Why Maimonides Believed Revelation Was Necessary

When studying individuals from the history of philosophy, scholars can either analyze their subjects in historical context at the expense of contemporary relevance or approach their subject as a philosophical interlocutor, anachronistically plundering the text for its significance to their own concerns. While each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, for decades those working in the field of Jewish philosophy were firmly ensconced in the first camp, focusing on the history of ideas almost to the exclusion of any consideration of their conceptual worth. Moses Maimonides figured more prominently than any other individual in this scholarship, and no one is more responsible for revivifying the academic study of Maimonides in the twentieth century than Leo Strauss, who prima facie approached it in precisely the historical mode that so dominated the field. Yet, in his latest monograph, Kenneth Hart Green, one of the foremost contemporary Strauss scholars, argues that rather than reading Strauss on Maimonides as "an achievement of historical scholarship," we should instead see him as "primarily and perhaps most significantly, a thinker . . . [and] only secondarily a historical scholar, albeit a masterly one" (87). While his two dominant and intimately connected questions, therefore, are "Who was Strauss's Maimonides?" and "Who was Strauss?", in this impressive and tightly-written book, Green similarly engages philosophical questions of import in the course of his own historical study.