Schocken library,

"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 secular philosophies of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant.". "Through the story of his passage from the inbred religiosity of the ghetto to the scientific philosophical intellectualism of the West, Maimon conveys the physically wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, his own development as a thinker in the company of Moses Mendelssohn and others, and the world of the wealthy Berlin Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.

According to Hasidic lore, the various ways in which men learn to perfect themselves are the "rungs" on the ladder leading to the realm of heaven. It is said: "No limits are set to the ascent of man, and to each and every one the highest stands open. Here it is only your personal choice that decides.". The tales and aphorisms retold here by Martin Buber belong to the teachings of Hasidism, the mystical movement that swept Eastern European Jewry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fanciful and sober by turn, these sayings never swerve from their basic purpose: to arouse in man an awareness of his condition and to show him the way to the righteous life. In Martin Buber they have an ideal editor and interpreter. The relation is reciprocal, for Buber's own religious philosophy owes much to Hasidism, through its emphasis on joyful worship and its belief that "there is no rung of being on which we cannot find the holiness of God everywhere and at all times."