Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204), better known to posterity as Moses Maimonides, is widely regarded as the greatest of medieval Jewish philosophers. His religious commentaries are a mainstay of the Talmudic tradition. His development of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian strands of medieval Islamic thought earned him a place of respect within the Muslim world. (The 850th anniversary of his birth two years ago received public recognition not only in Israel, but in Egypt and Pakistan as well.) His attempted synthesis of Greek, philosophy with revealed religion influenced similar inquiries in the Christian West during the thirteenth century. To Saint Thomas Aquinas, for whom Saint Paul was "the Apostle" and Aristotle "the Philosopher," Maimonides was "the Rabbi," the very personification of Jewish philosophic wisdom.
Maimonides' early years were spent in the city of Cordoba, at a time when the entire Spanish peninsula was under Muslim rule. In general, this rule had been religiously tolerant, but in 1148 a fundamentalist Muslim sect, the Aristotle-Mohad, gained local ascendancy. After living for eleven years in a state of quasi-apostasy--adopting the outward customs of their Muslim neighbors, but not pretending to convert to Islam--the Maimon family emigrated in 1159, first to Fez, then to Palestine, finally settling in Egypt in 1165. Maimonides spent the remainder of his life in Cairo, where he practiced medicine, becoming court physician to Saladin, and rose to prominence as a leader of that city's sizable Jewish community and as an authority among the Mediterranean rabbinate. It was there that he labored for the greater part of the decade of the 1180s on his monumental Guide of the Perplexed, on the basis of which his philosophic reputation principally rests. It was there too, in 1194, that the wrote the "Letter on Astrology."
Defining the Knowable
A threshold question occurs when we approach Moses Maimonides' famous letter to the rabbis of Marseilles: why should we twentieth-century sophisticates concern ourselves with a work on so discredited a topic? Though not a question that Maimonides himself poses, it is one that he, oddly enough, answers. What makes this doubly noteworthy is that the letter manifestly attempts to discredit astrology. To discredit something, however, is not the same as to dismiss it out of hand. Our first task, in which he assists us, is therefore to see the serious side of what may be a powerful error.
Maimonides' letter is not only about astrology. It is also a kind of epistemological precis, a set of summary conclusions on what is knowable and worth knowing. As such, it concerns itself with man's thinking, its means and its objects. Maimonides emphasizes the importance of knowing by enjoining his readers to "know this . . ." no less than six times within the compass of this relatively short work (beginning six of its nine paragraphs in Ralph Lerner's translation of the work). Maimonides describes astrology as the pursuit of a false notion of causation. He links it to enduring or recurrent practical problems, particularly the dissolution of community and the occasional appearance of false messiahs, both chronic problems to the Jews of the Diaspora. His discussion poses the general question: what kinds of false assumptions about the way the universe works--especially about "fate"--are apt to make men neglect their community obligations and succumb to the deceptions of self-deceived seducers? Viewed in this light, the letter's concerns seem relevant indeed to our own time, which
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