'The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries’ Review: From Torah Scrolls to Postage Stamps

By Edward Rothstein, The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2023

Image: Sefer ha-Mitsvot (Book of the Commandments) (1492), by Moses Maimonides Photo: Hartman Family

New York … Carved on the worn remnant of a wooden panel at the exhibition “The Golden Path: Maimonides Across Eight Centuries,” at Yeshiva University Museum in the Center for Jewish History, can be read a fragment of a Hebrew invocation: “Open to me the gates of righteousness; I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.” About 800 years ago, in Fustat, Egypt—now incorporated into Cairo—the panel was part of a door that would have literally been considered a “gate of righteousness,” for behind it were kept Torah scrolls belonging to the Jewish community of the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

That was the same synagogue in which was discovered, in the late 19th century, an extraordinary cache of more than 200,000 books and manuscripts, written over a millennium. Since they included God’s name, according to Jewish belief they could not be destroyed and so were preserved in a storeroom known as a genizah.

Found in that genizah, too, were documents in the hand of Maimonides, the subject of this exhibition (he had surely visited that synagogue)—documents that have given unusual insight into the 12th-century physician, jurist, philosopher, rabbi, teacher and occasional titular leader of the Egyptian Jewish community. Three of them are here, including his signed request for funds to ransom Jews who had been kidnapped by the region’s active slave trade.

As we proceed from those genizah fragments, through three galleries of manuscripts and publications, we begin to get a sense of the subject’s scale. Even in his own time Maimonides (whose name was more familiarly Moshe [Moses] ben Maimon) was an immense force—attacked by some, but widely known as “the Great Eagle” and “the light of the world.” Later generations of Jewish scholars paid tribute to his achievements with a Hebrew maxim, referring to his biblical namesake: “From Moses to Moses, none arose like Moses.” His philosophical writings, Aristotelian in temperament, were cited by Aquinas and Leibniz. Meister Eckhart thought him a philosopher second only to St. Augustine. A document here, written in the hand of Isaac Newton in 1699, draws on Maimonides’s astronomical writings to argue for the reform of England’s Julian calendar.

The historian David Sclar, the exhibition’s curator and editor of its wide-ranging catalog, has drawn its offerings from what he has called “the most significant private collection” of Maimonides-related manuscripts and rare books, owned by Robert and Debra F. Hartman; it has been supplemented with international loans. We follow editions of Maimonides’s work, mainly chronologically, viewing manuscripts from Yemen, early printed works from Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and books that accompanied centuries of exilic wanderings.

Among the most memorable are two illuminated editions of his great philosophical work, “Moreh Nevukhim” (“Guide for the Perplexed”), including one from the 14th century (from the Mantua State Archive in Italy) in which the works of the Creation are delicately painted. An autograph manuscript of Maimonides’s “Commentary on the Mishnah” (from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford) contains Maimonides’s handwritten notations along with a sketch of the archetypal Temple Menorah (drawn, perhaps, using geometric stamps), creating an angular shape now often imitated.

From more recent centuries we see a 1784 Hebrew prayer composed in New York after the American Revolution incorporating Maimonides’s doctrines of faith, mentioning George Washington and offering thanks for granting “these thirteen states of America everlasting freedom.” More visceral evocations of Maimonides appear in 20th-century artifacts and images, including Arthur Szyk’s haunting portrait of Maimonides as a medievalesque melancholic, leaning on Hebraic scrolls and surrounded by allegorical trappings of wealth. And finally, contemporary Maimonides memorabilia include toddler outfits, postage stamps and school notebooks.

Unfortunately, from the books alone we can’t really get a sense of the philosopher’s taut binding of the faculty of reason and religious faith, or of how he combined severe scrutiny with interpretive flexibility.

These volumes are mainly written in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic. Detailed translations as part of the displays would have helped, but perhaps only cursorily. Maimonides’s two most important works—codifying Jewish law in the encyclopedic “Mishneh Torah” and conducting a philosophical inquiry into the nature of God and Jewish belief in “Guide for the Perplexed”—are meant to be studied, not perused.

We also get too schematic a sense of his life—fleeing Muslim fundamentalism, massacres and forced conversions in Cordoba, Spain, and in Fez, Morocco, and then finding no comfort in the Crusader-run Holy Land before ending up in Egypt—but ultimately, the focus on texts comes to seem appropriate. The first printing presses in Portugal, the Ottoman Empire and the African continent were Hebrew presses; before 1550, 140 Hebrew titles were printed; Maimonides’s “Mishneh Torah” was printed at least six times.

Each display can also lead to a widening network of historical facts and ideas. In one case, Maimonides’s works—born out of a milieu of cross-cultural learning and inquiry—are bound up in a fate that echoed his own life struggles. We see copies of “Mishneh Torah” published in Venice in 1550-51 by two different Christian-run Hebrew presses. A lawsuit between them over some commentary led to an appeal to the Pope, who then called for an investigation by the Inquisition. The result? The “gates of righteousness” slammed shut. In Rome and then in Venice, public bonfires destroyed every copy of the Talmud that could be discovered, attempting to eradicate that multi-volume compendium of Jewish law and debate that helped shape Maimonides’s religious world.

See the fully illustrated article at The Wall Street Journal.