“FROM MOSES TO MOSES” 165
led the phi losophers to adhere to this theory, and they usually displayed
confi dence in their intellectual ability. Nevertheless, it is only natural that
they would at times lose heart and lapse into skepticism. Their observa-
tions and analyses indicated to them that the attachment of the human in-
tellect to the body was not a mere temporal obstacle, but a constant that
defi nes humanity. Their statements about the possibility of immortality,
therefore, vary in intensity, and sometimes even in content. It would be in-
correct, in my view, to weigh these statements against each other and look
for the single true belief, as opposed to the others that would be only a
camoufl age for the true skeptical view. In such cases as Maimonides’
Guide 3.51 (or, for that matter, Avicenna’s Isharat), where the phi losopher
abandons technical language to expand on his perception of the hereafter,
the emotional language is a clear sign that what he says refl ects exactly
what he thinks at that moment, regardless of what he may have said before
or after. It is a sincere expression of his confi dence in the awaiting felicity.
Issues of Life and Death:
The Controversy Regarding ResurrectionAmong Maimonides’ writings, The Treatise on Resurrection constitutes
an enigma. Apologetic and yet aggressive, this treatise seems to reveal a
personality quite different from the one refl ected in his other works. It is
not that he contradicts what he says in his previous writings: on the con-
trary, he repeats it. The sum total of these repetitions, however, creates a
Maimonides who seems more orthodox in his concerns, and who is cer-
tainly more outspoken. The special character of this treatise accounts for
the discomfort expressed by several scholars about it. Some scholars
went as far as to reject its attribution to Maimonides altogether.^43 Its pe-
culiarity, however, is recognized also by those who do not question its
authenticity. For some, who note the bitter and disillusioned tone of this
work, it refl ects a compromise to which Maimonides was pushed as a
result of a po litical situation within the Jewish community.^44 Davidson
(^43) See J. L. Teicher, “A Literary Forgery in the Thirteenth Century: Maimonides’ Epistle on
Resurrection,” Melilah 1 (1944): 81– 92 [Hebrew]; N. L. Goldfi eld, Moses Maimonides’
Treatise on Resurrection: an Inquiry into its Authenticity (New York, 1986); and see also
J. L. Teicher, “Maimonides’ Letter to Jospeh b. Jehudah— A Literary Forgery,” Journal of
Jewish Studies 1 (1948– 49): 35– 54.
(^44) See R. Lerner, “Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection,” History of Religions 23 (1984):
140–55; Halkin and Hartmann, Crisis and Leadership, 246– 47, 263; Lerner, Maimonides’
Empire of the Light, 42, notes that “in none of his addresses to his public at large does
Maimonides come so close to open despair as in the Treateise on Resurrection.”