The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon - Annotated

Book Synopsis

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

Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. 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 distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. After a series of picaresque misadventures, he reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted. This edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray--for long the only available English edition--and includes an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon's extraordinary life.

From the Back Cover

"This new translation of Maimon's pathbreaking autobiography is timely, and the editors and translator are exactly the right team to pull it off. It is a kind of Jewish picaresque, with Maimon playing the role of the rude barbarian who can't help but import his Talmudic sensibility into the philosophical debates of late eighteenth-century Germany."--David Biale, coauthor of Hasidism: A New History

"Reitter's translation captures the drive, energy, humor, and occasional irreverence of the original German, while annotations by Melamed and Socher supply the information readers need to read Maimon's autobiography with pleasure."--Jonathan M. Hess, author of Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage

Review Quotes

"Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography and Memoir"

About the Author

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Abraham Socher is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University. Gideon Freudenthal is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University's Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas.