Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of
the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon's remarkable Autobiography, the 1888 translation
by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies
scholar Michael Shapiro.
Wry and spirited, shrewd and unrepentant, Maimon alternated between nomadic destitution and intellectual swordplay
among the Jewish elite of Berlin. The son of a petty merchant in Polish Lithuania, Maimon was a child Talmud prodigy
who became increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish establishment and receptive toward the secular philosophies
of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant. Parallel to his own development as a thinker, Maimon conveys the physically
wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, the beginnings of Hasidism, and the world of the wealthy Berlin
Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Combining philosophical discourse with personal anecdotes that shift abruptly from the tragic to the hilarious
and back, Maimon's Autobiography indelibly portrays one man's devotion to truth on his own terms regardless of
the cost to himself or others.