Maimonides

Moses ben Maimon, known in English as Maimonides and in Jewish tradition by the acronym Rambam, was a Jewish rabbi, legal scholar, philosopher and physician of the twelfth century. Born in Muslim Spain and settled in Egypt, he produced the first comprehensive code of Jewish law and The Guide of the Perplexed, the most important work of medieval Jewish philosophy, which tried to reconcile the Bible with the philosophy of Aristotle.

Maimonides was born in Córdoba, then one of the great cities of Muslim al-Andalus, into a family of rabbinic scholars; his father, Maimon, was a judge of the Jewish community. The traditional birth date is 1135, but many modern scholars prefer 1138. In 1148 the city fell to the Almohad Caliphate, a Berber dynasty that ended the toleration of Jews and Christians and pressed them to convert to Islam or leave. The family went into years of wandering, in southern Spain and then North Africa, settling for a time in Fez in Morocco. Whether they outwardly professed Islam there, as some medieval sources claim, is debated.

Around 1165 the family left Morocco, stopped briefly in the Holy Land, and settled in Fustat, the old city that is now part of Cairo. Egypt was still ruled by the Fatimid Caliphate, and then from 1171 by Saladin and his Ayyubid dynasty, both far more tolerant of Jews than the Almohads. Maimonides was at first supported by his younger brother David, a merchant in the India trade. When David drowned in the Indian Ocean, around 1177, taking much of the family's wealth with him, Maimonides was devastated and turned to medicine for a living.

Maimonides became one of the best-known doctors in Egypt. He served at the Ayyubid court, in the circle of Saladin's chief minister al-Qadi al-Fadil and later of Saladin's son al-Afdal. In a famous letter he described a working day spent attending the court and then seeing crowds of patients at home until late at night. He wrote about ten medical works in Arabic, on subjects such as diet, asthma, poisons and the aphorisms of Galen, stressing prevention and moderation.

He was also recognised as head of the Jewish community of Egypt and answered legal questions sent from across the Jewish world. His Epistle to Yemen, written in 1172 to a community suffering forced conversions and stirred by a false messiah, offered comfort and warned against messianic speculation. He died in Fustat in December 1204. According to tradition he was buried in Tiberias, in today's Israel, where his tomb is still visited.

Maimonides' first major work was a Commentary on the Mishnah, the core text of rabbinic law, completed around 1168 and written in Arabic. In it he set out thirteen principles of faith that every Jew must accept, including the existence, unity and bodilessness of God, the prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. This was the first attempt to define Jewish belief as a creed, and it provoked argument from the start, though the principles later entered the prayer book in poetic form.

His masterpiece in law was the Mishneh Torah, completed around 1178 and written in clear Hebrew. Its fourteen books arranged the whole of Jewish law, scattered across the vast Talmud and later rulings, into a single logical system, without the debates and citations that made the sources so hard to use. Maimonides tried to show that each commandment had a rational purpose. Critics feared that the code might replace study of the Talmud itself, and that its lack of sources made it hard to check, but it became one of the foundations of all later Jewish legal writing.

The Guide of the Perplexed, finished around 1190 and written in Arabic in Hebrew letters, is addressed to a student torn between the Torah and philosophy. Maimonides, who followed Aristotle as read by Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, argued that the two need not clash. Biblical passages that describe God with a body or human feelings are to be read figuratively. God has no body and no attributes in the ordinary sense, and humans can say properly only what God is not; this approach is known as negative theology.

On the question that divided philosophers and believers, whether the world was created or has always existed, Maimonides argued that neither side could be proved by reason. Since Aristotle's arguments for an eternal world were not conclusive, he held, the biblical teaching of creation should be accepted. He also explained prophecy as a natural perfection of the intellect and imagination, and gave reasons for the commandments, including historical explanations of sacrifice. The book is written with deliberate contradictions and hints, so that, as he said, only the qualified reader would understand its full meaning, and scholars still argue over what he really believed.

The Guide and parts of the Mishneh Torah set off a bitter dispute among Jews in Spain and Provence in the thirteenth century, when traditionalists accused his followers of putting philosophy above faith; in the 1230s his books were reportedly burned in Montpellier. Yet his authority in Jewish law and thought only grew, summed up in the saying that from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses. In Christian Europe, the Guide was translated into Latin, and Thomas Aquinas cited "Rabbi Moses" with respect on questions of God and creation. Baruch Spinoza, centuries later, criticised his method of interpreting scripture, while engaging closely with it.

Maimonides is the leading figure of the Jewish side of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, a towering name in Judaism, and a reminder of the shared intellectual world of Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain and Egypt, where he lived in the same age as his fellow Cordoban Averroes.