Every scholar knows the dread of “Reviewer Two.”
You submit the article, the chapter, the monograph over which you have laboured for years, and upon which glittering prizes of promotion or tenure depend. In due course the verdicts from the peer reviewers return: the agreeable, the constructive, and the lethal. Reviewer One is generous, scattering compliments and a few painless suggestions. Reviewer Three offers some constructive grumbles, nothing that will ruin your summer. Reviewer Two, by contrast, descends from the Google cloud like an avenging angel of methodological displeasure, ferreting out various weak joints and pronouncing, with icy finality, the sentence that upends hearts and tenure clocks around the world: this requires substantial revision.
For junior scholars such as your obedient servant, the terror is sharper still. Everything one writes will be read by people more widely read, securely situated, and professionally advanced than oneself. Somewhere out there sits the man who knows the article you failed to cite, the manuscript you misread, the distinction you fudged, and the whole conceptual wobble that renders your labour, if not entirely worthless, then certainly in dire need of extensive reworking.
Great works of religious literature have, on the whole, been spared this particular humiliation. They attract commentary, certainly, but of a reverent kind: later hands interpret, qualify, expand, harmonise, and occasionally dissent, yet they do so from within a posture of deference, treating the canonical author not as a dispensable junior colleague but as an indispensable voice to be construed with charity and gravitas. Jewish intellectual history, however, furnishes one glorious exception. Maimonides, the supreme codifier of Jewish law and the towering philosopher of the tradition, was in effect assigned a Reviewer Two, whose name has remained in the mouths of rabbinic students these past eight centuries at least.
