Born in golden-age Córdoba
Moses ben Maimon, known in Hebrew by the acronym Rambam, and in the West as Maimonides, was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, on the eve of Passover in 1138 (some sources say 1135). Córdoba was then one of the great cities of Europe, a centre of Arabic learning in which Jews had long flourished as scholars, poets, physicians and courtiers. His father, Maimon ben Joseph, was a respected rabbinic judge, a dayyan, and taught his son Torah and Talmud. The boy also read widely in the Greek philosophy and science that had come down in Arabic translation, above all Aristotle.
That world was shattered when he was about ten. In 1148 the Almohads, a militant Berber dynasty from North Africa, captured Córdoba and abolished the protected status that Jews and Christians had held under earlier Muslim rulers. Jews faced a stark choice: convert to Islam, leave, or die. Many converted outwardly while keeping their faith in secret. Maimon’s family chose exile.
Years of wandering
For roughly a decade the family moved through southern Spain and North Africa, and around 1160 they settled in Fez, in Morocco, itself under Almohad rule. Whether the family was forced to profess Islam outwardly during these years has been debated by historians for centuries; what is clear is that the young Maimonides kept studying, writing an early treatise on logic and beginning his great commentary on the Mishnah. In 1165, after one of his teachers in Fez was executed, the family fled again.
They sailed to the Land of Israel, landing at Acre on May 16, 1165. That autumn Maimonides went up to Jerusalem, then under Crusader rule, and prayed on the Temple Mount, and visited the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. But the country was poor and unsettled, and the family moved on to Egypt, first to Alexandria and then, by 1168, to Fustat, the old city beside Cairo, where Jews could practise their religion openly. It would be his home for the rest of his life.
Grief and the turn to medicine
In Fustat, Maimonides completed his Commentary on the Mishnah in 1168. Written in Arabic, it explained the core text of rabbinic law in clear, systematic language, and in one famous section he set out thirteen principles of Jewish faith, among them God’s existence, unity and incorporeality, the prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, and the coming of the Messiah. Simplified into verse, they are still sung in synagogues today as the hymn Yigdal, and printed in prayer books as the Ani Ma’amin.
His scholarly life had been supported by the family business, run by his younger brother David, a jewellery merchant. Sometime between 1169 and 1177, David drowned in the Indian Ocean on a trading voyage, taking much of the family’s money with him. Maimonides was devastated. Years later he wrote that it was the greatest misfortune of his life: on hearing the news he took to his bed for about a year with fever and depression, and still could not be consoled, David had grown up on his knees; he was his brother and his student. With the family’s fortune gone, and rabbis in his day being unpaid, he turned to medicine for a living.
Physician to the court
Maimonides became one of the most celebrated physicians of the Islamic world. He served as physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, the chief minister of Saladin, then to the court of Saladin himself, and after Saladin’s death to the Ayyubid dynasty. For the sultan al-Afdal, Saladin’s son, who suffered from depression, he wrote a Regimen of Health stressing diet, exercise, sleep and peace of mind. Among his medical works are the Medical Aphorisms, a compendium of some 1,500 aphorisms building on the Greek physician Galen, a Treatise on Asthma and a Treatise on Poisons and Their Antidotes. His emphasis on prevention, hygiene and the patient’s emotional state has been praised by modern doctors.
The work was gruelling. In a letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon, who wanted to visit him, Maimonides described his day: an early ride to the sultan’s palace in Cairo, hours of attendance on the royal household, and a return to Fustat to find his antechambers full of Jewish and Muslim patients waiting. He ate his one meal of the day, treated them until nightfall and beyond, and finally prescribed lying down from exhaustion. He was also, for long periods, the recognised leader, the nagid, of Egypt’s Jewish community, answering legal questions from across the Jewish world. His Epistle to Yemen (1172–74) sent comfort and guidance to the hard-pressed Jews of Yemen.
The Mishneh Torah
Alongside all this, Maimonides produced the work that would make him the central figure of Jewish law. Over roughly ten years, from about 1170 to 1180, he wrote the Mishneh Torah (“Repetition of the Law”), a code of the entire body of Jewish law in fourteen books, organised by subject and written in a lucid, elegant Mishnaic Hebrew. For the first time, everything, from prayer and the Sabbath to agriculture, damages, the Temple service and the laws of kings, was gathered in one place and stated clearly, without the long debates of the Talmud. He had prepared the ground with the Book of Commandments, which enumerated the 613 commandments of the Torah.
The code was revolutionary, and controversial. Critics objected that it gave rulings without citing sources and feared it would be used in place of Talmud study. But it became one of the pillars of halakha: later codes, including the Shulchan Aruch, rest heavily upon it, and it is studied daily by Jews around the world. Its ethics have been just as enduring. Maimonides taught that the right path in character lies in the mean between extremes, and he ranked charity in eight degrees, the highest being to help a person become self-sufficient, through a gift, a loan or a partnership, so that they need never depend on others.
The Guide for the Perplexed
His philosophical masterpiece, the Guide for the Perplexed, was completed around 1190. Written in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew letters, and framed as a letter to a gifted student, it was addressed to readers torn between the Bible and the rigorous philosophy of Aristotle. Maimonides argued that the two need not conflict: the Bible’s descriptions of God with hands, eyes or emotions must be read figuratively, and true knowledge of God is reached through reason. His “negative theology” held that God’s essence is unknowable and can be described only by what God is not; the more one can show to be inapplicable to God, he wrote, the better.
He also tackled the creation of the world, concluding that neither creation nor the eternity of the universe could be proved, but that creation was the better view; he explained prophecy as a perfection of the intellect and imagination; and he sought rational purposes for the commandments. The Guide was translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon in 1204, the year of Maimonides’ death. In the following decades it provoked the bitter “Maimonidean controversy”: some rabbis in Provence and northern France banned it, and copies were burned in Montpellier.
From Cairo to Aquinas
The Guide’s reach extended far beyond Judaism. Translated into Latin, it was read closely by the great Christian scholastics. Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas engaged extensively with “Rabbi Moses”, as they called him, on questions such as the proofs of God’s existence, the limits of human language about God and the eternity of the world, and Duns Scotus and the mystic Meister Eckhart drew on him too. Centuries later Spinoza, Leibniz and even Isaac Newton wrestled with his ideas.
That a Jewish refugee writing in Arabic in twelfth-century Egypt should help shape the architecture of Christian philosophy is one of the great cross-cultural stories of the Middle Ages. Muslim scholars also read him: the Guide drew on al-Farabi, Avicenna and al-Ghazali, and it belongs as much to the history of Islamic philosophy as to Jewish and Christian thought.
Death and legacy
Maimonides married late and had one son, Abraham, who became a distinguished scholar in his own right and succeeded him as nagid and court physician; the leadership of Egyptian Jewry remained in the family for four generations. Maimonides died in Fustat on December 12, 1204. According to medieval tradition his body was carried to the Land of Israel and buried in Tiberias, where his tomb is a place of pilgrimage, though there is no contemporary evidence for the move.
His tomb bears the saying that sums up his standing in Jewish memory: “From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses.” He is honoured in medicine too, though the popular “Oath of Maimonides” recited by some medical graduates was almost certainly written centuries later, probably by the eighteenth-century German physician Markus Herz. No authentic portrait of him survives; the familiar bearded image is an eighteenth-century invention. What survives instead is an extraordinary body of work in law, philosophy and medicine, and the example of a man who believed faith and reason could, and must, be held together.
Sources & further reading
Maimonides, Wikipedia · Maimonides, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy · Moses Maimonides (Rambam), Jewish Virtual Library · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.