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Solomon Maimon´s autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work. This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter´s translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon´s prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon´s contribution to modern philosophy.

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"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

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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.

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