The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon

The Complete Translation

Solomon Maimon, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Abraham Socher, Paul Reitter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780691203089, 9780691163857
• eBook ISBN: 9781400890446
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon's influential and delightfully entertaining memoir

Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work.

Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah--and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him.

This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Note
• Maimon’s Autobiography: A Guide for the Perplexed
• Original Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: My Grandfather’s Household
• Chapter 2: Earliest Childhood Memories
• Chapter 3: Private Education and Independent Study
• Chapter 4: Jewish Schools. The Joy of Being Delivered from Them Results in a Stiff Foot
• Chapter 5: My Family Is Driven into Poverty, and an Old Servant’s Great Loyalty Costs Him a Christian Burial
• Chapter 6: New Residence, New Misery. The Talmudist
• Chapter 7: Happiness Turns Out to Be Short-Lived
• Chapter 8: The Student Knows More Than the Teacher. A Theft à la Rousseau Is Discovered. The Pious Man Wears What the Godless Man Procures
• Chapter 9: Love Affairs. Marriage Proposals. The Song of Solomon Can Be Used as a Matchmaking Device. Smallpox
• Chapter 10: People Fight over Me. I Suddenly Go from Having No Wives to Having Two. In the End, I Wind Up Being Kidnapped
• Chapter 11: Marrying as an Eleven Year Old Makes Me into My Wife’s Slave and Results in Beatings at the Hands of My Mother-in-Law. A Spirit of Flesh and Blood
• Chapter 12: Marital Secrets. Prince R., or the Things One Isn’t Allowed to Do in Poland
• Chapter 13: Striving for Intellectual Growth amidst the Eternal Struggle against All Kinds of Misery
• Chapter 14: I Study the Kabbalah, and Finally Become a Doctor
• Chapter 15: Brief Account of the Jewish Religion, from Its Origins to the Present
• Chapter 16: Jewish Piety and Exercises in Penance
• Chapter 17: Friendship and Rapture
• Chapter 18: Life as a Tutor
• Chapter 19: Another Secret Society and Therefore a Long Chapter
• Chapter 20: Continuation of the Story, as well as Some Thoughts on Religious Mysteries
• Chapter 21: Trips to Königsberg, Stettin, and Berlin, to Further My Understanding of Humanity
• Chapter 22: My Misery Reaches Its Nadir. Rescue
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND BOOK
• Afterword: Maimon’s Philosophical Itinerary
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index