From Cordoba to Cairo
Moses ben Maimon, known in Hebrew as Rambam and in Latin and English as Maimonides, was born in Cordoba, in Muslim Spain, in the 1130s (1138 is the traditional date). Cordoba had been a major center of Jewish and Islamic learning, and he grew up in a scholarly family. His education combined the Torah and Talmud with Arabic philosophy, mathematics and medicine, which was normal for educated Jews in the Islamic world.
His childhood ended with political upheaval. A new North African dynasty, the Almohads, took Cordoba in the middle of the twelfth century and pressed non-Muslims to convert or leave. The family left, and the details of their travels are partly uncertain. They are generally said to have lived for some years in Morocco, including the city of Fez, then to have traveled to the Land of Israel for a short time, before settling in Egypt in the 1160s. There they lived in Fustat, the older part of what is now Cairo, which had a large and active Jewish community.
Life in Egypt
In Egypt, Maimonides studied, wrote and, after the death of his brother David, who was a merchant and is said to have been lost at sea, he took up medicine to support his family. In time he became a physician connected with the ruling circle. Sources associate him with the court of Saladin’s government, and he is described as physician to a high official, though the exact roles are a matter for historians to debate. He also had a position of leadership in the Jewish community, although how formal it was and how long he held it are less certain.
He wrote letters answering questions from Jews as far away as Yemen and southern France. He died in 1204 and, according to tradition, was buried in Tiberias. His tomb became a place of pilgrimage.
His major Jewish works
He wrote an early commentary on the Mishnah in Arabic, as a young man, which included a statement of thirteen principles of Jewish belief. These principles became widely known and are reflected in hymns and prayer books still used today.
His largest legal work was the Mishneh Torah, completed around 1180. It organized the whole of Jewish law into a clear Hebrew code without citing the debates of the Talmud, which made it accessible but also controversial. Some critics feared that it would replace the study of the Talmud itself, and others disagreed with specific rulings. It nevertheless became one of the central works of Jewish law and a reference for later codes.
The Guide of the Perplexed
His best-known philosophical work, the Guide of the Perplexed, was written in Arabic with Hebrew letters, probably around the 1190s. It was addressed to a student troubled by the apparent conflict between faith and reason. Maimonides argued that the Bible’s language about God, which often seems to describe God in human terms, should be understood figuratively, and that God cannot be described by positive attributes in the way a person can. He drew on Aristotle as read through Arabic thinkers, and on the discussions of faith and reason in the Islamic world.
The book was not simple, and he said as much: he wrote it for a limited audience. Its approach caused argument. In the early thirteenth century, some Jewish communities in southern France and Spain split over whether the Guide and his other philosophical writing should be read or banned. In the 1230s, some opponents appealed to Christian authorities, and the Dominicans are reported to have burned copies, a sad episode of internal dispute that became external persecution. The dispute faded, but it shows how bold the work seemed.
Medicine
Maimonides wrote several medical works in Arabic, including advice on diet and health, treatises on specific problems such as poisons and asthma, and a commentary on earlier medical authorities. He relied on the Greek tradition, notably Galen, as filtered through Arabic writers, and he sometimes disagreed with it. His medical writing stresses moderation, regimen and attention to the patient, which fits the humoral theory of his day. A modern reader would not accept the underlying theory, but the focus on prevention and on practical caution is a sensible feature of his writing. His work belongs alongside that of the wider medieval medicine tradition and the Arabic writers such as Ibn Sina.
Reach and influence
The Guide of the Perplexed was translated into Hebrew within a generation or so and later into Latin. Latin Christian scholars, including Thomas Aquinas, read it and referred to the author, sometimes as “Rabbi Moses”. Aquinas did not agree on every point, but the work provided an example of how a religious thinker could combine revelation with Aristotelian reasoning, a task that scholastic thinkers in the medieval universities also set themselves.
Within Judaism, Maimonides’ influence continued in law, theology and education. A saying attached to him, “From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses”, is traditional praise, not history, but it reflects how highly later generations valued him. His surviving autograph writings and the letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza help scholars understand his daily work and correspondence.
A balanced view
Because Maimonides became such a figure of reverence, it is useful to separate legend from evidence. We know a good deal from his own writing and from documents of the period, but some biographical details, such as exact dates, travel routes and the scope of his official positions, rest on later tradition. What is clear is that he was a rare figure who worked at once as a doctor, a legal authority and a philosopher, in a city where Jews, Muslims and Christians shared the same markets and, sometimes, the same intellectual world.