Uma análise do discurso de Maimônides: diáspora, idolatria e messianismo no Livro da Sabedoria e no Guia dos Perplexos (1135- 1204)

Abstract

The present work intend to do an analysis of the discourse of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135 A.D. – 1204 A.D.), also known as Maimonides, in the Book of Wisdom (1180 A.D.) and in selected excerpts from the Guide for the Perplexed (1190 A.D.), with the primary purpose of identifying their understanding and their discourse on diaspora, idolatry and messianism. Maimonides was a spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Fustat, present-day Cairo, in North Africa, and has produced an extensive bibliography on various subjects, highlighting his writings that involve medical, philosophical and theological knowledge. Thus his most prestigious works consist of the Commentary on the Mishnah (1168 A.D.), the Mishnah Torah code, having the Book of Wisdom as the first volume, and the Guide for the Perplexed, writings which aroused polemics and debates within the Jewish community medieval, both by its forms and by its contents. Maimonides had the primary purpose of proving the necessary identity between Greek philosophy and the Jewish religion for the correct understanding of the Holy Scriptures. However, such positioning was not understood by more conservative Jewish scholars and sometimes seen as a threat to Jewish tradition. The controversy and hostility surrounding the writings of Maimonides became known in Jewish history as the Maimonidian Controversy, and had three phases: at 1180 A.D. when he finished the Book of Wisdom, from 1230 to 1232 A.D., and from 1,300 to 1306 A.D. It should be noted that Maimonides lived in a period of severe political and religious strife. The coexistence between the three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, the latter as a political minority, permeated the medieval yearnings and intellectual productions in the Dispersion. Daily life as a religious minority, in the case under Islam's rule, in which the dominant political and social positions alternated between "contemptuous" tolerance and extreme radicalism, promoted a decline in the status quo of Jewish communities, while at the same time, promoted access and diffusion of philosophical knowledge of antiquity through Arabic, as well as differentiated cultural exchanges from the tenth century. In this sense, based on the assumptions of North American Culturalism, which teaches that understanding about context is essential to understand the influences of a certain historical time on the character studied, and the concepts of identity and diaspora, it is firstly aimed to identify in Maimonides' discourse elements of the diaspora concept in the selected writings. Added to this, it is also proposed to identify the concept of idolatry in the selected writings of Maimonides, since he understood the practice of non-idolatry as the ultimate difference between Jews and non-Jews, and to analyze his claims about the doctrine of messianism, which corresponds to the element that interconnects past and future, and which involves the beginning of the end of Jewish suffering. In this way, the following question arises: How does Maimonides justify the reality lived by the Jews of his time and in what form is influenced by the questions promoted by the Jewish Diaspora? That said, the guiding axis of this work is the understanding and identification of the concept of diaspora and its elements, based on North American Culturalism and cultural studies. For this, it was selected statements of the Book of Wisdom and the Guide for the Perplexed, having as support some personal correspondences of Maimonides. Since diaspora is understood as encompassing the affirmation of identities, that is, the idea of belonging, and of differences - the delimitation of the "other," and the conception of the end of the dispersed experience and improvement of the status quo of a certain community, culminating in the idea of the promise of a "future redeemer," it was concluded that the Revelation at Mount Sinai and the conception of the Elect People are affirmed by Maimonides as justifications for Jewish unity and for their persecution by non-Jews , that the discourse of conciliation between religion and Greek philosophy aimed at guaranteeing Judaism unquestionable validity and legitimacy, and that Jewish practice in secret, as a false conversion, as long as idolatry is not practiced can be tolerated, which suggests that the Muslim rule is more permissible for the maintenance of religious unit. Discourse Analysis serves as a methodological framework.