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His studies were purely Rabbinic, but his alert mind grasped every opportunity of acquiring other knowledge, and in this incidental way he became familiar first with French and then with German. The influence of the philosopher Krochmal, with whom he came in close personal contact, shaped his career as a writer and a scholar.
At the same time, following a tradition reflected in the Apocalyptic and Rabbinic literature, he modifies the Biblical statement, that the Jews spoiled the Egyptians before leaving the country, by explaining that they took their fair hire for their labor.
In those days a Rabbinic authority arose like unto whom none had been known among Jews in the later centuries, and his earnest, independent genius, as well as his moral grandeur, conferred a consecration upon the peculiar spiritual tendencies prevailing in Lithuanian Judaism, which he personified at its loftiest.
In 1828 Chiarini suggested to the "Committee of Old Testament Believers" to arrange a course in Hebrew Archaeology at the Warsaw University for the purpose of acquainting Christian students with rabbinic literature and thus equipping prospective Polish officials with a knowledge of things Jewish.
Oppression and gloom caused the Jews to retire within their shell and they sought consolation for the freedom denied them without in concentrating their interests, ideals and hopes upon the Rabbinic writings, legal as well as mystical.
The "Guide of the Perplexed" would not have attracted the attention it did, it would not have raised the storm which divided Jewry into two opposed camps, if it had not come as the mature work of the man whom all Jewry recognized as the greatest Rabbinic authority of his time. Others had written on philosophy before Maimonides.
This effort brings him to the type of perfect man, whose soul shall live in the state that befits it, viz. in the world to come. Thus the world to come is a state rather than a place. But Maimonides' view was not accepted without dispute. It was indeed quite easy to cite Rabbinic passages in which the world to come is identified with the bodily Resurrection.
From the middle of the fifteenth to the latter part of the eighteenth century, Hebrew literature consisted, if a few scattered books on philosophy, mostly translations from the Arabic, are excepted, mainly of Talmudic disquisitions, written in the rabbinic dialect and in a euphuistic style. Besides the great Maimuni, there were few able or willing to write Hebrew "as she should be spoke."
The controlling idea with them, and consequently with the people, was the sanctity of God's law. They were conscious of the sinfulness of the people, and their demand for repentance was constant. It is a rabbinic commonplace that the delay of the Messiah's coming is due to lack of repentance in Israel.
This feature is almost as frequent in the Midrash as the Logos-idea in Philo, so that it may be said that rabbinic theology finds an idealism in the Torah which corresponds to the idealism of the Philonic Word. It is expressed, no doubt, naïvely and fancifully, even playfully, without attempt at philosophical deductions.
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