Strauss on Hermann Cohen’s “Idealizing” Appropriation of Maimonides as A Platonist

Abstract

Hermann Cohen’s “Characteristics of Maimonides’s Ethics” appeared in 1908, in a collection of essays on Moses Maimonides by various German Jewish scholars.¹ Cohen’s essay was the subject of a 1931 lecture by the young Leo Strauss to the Academy for the Scientific Study of Judaism in Berlin, entitled “Cohen and Maimonides.”² At that time, as Strauss later recalled, Cohen was “the center of attraction for philosophically minded Jews who were devoted to Judaism… the master whom they revered.”³ Strauss’s lecture vindicates his older contemporaries’ reverence for Cohen to the extent that it shows Cohen to be an extraordinarily helpful (if ultimately inadequate) guide for understanding Maimonides when one starts, as they do, from modern premises, that is to say, from premises supplied by the (modern) Enlightenment. Cohen himself, Strauss shows, reveres Maimonides as an enlightened Jew, indeed as a role model for modern enlightened Jews like himself, and in this regard interprets Maimonides as a Platonist rather than, more conventionally,⁴ as an Aristotelian. Strauss endorses Cohen’s Maimonides interpretation—up to a point. He demurs at Cohen’s retrofitting onto Maimonides his own, “idealizing” way of interpreting Jewish sources.⁵ Accordingly, Strauss’s lecture probes the merits and shortcomings of Cohen’s “idealizing” appropriation of Maimonides and offers a corrective.