Ricerc@Sapienza

Hermann Cohen, Maimonides and Salomon Munk’s Translation of “The Guide of the Per- plexed” · Maimonides has been one of the most important philosophical references for Hermann Cohen. To Maimonides’s philosophical work, the classic of Jewish rationalism in the Middle Ages, Cohen attributed a seminal role near the works of Plato and Kant in the definition of his critical idealism. In doing this, Cohen’s philosophical reflections on Maimonides were based both on the two most influential translations of Maimonides’s “Guide of the Perplexd”: Salomon Munk’s french translation from the original text in judeo-arabic, which he read as a young scholar, and on the hebrew translation by Samuel Ibn Tibbon, a contemporary of Maimondes. Though Munk’s reading of Maimonides philosophy was in several aspects different from Cohen’s reading, fascina- ted by the idea of a philological science that was close to history as well as to speculation, Cohen took very seriously Munk’s precision in analyzing Maimonides’s text and agreed with Munk in a very central point for his philosophical project, that is to say, that the “seal” of the Guide deals with the love of God and ethics, and in the light of it the whole Guide should be read.