The Political Project of Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah: Bodily Desire, the Nazirite, and Ends of Law, 3/13

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Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) is perhaps the most influential Jewish thinker; yet that influence is often bifurcated between his authority as jurist in the Mishneh Torah and his exemplarity as a philosopher in the Guide of the Perplexed. Certainly, these are distinct works, with different goals, audiences, and even languages. Yet the gap between them is widened under the modern assumption that law is a distinct discipline and area of life that can be separated from politics, ethics, philosophy, and theology. Maimonides, however, held no such assumption. His Mishneh Torah not only addresses theological doctrines, philosophical claims, ethical virtues, and political institutions, but it arguably embodies and advances a political project. That this political project focuses on legal norms, categories, and institutions is unsurprising for a medieval rabbi writing in the Jewish diaspora; what is surprising is how he insists on the plurality of normative orders tied to diverse human goods and how he toggles between an ideal (messianic) vision and real (exilic) purposes. This talk illustrates these dimensions of his thought by focusing on the discussion of bodily desire, the virtue of temperance, and the institution of the Nazirite in the Guide of the Perplexed and the Mishneh Torah. For it reveals Maimonides reworking biblical and rabbinic norms in view of Greek philosophical accounts of law and politics, as well as developing a theoretical legal position for practical political effects. 

This talk is part of a larger project that offers a critical genealogy of “Jewish law,” charting how it emerged as a discrete intellectual object in modernity and evaluating its ongoing challenges. It is crucial, then, to return to medieval thinkers, like Maimonides, as both an indication of how they understood their subject matter and how they were reread in modernity through new categories.

This event is part of the Ancient Medieval and Early Modern Studies Initiative. 

All are welcome. For questions, contact: Alice Isabella Sullivan, History of Art and Architecture (alice.sullivan@tufts.edu) Gregory Crane, Classical Studies (gregory.crane@tufts.edu)