Not only is beauty no standard for truth when it comes to Judaism, but neither are the liberal arts and sciences anything to do with it. A Jew with a good head for business who raises a large family is a good Jew, and if he is a dreamer, then he goes into the world of Torah. The nineteenth-century novelists who imitated the European form in order to bring Enlightenment ideas into the world of Eastern European Jewry are really doing something more alien than even they realize, because the object of a novel, to create a self-enclosed world that speaks to the reader from out of it, is a form of representation banned by the Second Commandment, and also asks us to judge by a standard of beauty, if only in virtuosity of execution, that has nothing to do with the perpetuation of the generations and continuity throughout history that is expected of the Jew who conforms to Torah in good faith. God will provide – no art is required, just follow the rules.

The notion that the late Wittgenstein and the Kant of the Critique of Judgment problematize how one knows how to follow such rules as there are is a Protestant one, because the answer, previously, had been to trust to the judgment of priests. Now, it is supposed, this is a matter we must divine for ourselves. Maimonides’s mastery of the tradition plays a key role in allowing him to investigate the philosophy of Aristotle, because it immunizes him against charges of heresy. As a rabbinic figure with impeccable credentials, it is he who is in a position to judge others, rather than himself being judged.