Product Description

Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon's remarkable "Autobiography", the 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies scholar Michael Shapiro. Wry and spirited, shrewd and unrepentant, Maimon alternated between nomadic destitution and intellectual swordplay among the Jewish elite of Berlin. The son of a petty merchant in Polish Lithuania, Maimon was a child Talmud prodigy who became increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish establishment and receptive toward the secular philosophies of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant.A perpetual outsider, Maimon observed with an equally sharp eye the excesses of his time and the vicissitudes of his own life. Parallel to his own development as a thinker in the company of Moses Mendelssohn and others, Maimon conveys the physically wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, the beginnings of Hasidism (which he denounces as antirationalist), and the world of the wealthy Berlin Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment. Combining philosophical discourse with personal anecdotes that shift abruptly from the tragic to the hilarious and back, "Maimon's Autobiography" indelibly portrays one man's devotion to truth on his own terms regardless of the cost to himself or others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #699552 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 324 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)

Customer Reviews

Very pleasant reading
Solomon Maimon is known in the history of German Idealism as the person to whom Kant himself attributed the deeper understanding and penetration of the main problems of his Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover Maimon's internal criticism of Transcendental Idealism and his proposed solution to its major, according to him, problem paved the way for the theories of the post Kantian Idealists. So he was one of the thinkers who helped the thansformation of 'critical' to 'dogmatic' idealism. Now this may seem to many a step backward but this is another story.
In this small book just a few pages are devoted to Kant's reception of his manuscrispts. What we have instead is a concise, well written with brevity, wit and humor recounting of the memorable events of his extraordinary life. The form of the narrative is similar to that of a bildungsroman. He tells how he left the confines of his backward, isolated and ridden with prejudices small hometown in Polish Lithouania in search of knowledge.
Maimon was a man of exceptional intelligence and that was obvious not only to himself but also to his countrymen whose high esteem he commanded from a young age due to his excelence in the talmoudic studies. Yet he grew sceptical towards the latter and set out to seek rational and scientific enlightenment in Germany. In this endeavour he even managed because of his destitution to follow a beggar for six whole months, "two such heterogeneous persons were nowhere to be met in the world, I was an educated rabbi, he was an idiot".
His story from successes to misfortunes hovers from the hillarious to the tragic and reveals a personality of a genius whose naivety in social relationships and incistence never to pursue anything but knowledge kept him in almost constant destitution.
It is enjoyable reading and also contains much information about the jewish intellectual world in 18th century Europe.

A rich historical document
This autobiography seems to me more important as a historical document than as a work of art. Maimon despite his great intellect and his courage in going where his mind led him does not seem to me to speak of himself or his life with great psychological depth or insight. I too think that he did not understand truly the nature of the Hasidic movement he criticized harshly. Still this is an important work as a document which gives insight into the Jewish world of his time.

Great book, possibly not by Maimon
This is an amazing book and I am surprised it is not better known. It tells about the life of a Polish Jew who escaped from what he considered the stifling atmosphere of Polish Hasidic life and went to Germany to become part of the German Enlightenment. He translated Kant into Yiddish for the edification of his compatriots back home. The scenes depicting Maimon's marriage at the age of 12 and of Jewish life in eighteenth century Poland are very memorable. Someone told me recently that this book might not actually have been written by Maimon at all but by the "editor," the German writer Karl Philip Moritz, who apparently had a similar life. Perhaps that is why the book has not been reprinted.