Since Shlomo Pines's entry, scholars have come to accept 1138, not 1135, as the year of Maimonides' birth. Some scholars also believe that the youthful treatise on logic (Millot ha-Higayon) is not by Maimonides. The major development in Maimonidean studies, however, is an interpretive one. Pines worked closely with Leo Strauss on the 1963 English translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, which remains the best complete English version of his philosophical magnum opus. Strauss, who wrote the introductory essay to the translation, had an idiosyncratic way of reading many premodern thinkers, including Maimonides. In brief, Strauss understood Maimonides to be engaged in a vast project of deception, of concealing his real beliefs, in order that those incapable of understanding and accepting them not become perplexed and dislodged from their simple pieties.

Strauss's way of reading Maimonides finds its way into this article when Pines suggests that Maimonides was...