Language:
English
Year of publication:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2021) 83–96
Keywords:
Abraham ben Moses ben Maimon,
;
Maimonides, Moses,
;
Daniel ben Saadiah,
;
Jewish philosophy Middle Ages, 500-1500
Abstract:
The adoption and adaptation of Maimonidean ideas by a staggering array of Jewish thinkers, especially those who opposed his philosophical and legal positions, testifies to Maimonides’s success in reframing Jewish thought. This essay focuses on an exchange between Daniel ben Saadia ha-Bavli (fl. early thirteenth century) and Abraham Maimonides (1186–1237), which occurred in the shadow of twelfth-century institutional opposition to Maimonides (1138–1204), a period in which Maimonides’s reputation began to take shape. Despite the staunch opposition of Daniel’s teacher, Samuel ben ʿElī Ibn al-Dastūr (d. 1194/1197), to Maimonides, as well as Daniel’s own disagreements with Maimonidean theology, Daniel assimilated many Maimonidean legal doctrines, integrating them into his jurisprudential thought. Their exchange shows that both Abraham and Daniel, to different degrees, evaluated Maimonides’s writings with a certain degree of distance, absent much of the rancor of earlier and later Maimonidean controversies. Daniel’s critical engagement with Maimonides underscores that even those educated in the heart of the opposition to the Great Eagle derived much from his writings. Much like those who rejected Maimonidean philosophy, later talmudists who spurned aspects of Maimonides’s halakhah benefited profoundly from his efforts at categorization, organization, and systematization.
DOI:
10.1163/9789004460942_006
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink