Moses ben Maimon — known in Hebrew as the Rambam, in Latin as Maimonides — was born in Córdoba in southern Spain on 30 March 1138, in the closing decades of what would later be called the Golden Age of Andalusian Jewish culture. His father was a respected rabbinic judge; the family belonged to a Sephardic scholarly tradition reaching back several centuries. By the time Maimonides was ten years old the world he had been born into was over.
The Almohads — a fundamentalist Berber Muslim dynasty that had conquered most of modern Morocco — crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 1146 and captured Córdoba in 1148. Their religious policy ended the centuries of dhimmi tolerance that Andalusian Jews and Christians had lived under. Non-Muslims were given the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The Maimonides family chose exile. They wandered for the next eleven years across southern Spain and North Africa under conditions of varying severity, eventually settling around 1160 in Fez in Morocco — where the persecution found them again. Around 1165 they fled east. After a brief stop in Crusader-controlled Palestine they continued south to Cairo, capital of the Fatimid caliphate.
The court physician
Maimonides arrived in Egypt as an experienced refugee in his late twenties. His father died shortly after the family settled at Fustat (the old Egyptian capital, immediately south of the new Fatimid city of Cairo). His younger brother David, on whom the family income depended, drowned around 1169 in the Indian Ocean while travelling on a trading expedition; the loss left Maimonides responsible for his widowed sister-in-law and her children as well as his own household. He had been studying medicine — as a probable supplementary profession to rabbinic scholarship — for at least a decade. He now had to practice it for a living.
The political timing was fortunate. Saladin — the Kurdish general who had been installed as Fatimid vizier in 1169 — abolished the Fatimid caliphate in 1171 and reorganized Egypt as the seat of the new Ayyubid sultanate. The new Ayyubid administration was meritocratic by 12th-century standards and substantially Sunni-Muslim in religious orientation but tolerant of Jewish and Christian professionals. Maimonides progressively built a medical practice and an administrative reputation in Cairo through the 1170s.
By around 1185, Maimonides had been appointed personal physician to Al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s senior vizier — the effective second-in-command of the Ayyubid state. The position gave Maimonides direct access to the Ayyubid court and substantial standing among the Cairo medical community. He was, by his own slightly weary description in a 1199 letter to his French translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, expected at the sultan’s palace at dawn and worked through the afternoon attending to the senior household and visiting officials, returning home in the evening to a queue of waiting Jewish and Muslim patients that lasted into the night.
Whether he personally treated Saladin is uncertain. The Ayyubid medical establishment was substantial and Saladin had at least three senior personal physicians at any given period. Maimonides was certainly within the court medical hierarchy by the mid-1180s and was attending senior members of the sultan’s household. After Saladin’s death in 1193, Maimonides served as personal physician to Saladin’s eldest son Al-Afdal, who ruled Damascus and southern Syria.
The philosophical project
The medical position was a means of supporting himself. Maimonides’s lifetime intellectual project was the systematic reorganization of Jewish theological and legal tradition on Aristotelian philosophical foundations. He wrote in Arabic (the standard scholarly language of medieval Islamic Egypt) and in Hebrew (for Jewish-community legal correspondence). Over approximately thirty years of practice he produced:
The Mishneh Torah (completed 1180) — a comprehensive fourteen-book codification of all of Jewish religious law, written in clear Mishnaic Hebrew prose, the first work of its kind. It is still studied as the primary legal-codification framework of Orthodox Jewish religious practice.
The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Ha’irin, completed c. 1190) — his philosophical masterwork, written in Arabic but rapidly translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon and into Latin by the 13th century. The Guide attempts a systematic reconciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with the Hebrew Bible, addressing the substantial perceived contradictions between the two traditions (the corporeality of God in scripture vs. Aristotelian metaphysics of pure form, the question of the world’s eternity vs. biblical creation, the problem of divine knowledge of contingent particulars, the status of prophecy, the meaning of biblical commandments). It is the most influential medieval Jewish philosophical work and was extensively studied and cited by Thomas Aquinas and the 13th-century Christian scholastics.
The medical treatises — including the Treatise on Asthma, the Treatise on Hemorrhoids, the Treatise on Poisons and Their Antidotes, the Aphorisms of Moses (a thousand medical maxims drawn from Galen and his own observation), and several specific case-history works. The medical writings are substantially competent by 12th-century Galenic standards and are among the most-translated medical works of the medieval period.
The Mediterranean correspondent
Maimonides served as the de facto religious authority of the western Mediterranean Jewish diaspora through the second half of his life. The volume of legal-religious correspondence he handled was substantial — over five hundred surviving responsa, addressing questions from Yemen, the Maghreb, southern France, the Crusader states, and the Sephardic communities of Christian Spain. The most consequential of the surviving responsa is the Epistle to Yemen (c. 1172), written in response to the persecution of Yemenite Jews under the Zaydi imamate, which articulated the principle of constancy under religious persecution and the strict prohibition of forced conversion as a religiously acceptable expedient.
His position made him controversial within the Jewish community. The traditional rabbinic authorities of southern France and the German Rhineland — substantially uneasy with the Aristotelian-philosophical character of the Guide — produced two major Jewish-community controversies (in the 1230s and again in the 1300s) over whether Maimonides’s writings should be permitted. The first controversy was particularly bitter; the rabbis of Montpellier persuaded the Dominican Inquisition to burn copies of the Guide and the Mishneh Torah in 1232 — possibly the first instance of Christian ecclesiastical book-burning aimed at Jewish theological writing.
Death
Maimonides died at Fustat on 13 December 1204, aged 66. His body was transported north to Crusader-controlled Palestine and buried at Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The tomb survives. The traditional Hebrew epitaph reads: “From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses” — comparing him to the Mosaic patriarch of biblical tradition.
The political-religious circumstances of Maimonides’s death are unusual. The Ayyubid sultan whose senior household had employed him for two decades had been dead for eleven years. The Jewish community of Fustat that he had led was substantial but politically subordinate to a Muslim Ayyubid state then completing the recovery of most of the Crusader Holy Land. The Crusader political entity that controlled the Galilee where he was buried would itself last only eighty-six more years before falling to the Mamluks at Acre in 1291. And the Almohad caliphate whose persecution had driven the Maimonides family out of Córdoba in 1148 was, by 1204, on the verge of its own military collapse at the hands of the Christian Castilian kings.
The single most consequential Jewish theological-philosophical career of the medieval period was lived almost entirely in transit between successive intolerant or just barely tolerable political regimes. The body buried at Tiberias rests today under the Israeli civil sovereignty established in 1948 — the seventh distinct sovereign authority to have controlled the burial site in the eight hundred and twenty years since Maimonides was interred there.