Maimonides justifies his move toward allegorical interpretation by citing an explicit example from Plato: "For they concealed what they said about the first principles and presented it in enigmas. Thus Plato . . . designated Matter as the female and Form as the male" (Maimonides 1963, 43; see Klein-Braslavy 1986, 198). This example, presented as if random and innocent, becomes in fact the
master
allegory of Maimonides's writing. The connection between matter and the female, according to Maimonides, lies in the fact that "woman" is a name for that which needs to be joined to something else, and matter, of course, in Platonic-Aristotelian physics, desires to be joined with a form. What is astounding here is how quickly Maimonides's ontology and its connected hermeneutic practice bring him to expressions of virulent misogyny, much more virulent, indeed, than any known in the older formation of midrashic Judaism:
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 | | How extraordinary is what
Solomon
said in his wisdom when likening matter
to a married harlot,
for matter is in no way found without form and is consequently always like a
married woman
who is never separated from a
man
and is never
free
. However, notwithstanding her being
a married woman,
she never ceases to seek for another man to substitute for her husband, and she deceives and draws him on in every way until he obtains from her what her husband used to obtain.
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| | (Maimonides 1963, 431)
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Maimonides's allegorization of "woman" and "man" as matter and form, and his physical philosophy of matter as always in need of form and always exchanging forms, essentializes woman (as the allegorized term) into an ontological whoredom. We typically refer to such allegory as
personification allegory
and forget that it is also a reification of persons. When those persons are not individual fictional characters but categories of real human beings, the social results can be dramaticindeed devastating. Maimonides continues his exposition of the relation of matter to form:
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| | For example, man's apprehension of his Creator, his mental representation of every intelligible, his control of his desire and his anger . . . are all of them consequent upon his form. On the other hand, his eating and drinking and copulation and his passionate desire for these things, as well as his anger and all bad habits found in him, are all of them consequent on his matter. Inasmuch as it is clear that this is so, and as according to what has been laid down by divine wisdom it is impossible for matter to exist without form and for any of the forms in question to exist without matter, and as consequently it was necessary that man's
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