The third book of that intersects here, Menachem Kellner and James Diamond, Reinventing Maimonides in Contemporary Jewish Thought (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019) where the Kellner sections show how much the Ultra-Orthodox approach and even the world of Rabbi Soloveitchik deviate from Kellner’s ideal Maimonides. In that work, Gillis shows how the organization of the laws in the entire Mishneh Torah is shaped by the medieval cosmology at the start of the Principles of the Torah.(yesodei hatorah) This book on universalism has a fine summery of Gillis’ thesis, useful for showing how the keeping of the law is in accord with the rational structure of the cosmos. Kellner’s basic focus in most of his books is how to have an ethical and rational Maimonides, which is part Hermann Cohen’s Maimonides via Steven Schwatzchild (Kellner’s doctorate advisor) and part a spiritualized and carefully selected selection of Maimonides’s ideas that fights the battles against the farshtunken and perverse thinkers that Kellner openly disapproves of their thought including: Ultra-Orthodoxy, Kabbalists, and those who think Jews are superior to gentiles.ĭavid Gillis, a student of Kellner’s, who did not chose academia as a profession, wrote a very nice book back a number of years ago called Reading Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014). He is the author of over 25 books and was interviewed twice before on this blog. His prior position was at the University of Haifa for 33 years. Menachem Kellner is the Chair of the Philosophy and Jewish Thought Department at Shalem College. This review is basically on the single book Maimonides the Universalist: The Ethical Horizons of the Mishneh Torah(The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020) by Menachem Keller and David Gillis, but also its intersection with David Gillis Reading Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2014) and Menachem Kellner and James Diamond, Reinventing Maimonides in Contemporary Jewish Thought (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019). Can one construct an Orthodox Judaism that does not create an intrinsic distinction between Jew and non-Jew? Can one envision an Orthodox Judaism that focuses on knowledge of God and the imitation of God aided by the Aristotelian concepts of intellectual and moral virtue? Can one make the other commandments subservient to universal ones? This is the goal of the recent book Maimonides the Universalist: The Ethical Horizons of the Mishneh Torah(The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020) by Menachem Keller and David Gillis who use Maimonides as their ideal vision of Judaism.
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