THE MAIMONIDES presented in this book will seem to many readers to be so far out of the mainstream of Judaism as to have left it altogether. Traditionalist Judaism today is often understood by its practitioners and presented by its exponents and interpreters as if the crucial element in Jewish religious identity is ethnic, determined by descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Such Jews, influenced by the thought of Rabbi Judah Halevi (d. 1141) and the ontological essentialism of kabbalah, in effect see the crucial event in Jewish religious history as being the Covenant of the Pieces between God and Abraham. Maimonides sees the crucial event in Jewish religious history as the revelation at Sinai, when the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob converted to Judaism.

This point must be fleshed out. Thinkers like Judah Halevi, the authors of the Zohar, Maharal of Prague (c.1525–1609), Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady (1745–1813), and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) were all convinced that Jews are distinguished from non-Jews by some essential characteristic which made them ontologically distinct and superior. This view has no source in the Hebrew Bible at all and very few clear-cut sources in rabbinic literature, but it came to dominate medieval and post-medieval Judaism. (This is hardly surprising, given the way in which the non-Jewish world threatened the Jews for much of this period.)

Maimonides, as I will make clear below, did not express himself unambiguously on these issues; as is well known, he wrote esoterically. If he contradicts himself on the issue of universalism and particularism, why not see his universalist statements as exoteric window-dressing, which do not reflect his true views? Another way of putting this is to ask why one should insist, as I will be doing in this book, on taking his universalist statements as basic and reading his particularist statements in their light? Why not do the reverse? After all, that is the way in which Maimonides has been read by many of his students over the centuries (a reading, I might add, which allows him to remain an authoritative figure in rabbinic circles).