand—so such praiseworthy aspirations are not missing in our own time, yielding fruit both for the Wissenschaft of religion and for religiosity itself. Yet Maimonides, Scheyer emphasizes, as the reformers of his own time, was faced with a sturdy opposition of critics and obscurantists: who identify in the combining of Wissenschaft and religion the certain doom of religion; the devotees of the Old are prepared also in our own times for a fi ght in defense of its disputed authority, ready to scorn the covenant of friendship with Wissenschaft.3

1 For a modern discussion of Maimonides’ “negative theology” see the special issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002). 2 For Maimon’s commentary on the Guide see the chapter by Abraham Socher in this volume. 3 Zurechtweisung der Verirrten von Moses ben Maimon; ins Deutsche übersetzt mit Zuziehung zweier arabischen Ms. und mit Anmerkungen begleitet von Simon Scheyer (Frankfurt am Main, 1838), p. V.