Conclusion
The preceding pageswere dedicated to one major medieval thinker,
Moses Maimonides, and to the examination of his thought in its con-
text. The outcome of this examination bears fi rst of all upon our under-
standing of Maimonides himself. The description presented here, of
Maimonides as a Mediterranean thinker, is not meant to say that he was
not also, and essentially, a Jewish thinker. Rather, it highlights and elu-
cidates Maimonides’ consistent interpretation of his own, Jewish tradi-
tion in contemporary terms, as they were shaped by his Mediterranean
legacy.
Such an interpretation, which translates tradition into contemporary,
more familiar terms, is in itself not an uncommon phenomenon: Rem-
brandt’s Abraham, we know, looks distinctly Dutch. Maimonides’ success
in his interpretative effort is also not surprising: Maimonides’ linguistic
diglossia means not only that he switches easily from Hebrew to Arabic
and back, but also that he thinks about the same issues in both Arabic and
Hebrew. In each of these languages, words and phrases carry with them
their own, mostly Muslim or mostly Jewish, conceptual and associative
baggage. Maimonides’ complex and nuanced thought is the product of his
openness to his multiple cultural heritages, and of his talent to absorb and
rework their riches. The reader who wishes to fathom the nuances of Mai-
monides’ thought is thus challenged to be as open as he was, to constantly
bear these legacies in mind, and to remain alert to their presence in Mai-
monides’ work.
Beyond Maimonides, however, the results of the present study bear
upon the methodology of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought. In study-
ing Jewish philosophy in general, scholarly methods vary, and scholars
disagree in their evaluation of the relevance of the non- Jewish context to
the topic. Thus, while Shlomo Pines emphasizes the broader cultural
circles that nurture Jewish philosophy, Eliezer Schweid views the devel-
opment of Jewish philosophy as mainly an internal pro cess, where Jew-
ish thinkers carry on a dialogue with previous generations of Jewish
scholars. Regarding the early medieval period, Schweid, like Pines, ac-
cepts the existence of direct infl uences of the immediate Muslim envi-
ronment on Jewish thought, but he tends to play down their signifi cance.
The argument between scholars thus focuses on the scope and nature of
Islamic infl uence. For Schweid, the Islamic world provides only the
background to Jewish philosophy, within which we can distinguish “a
continuous Jewish speculative literature, with a fair amount of internal