MANY BOOKS on Maimonides have been written and still more will appear. Most are written by scholars of Maimonides, themselves often open or hidden Maimonideans. Menachem Kellner's book is written by a scholar who does not necessarily wish to be identified as a religious or intellectual follower of his subject. Not that Professor Kellner has anything against Maimonides; on the contrary, he would like to have the best of him consonant with modern sensibilities. His book presents the Great Eagle in the relativity of his greatness. This means that he believes that, in order to understand Maimonides and his achievement, it is necessary to encounter the various religious versions of Judaism that existed before Maimonides. This necessitates a relativizing approach, since Maimonides’ views should be understood, not so much as the expression of a ‘true’ Judaism, but as the fascinating alternative he offered to other forms of the religion.

Less a philosopher than a religious thinker, Maimonides is presented here against the religious background that informed his many innovative and influential choices. The book is thus not only an analysis of the thought of the great religious thinker but a complex survey of what was actually available on the horizon of the many contemporary Jewish literatures, with which he engaged in a dialogue that was often critical. The discussions that serve as the background and foil to Maimonides’ thought reiterate the lack of a Jewish orthodoxy before him, a leitmotiv of one of Professor Kellner's earlier books. In a way, Maimonides himself was not an orthodox thinker, since there was no established orthodoxy before his time, but he strove to establish an orthodoxy and indeed succeeded in doing so. Thus, while Maimonides’ religious outlook serves as a clear centre for the entire enterprise, Professor Kellner tells a story that is much more complex than a simplistic portrait of the Great Eagle as the opponent to the elusive Sabians, or as a religious leader dealing with unpleasant characteristics of earlier Judaism. In order to do this, he has had to engage a huge bibliography—the only reliable way of evaluating the originality of Maimonides’ thought.