Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (Hardcover)

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.