Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography.

Born into a struggling provincial Jewish family in 1753, Solomon Maimon was a prodigy who quickly mastered what his teachers could teach him, and then rejected their authority entirely. This is the story of his escape from the suffocating orthodoxy of Polish Jewish life, his wandering years among Hasidic mystics and Kabbalistic scholars, and his eventual arrival in Berlin where he became the philosopher Kant called "the sharpest" of his critics. But this is no dry intellectual autobiography. Maimon writes with wicked humor and picaresque verve about his youthful rebellions, his failed schemes, and his encounters with a cast of characters ranging from cunning rabbis to sympathetic nobility. The book pulses with a restless, rebellious intelligence, one that refused to accept any authority until it had been genuinely tested. It offers an extraordinary window into Enlightenment-era Jewish existence, the internal conflicts facing Jewish intellectuals torn between tradition and modernity, and the making of a philosophical mind that would influence thinkers from Goethe to Benjamin to Arendt. This memoir has endured for over two centuries because it reads not as a relic but as the urgent, witty voice of a man who thought dangerously and wrote with devastating clarity.