In People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) Moshe Halbertal distinguishes between normative and formative canons. Texts which are canonical in the normative sense are obeyed and followed; they provide the group loyal to the text with guides to behavior and belief. Formative canonical texts, on the other hand, are "taught, read, transmitted, and interpreted … they provide a society or a profession with a shared vocabulary" (p. 3).
In his brave new book, Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), James A. Diamond, the Lebovic Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo (link), sets out to prove that "at virtually every critical turn in Jewish thought, one confronts Maimonidean formulations in one way or another" (p. 263). Diamond's claim is actually much stronger than that. He sets out to prove that the collected works of Rambam, alongside the Bible, Talmud, and Zohar "comprise the core spiritual and intellectual canon of Judaism" (p. 266).
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