Many books on Maimonides have been written and
still more will appear. Few present Maimonides, as Menachem Kellner does
against the actual religious background that informed his many innovative and
influential choices. He not only analyses the thought of the great religious
thinker but contextualizes it in terms of the ‘proto-kabbalistic’ Judaism that
preceded him. Kellner shows how the Judaism that Maimonides knew had come to
conceptualize the world as an enchanted universe, governed by occult
affinities. He shows why Maimonides rejected this and how he went about doing
it. Kellner argues that Maimonides’ attempted reformation failed, the clearest
proof of that being the success of the kabbalistic counter-reformation which
his writings provoked.





Kellner shows
how Maimonides rethought Judaism in different ways. It is in highlighting this
and identifying Maimonides as a religious reformer that this book makes its key
contribution. Maimonides created a new Judaism, ‘disenchanted’, depersonalized,
and challenging; a religion that is at the same time elitist and universalist.





Kellner’s
analysis also shows the deep configuration of Judaism in a new light. If, as
Moshe Idel says in his Foreword, Maimonides was able to ‘reform so many aspects
of rabbinic Judaism single-handedly, to enrich it by importing such
dramatically different concepts, it shows that the profound structures of this
religion are flexible enough to allow the emergence and success of astonishing
reforms. The fact that, great as Maimonides was, he did not overcome the
traditional forms of proto-kabbalism shows that the dynamic of religion is much
more complex than subscribing to authorities, however widely accepted.’