The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon

Abstract

With extraordinary chutzpa and deep philosophical seriousness, Solomon ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed himself after his medieval intellectual hero, Moses Maimonides. Solomon Maimon was perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most controversial figure of the late eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment. He scandalized rabbinic authorities, embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn, provoked Immanuel Kant, charmed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and inspired Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among others. This study of Maimon integrates his idiosyncratic philosophical idealism with his popular autobiography, and with his early exegetical, mystical, and Maimonidean work in Hebrew. In doing so, it illuminates the intellectual and spiritual possibilities open to a European Jew at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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