"Scion of a distinguished prewar Viennese Jewish family and son of the chief rabbi of Zurich, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was a philosopher of religion and scholar of Judaism and the New Testament whose career and public life intersected with that of many of the luminaries of postwar continental European and American intellectual life in the humanities. In a life that took him to teaching posts in Jerusalem, New York, Paris, and Berlin, he became a repository...

The first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. Recalling such bestsellers as David McCullough's John Adams and Walter Isaacson's Einstein, MAIMONIDES is a biography on a grand scale, brilliantly explicating one man's life against the background of his time. As a physician, Maimonides is associated with Hippocrates as...

The first major biography in English in over thirty years of the seminal modern Jewish thinker Martin Buber. An authority on the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965), Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker. Organized around several key moments-such as his sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three-Mendes-Flohr shows how this foundational...

"Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance: a great physician who served a sultan, a dazzling Torah scholar, a community leader, a daring philosopher whose greatest work—The Guide for the Perplexed—attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world, a rationalist living in a time of superstition. Eight hundred years after his death, his notions about God, faith, the...