Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon

James A. Diamond holds an endowed chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. He is a leading authority on medieval Jewish thought and philosophy, and his studies have been published widely in all the prominent journals in the fields of Jewish studies, religious studies, and philosophy. His previous two books each garnered the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best scholarly book in the field of Jewish studies, and his last book on Maimonides and the Outsider was chosen in 2008 as a Notable Selection by the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards in the Category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought for best book in the previous four years.

• Introduction: Moses Maimonides: anchoring Jewish intellectual history; 1. Setting the stage for the future of Jewish thought; 2. Maimonides on Maimonides: loving God rabbinically and philosophically; 3. Nahmanides on Jewish identity (thirteenth century): launching the Kabbalistic assault; 4. R. Yom Tov ben Abraham Ishbili (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries): pushing back the assault; 5. Isaac Abarbanel (fifteenth century): the Akedah of faith versus the Akedah of reason; 6. Meir Ibn Gabbai (sixteenth century): the aimlessness of philosophy; 7. Spinoza (seventeenth century) and a Buberian afterword (twentieth century): reorienting Maimonides's scriptural hermeneutic; 8. Hermann Cohen (nineteenth century): a new religion of reason out of the sources of Maimonides; 9. R. Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (ninteenth century): loving God strictly rabbinically; 10. R. Abraham Isaac Kook (twentieth century): a Kabbalistic reinvention of Maimonides's legal code; Conclusion: the Maimonidean filigree of Jewish thought: Kafka, Scholem, and beyond.

'James A. Diamond's book is a wonderfully rich, subtle, and erudite exposition of Maimonides' central and complex place in the history of Jewish thought. In his emphasis on Maimonides as an interpreter of prior canonical texts and in his analysis of the complex and deep ways in which Maimonides' own works became, in turn canonical, Diamond makes a highly important and remarkable contribution to understanding Jewish thought as essentially an interpretative tradition.' Moshe Halbertal, New York University School of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of Maimonides: Life and Thought