ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH contemporary Jewish life, especially within Orthodoxy, will see immediately that the Maimonidean reform described in this book has failed to take hold. In addition to the seven specific issues addressed here—the nature of halakhah; distinctions between holy and profane and ritually pure and ritually impure; the character of the Hebrew language; the notion of kavod/shekhinah/created light; the distinction between Jew and non-Jew; and the existence of angels as popularly understood— Maimonides also sought to reform the curriculum of Jewish learning. In each of these areas he sought to transform the Judaism of his day, and in each of these areas Judaism continued to develop as if Maimonides had never existed and never written.

However, in contrast to the items in this list, there are areas in which Maimonides’ influence has been decisive. He succeeded in convincing almost all Jews that the God of Judaism is entirely incorporeal. Given the dramatic anthropomorphism and anthropaphism of the Bible and rabbinic literature this is no mean feat. He also convinced subsequent generations of Jews that the Jewish religion has a firm dogmatic base. But his own set of dogmas was never as widely accepted as many Jews today think it was, and the dogmas were never accepted in the form in which he laid them down. The project of creating comprehensive and logically organized codes of law, culminating in the publication of the Shulḥan arukh, must also be seen as at least a partial success of Maimonides.

However, despite these achievements, his overall reform cannot be considered a success. Indeed, if Graetz, Scholem, and Idel are all correct, Maimonides’ attempted reform boomeranged badly: his attempt to ‘demythologize’ post-talmudic Judaism, to bring about the ‘fall of myth in ritual’, in the perceptive words of Josef Stern, led to the enthusiastic ‘remythologization’ of Judaism through kabbalah. Whether or not the need to counter Maimonides was indeed a catalyst for the composition and publication of kabbalistic literature, there can be no doubt that its acceptance as normative by the rabbinic elite and by the rank and file of the Jewish people sounded the death knell for his projected reforms.