THE HISTORY of Mishneh Torah interpretation has been the history of its interrogation. From the days of the scholars of Lunel in the closing decade of the twelfth century down to our own time, every advance in the understanding of that work has been a product of questioning. Talmudic scholars, like legal scholars everywhere, are concerned with specific rulings, and if the meaning of a ruling is not affected in any way by its position in the text, they generally ignore the context. Historians, on the other hand, attempt to understand the system as a whole, the principles of its arrangement and organization. This agenda is fine if scrutiny and query remain their basic tools, but there is a tendency in Maimonidean scholarship to sing the praises of Mishneh Torah. There is nothing wrong with this so long as we remember that Maimonides is in no need of our praise. We are in need of understanding him, and paeans yield no insight.

Query we must, but what types of question are fruitful? I would like to point out two lines of enquiry that I believe to be unproductive, and indicate a third and more gainful one and give some examples of it. In the span of a short lecture, I can only draw attention to some of the problems that emerge in scrutinizing the classification in Mishneh Torah; their resolution requires a far broader framework: an analysis of the multiple intentions that Maimonides had in composing Mishneh Torah and the web of jurisprudential principles that underlie that work.

In my youth, on one of those long Saturday afternoons in the summer, I heard my father casually remarking that there were two problems in Maimonides’ classification: the placement of the laws of mourning in The Book of Judges (Shofetim) and of those of circumcision in the Book of Adoration (Ahavah), and Maimonides himself was aware of the problematic nature of the first. I mulled over the remark and told my father the next day that I didn't think either of the two placements merited criticism. If someone decides to classify a vast corpus into a preconceived number of units, be they four, fourteen or forty, inevitably he will be left with some topics that don't fit into any of these predetermined units.