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The chapter discusses the reaction of German Jewish Orthodoxy to the liberal Maimonides renaissance in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – analysing the reading of Maimonidean philosophy by Orthodox thinkers such as Samson Raphael Hirsch, Josef Gugenheimer, Simon Eppenstein, Joseph Wohlgemuth and David Z. Hoffmann. It will be argued that although those reactions evolve from Samson Raphael Hirsch's outright rejection of the Guide in 1836, to a meaningful orthodox cooperation in cross-stream research projects concerning Maimonides' work at the beginning of the twentieth century, there generally remains a clear difference between the liberal and orthodox interpreters of the Guide: Orthodox readings almost always retreat to supernatural Sinaitic revelation as the source of Judaism's essence, and would rather accuse the Guide of dissembling argumentation in order to address Jews perplexed by philosophy than attribute any kind of non-traditionalist position to the author of the Mishneh Torah.It will be demonstrated that even the most objective and apparently non-apologetic attempts to reclaim Maimonides for Orthodox Judaism must ultimately and inevitably end in an outspoken rejection of rationalism and a return to "arbitrary" revelation. It is this misunderstanding between the Reformers and neo-Orthodoxy that causes the continuous debates between the two camps discussed in this chapter: that for the traditionalist side it is self-evident, and neither open for argument nor subject to formal proof, that the intuitive discovery of "God's will", and the therefore assumed fact that the commandments are the product of this will, is the bedrock foundation for the obligation to keep them faithfully.Interestingly, the more philosophical implications of this antagonism are reflected, as will be shown in an appendix to the chapter, almost par for par in the well-known debate between Leo Strauss and Julius Guttmann about the relevance of religious philosophy in the modern world.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-4035-8_9

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