A poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this fall finds that 43 percent of Jews do not know that Moses Maimonides, codifier of Jewish law, author of the Thirteen Principles of Faith, physician, and philosopher extraordinaire, was Jewish.
They are the smart ones, Leo Strauss would have said, because Maimonides was not a Jew. On February 16, 1938, Strauss wrote to his longtime friend Jacob Klein: “One misunderstands Maimonides simply because one does not reckon with the possibility that he was an ‘Averroist.’ ” Strauss knew, of course, that “to pull Maimonides out of Judaism is to pull out its foundation,” but his recent insights into Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed had led him to the “determination that Maimonides in his beliefs was absolutely no Jew” because he was a philosopher. Strauss had long maintained, as he wrote to Klein, “the incompatibility in principle of philosophy and Judaism.” Eight years earlier in Berlin, he had argued heatedly with Julius Guttmann that “Jewish philosophy” was a contradiction in terms. But he had never overtly proven the claim for a major Jewish figure, and now he was getting ready to do so.
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