9 - Maimonides’ Treatment of Christianity and its Normative Implications

Summary

THE QUESTION OF OTHER RELIGIONS

SINCE JEWS inevitably interact with adherents of other religions, it is inevitable that halakhists (experts in Jewish law) have had to judge what Jews are required to do in their various dealings with those adherents of other religions. Halakhists have also had to judge whether or not the adherents of these other religions are practising what Judaism teaches ought or ought not to be practised by all human beings. In fact, whether other religions teach their adherents to live up to these standards largely determines the way halakhists judge how Jews should treat adherents of those religions. In this essay I examine how Maimonides advocates that Jews should treat Christians. Since Maimonides is the most theological of all the halakhists and the one most interested in the ideas that underlie religious praxis, I will also examine how informed he is about the ideas underlying the non-Jewish practices he approves or disapproves of.

To understand how Maimonides judges Christianity and the normative implications of that judgement, we need to ask some basic questions. These initial questions, though, must be asked about any religion other than Judaism, since Christianity is neither the only other religion Jews have had to deal with, nor is it even the first of those other religions. Thus Maimonides’ rulings about Christianity always deal with it in comparison to Islam and to ‘paganism’ (which Maimonides seems to think is all of a piece). Islam and Christianity are, For Maimonides, the two other rival religions his contemporary Jews must still take seriously, just as paganism was the rival religion Jews had to take seriously before the rise of either Christianity or Islam, even if paganism per se is no longer encountered by Jews. And we shall see in due course that the question of whether paganism is still present in Christianity or Islam is of great concern to Maimonides when differentiating between these two other religions and their adherents. It makes all the difference in the world to Jews whether another religion is ‘pagan’ or not. All paganism, whether involving the worship of a plurality of gods (polytheism) or the use of images in worship (idolatry), is to be combated in every way. But are all non-Jewish religions polytheistic and are all their adherents idolaters?