He studied in Berlin at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, where he was ordained as a rabbi in 1926.
Leaving Germany in 1938, Maybaum was given work in the United Synagogue by the British Chief Rabbi, Joseph Hertz.
He is most frequently remembered for his controversial view in The Face of God After Auschwitz (1965) that the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust was vicarious atonement for the sins of the rest of the world.
He was connecting the Jewish people to the figure of the "suffering servant" of Isaiah 52 and 53 in the Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament).
In the same work he employed Christian imagery, speaking of Auschwitz as the new Golgotha and the gas chambers as replacing the cross.