In Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen, one of the main characters, Danny, is a brilliant scholar who is faced with a troubling situation at home, due to his aspiration to study and become a psychologist, and what his father wants: for Danny to become a rabbi. Solomon Maimon and Reb Saunders' brother were both Jewish scholars whose short lives brought loss and pain due to their cold, calculating minds. The two were also different in that Reb Saunders' brother was a teacher, who had an impatient nature, while Maimon was a scholar who left his family, because his hunger for knowledge was too much for him. Danny is like the two intelligent men in the fact that the men are intelligent beyond compare, have the same heritage, and are unsatisfied with not enough knowledge, yet he is different from Solomon Maimon since he has more freedom to learn and, finally, Danny is unlike Reb Saunders' son because he was raised in silence, allowing him to feel because he felt the pain.…show more content… Maimon, a famous Polish scholar, left his wife and children to join a group of philosophers in the second half of the eighteenth century, in order to achieve his ultimate goal of pursuing knowledge. He became a philosopher, studying and writing. His life wasn't long, as he died on his Christian friends' estate at the age of forty seven. Like Maimon, Danny Saunders is a phenomenon. As Reuven's father describes to Reuven in a conversation about Danny's importance, Danny's mind is amazing, especially since he is American, and has more freedoms than Maimon did, or ever would as a polish citizen. Still, they both taught themselves German, a language that many scholars wrote books in, and read forbidden texts, texts that their religion, Judaism, did not agree
