March’s OLL birthday essay is in honor of the great Jewish rabbi, legal scholar, philosopher, community leader, and physician Moses ben Maimon, better known by the Hellenized version of his name, Maimonides. In Hebrew he is often called “Rambam,” an abbreviation of “Our Rabbi Moses, son of Maimon” and occasionally as “the Great Eagle” (haNesher haGadol). Although he made his living as a physician, he is mostly famous for his enduring contribution to the development of Jewish law and the crucial role his works subsequently played in medieval Scholastic philosophy.
The Reading Room
OLL’s March Birthday: Maimonides (30 March 1135 [?] – 12 December 1204)
Moses was born into an important rabbinic family in the city of Cordoba, then part of the Almoravid Caliphate. He received a sound education in the Jewish law (halakha) from his father and other rabbis, and the family enjoyed a prominent place in the Jewish community. Importantly, he also read works by Aristotle and Plato, available in Arabic translations.
Things changed for the family after the fall of the Almoravids and their replacement by the Almohads in 1148. Far more intolerant than their predecessors, the Almohads demanded that Christians and Jews under their rule convert to Islam or leave their territories. Maimon’s family finally left Cordoba in 1159 and moved to Fez, in modern day Morocco. While Fez was also under the control of the Almohads, the Jewish community managed a precarious semi-clandestine existence. While in Fez, Maimonides continued his study of Jewish law with the local rabbis while also studying medicine, a decision that was to have important consequences.
By 1164 the Almohads had extended their persecution of the Jews and Christians to their other domains and the family was forced to move once again. This time they moved briefly to Akko (Acre) in Palestine and then, in 1166, to Egypt, eventually settling in Fustat, today a neighborhood known as Old Cairo. Maimonides lived there the rest of his life.
During these years, Maimonides concerned himself mostly with efforts to organize and explain aspects of the Jewish law to be more understandable. Importantly many of these (and subsequent) works were written in Arabic, the language most Jews in the Middle East and North Africa actually spoke, or Judeo-Arabic; Arabic written with Hebrew letters. In 1165 he completed his commentaries on the Mishnah (which he had begun around the time of his family’s flight to Fez), and in 1167 he began work on the Book of Commandments (Sefer Hamitzvot). This became one of his most famous works, with commentaries on the 613 commandments Jewish tradition maintains are contained in the Torah. Among the many important conclusions he drew in the process of expounding on these commandments was: “It is better to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death,” a principle subsequently proclaimed by other legal scholars (perhaps most famously Blackstone) in the centuries to come.
In the midst of Maimonides’ growth as a scholar, tragedy struck his family. His younger brother, David, had become a successful merchant. In 1171 he embarked on an ambitious trip to India, during which he died in a shipwreck, losing not only his life but his entire cargo. The task of sustaining the extended family suddenly fell to Maimonides and he fell back on his training in medicine, setting himself up as a physician to pay the bills.
These were turbulent years, not only for Maimonides and his family, but for Egypt and broader region as the Crusades continued to unsettle Palestine and Syria. The Fatimid dynasty (which ruled Egypt and parts of Palestine and Syria), weakened by wars with the Crusaders and riven with internal problems, was finally overthrown in 1171 by the famous Kurdish warrior Salah al-Din (better known to the West as “Saladin”) who founded the Ayyubid Dynasty (1171-1260).
In the meantime, Maimonides' stature as both an expert in Jewish law and as a successful physician led to prestigious appointments and positions. In 1177 he was appointed the Nagid, or head of the Jewish community in Egypt. Around that same time his fame as a physician led first to medical service in the Ayyubid court and, eventually, to a position as personal physician to Sultan Salah al-Din himself. While his medical knowledge was rooted firmly in Galen’s work, he is important in the History of Medicine for incorporating his own experiences into his medical treatises, many of which remained standard medical texts well into the late Middle Ages. One of his most important medical books, the Guide to Good Health, was translated into Latin as the Regimen Sanitatis and published in Florence in 1477, after which it became a standard medical textbook. While many of his Galenic analyses and prescriptions are nowadays obsolete, his insights into the importance of psychological and spiritual care in the treatment of patients remain relevant to this day.
It was after he had attained these positions of influence and power that Maimonides wrote and/or completed some of his most famous and important works. Besides the Book of Commandments (mentioned earlier) perhaps the most important of these was the Mishneh Torah, on which he had worked for at least a decade and finally completed in 1180. In its fourteen volumes, he outlines and codifies the totality of Jewish law in a straightforward and accessible manner. Although written in Hebrew, unlike the Judeo-Arabic of most of his previous works, he intended this book to serve as an accessible aid to those in search of answers to any legal question. While many contemporary legal scholars denounced the book for not citing sources or including commentaries on the legal principles involved, it quickly became a standard source for all subsequent work on Jewish law.
It was also during this time in Maimonides’ life that he wrote what is probably his most famous work, The Guide for the Perplexed. Written in Judeo-Arabic, it incorporates many strands prevalent in the Islamic philosophy of the time, especially in the works of his contemporary and fellow Cordoban, Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198). The main objective of the work is to reconcile Jewish theology, and especially law, with philosophy, particularly the works of Aristotle. Like the work of Averroes, and the Christian Scholastics, the Guide argued that there was no conflict between philosophical reason and revelation. Along the way, Maimonides presents anti-anthropomorphic arguments about the descriptions of God in the Bible, and makes interesting contributions to Theodicy (including a version of the Privation Theory of Evil). The book was translated into Hebrew in 1204, the year of Maimonides’ death, and created a sensation, with some acclaiming it as brilliant and others, especially members of the established rabbinical community, denouncing it as heresy. A group of French rabbis even appealed to the Dominican Order, the custodians of the Inquisition, to burn all copies of the Guide (as well as Maimonides’ other books for good measure), a request which the Dominicans were only too happy to oblige. Nevertheless, the Guide for the Perplexed became a classic not only in Jewish intellectual history, but in Medieval Scholasticism as well.
Maimonides married late in life, and he and his wife had one son, Abraham (1186 – 1237). Abraham succeeded his father as Nagid and court physician and became a respected philosopher and rabbi in his own right. As for Moses ben Maimon, his remains were moved to Tiberias, in Galilee, where today an impressive monument marks the final resting place of the Great Eagle.