kept their mouth shut! “Would that you kept silent, it would be
counted as wisdom on your part” [Job. 13:5]. Or else, they could
have said: “We do not know what the Sages intended here, nor how
it is to be interpreted.” But no, they claim to understand it, and they
roll up their sleeves, trying to explain to people what they them-
selves understood rather than what the Sages said, holding forth in
front of the multitudes about the homilies found in Tractate Bera-
chot and Tractate Heleq and elsewhere, presenting them according
to their literal meaning, word for word.These impassioned lines, written relatively early in Maimonides’ life, are
striking, particularly since they are presented as a general observation. It
is therefore not surprising to fi nd Maimonides speaking on the same sub-
ject, and with the same tone, years later in a more personal context. Dur-
ing the controversy over the resurrection of the dead, he refers to the
Gaon of Baghdad, “he or [even] those who are better than him,” as peo-
ple who know nothing. In Maimonides’ view, the Gaon is “like any dar-
shan, babbling like the others.”^168 He calls the Gaon’s literary style “this
poor man’s rhetoric” and expresses regret that the Gaon did not limit
himself to the preachers’ bread and butter of Talmudic midrashim, rather
than presume to discuss the soul and the opinions of the philosophers—
“although even people who are better than him indulge in ravings (had-
hayan) and he undoubtedly transmitted the ravings of someone else.”^169
This brief exposition of Maimonides’ references to the expressions of
popular religiosity allows us a glimpse into the kind of religiosity that
surrounded Maimonides, that of his own community. Maimonides’ aspi-
rations for perfection, his sophisticated reading of the Jewish sources,
and his attempts to harmonize them with science and philosophy, and in
particular his profound loneliness, all these can be better appreciated
when set against the backdrop of the opinions that were prevalent among
his own people.
The exposition also allows us to see the broad palate of Maimonides’
reactions to his intellectual environment. When he tries to “save the ap-
pearance” of a midrashic text, and, recalling the wisdom of the Sages, to
interpret it allegorically, Maimonides’ approach can be compared to that
of Ghazali in his Faysal al- tafriqa.^170 In such places, where he shows com-
mitment to the Rabbinic text despite its problematic content, Maimo-
nides behaves as a traditional mutakallim.
(^168) Epistles, 297.
(^169) Epistles, 298.
(^170) See AbuHamid al- Ghazali,Faysal al- tafriqa bayna al- islam wal-zandaqa, ed. Sulayman
Dunya (Cairo, 1961), esp. 184.