Yehuda Kauffmann (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: g. Ex-Library. 3 volumes. Quarto. Continuous pagination of the first two volumes. lxxxviii. 524 (89)pp. Beige greenish cloth with black lettering to covers and spines. The Guide of the Perplexed is Maimonides' best known work. This specific edition was edited by Yehuda Kauffmann [Even Shemuel], a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose Neo-Kantian outlook is apparent in his commentary and remarks. Further remarkable is the easy readable regular Hebrew print [unlike the "Rashi"- print this work is normally printed in]. Text in Hebrew. Bindings with some sunning to spines of vol. 1&3. Front and back covers with some light smudges and scratches, endpapers with aging. Heads and tails slightly bumped. Some pages with light sunning to edges. Bindings in overall good, interiors in good condition. The Arabic original Dalalat al-Hairin was completed about 1200 in Cairo, Egypt. Shortly therafter, it was translated into Hebrew as The Moreh Nevukhim. The first translation [upon which this edition draws from], a literal one, was made by Samuel Ibn Tibbon with Maimonides' advice and completed in 1204. Maimonides wrote the Guide for someone who was firm in his religious beliefs and practices, but having studied philosophy, was perplexed by the literal meanings of Biblical anthropomorphic and antropopathic terms. [Hence the title] Maimonides also undertook here the explanation of Biblical parables. Thus, the Guide is devoted to the philosophic interpretation of Scripture, or to use Maimonides' terms, to the "science of Law in its true sense" (quoted in Encyclopedia Judaica, p. 771).