The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy [Hardcover]

With extraordinary chutzpa and deep philosophical seriousness, Solomon ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed himself after his medieval intellectual hero, Moses Maimonides. Maimon was perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most controversial figure of the late-eighteenth century Jewish Enlightenment. He scandalized rabbinic authorities, embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn, provoked Kant, charmed Goethe, and inspired Fichte, among others. This is the first study of Maimon to integrate his idiosyncratic philosophical idealism with his popular autobiography, and with his early unpublished exegetical, mystical, and Maimonidean work in Hebrew. In doing so, it illuminates the intellectual and spiritual possibilities open to a European Jew at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Solomon Maimon deserves more fame, both as a philosopher and as an autobiographer. In 1790, he published a critique of Kant, who said of it: none of my opponents have understood me and my essential meaning as well as Maimon . Two years later he brought out his autobiography, praised by both George Eliot inDaniel Derondaand by Kafka in a letter which calls it the harsh self-presentation of a man running to and fro like a ghost between Eastern and Western Jewry. Abraham P. Socher, in this well-written, deeply learned, perceptive and accessible study of Maimon claims it as the first autobiography.... Throughout this work, Socher aims and succeeds at presenting not just Maimon's thought but the 'thinking man' and the interaction between the two Socher's liberal exercise of such literary close reading of the whole interwoven text of Maimon's life and thought makes this book a consistent pleasure. Socher's main thesis is that in spite of the contemporary ideal of theBildung, Maimon remained faithful to the medieval and specifically Maimonidean ideal of exclusivelyintellectualself-perfection... What is new is the attempt to write Maimon's intellectual biography from this plb