A quiz question · hard
Saladin's senior court physician at Cairo — a man who fled the Almohad persecution in Córdoba as a teenager, ended up in Egypt by way of Morocco and Palestine, and on the side wrote the most influential medieval Jewish philosophical work ever — was?
Maimonides served Saladin's vizier Al-Qadi al-Fadil and later Saladin's son Al-Afdal. His *Guide for the Perplexed* (c. 1190) is the major work of medieval Jewish philosophy. Avicenna had been dead for 130 years by then (980–1037) and lived in Persia, never Cairo. Averroes was a contemporary of Maimonides — also from Córdoba, also a doctor — but he stayed in Andalusia and served the Almohad rulers there. Al-Razi (c. 854–925) was even earlier, the great Persian physician and freethinker.
Read the full story →From the story
The Jewish Doctor in Saladin's Court Moses Maimonides was expelled from Córdoba as a teenager, fled across the Mediterranean, and ended up as court physician to Saladin and Saladin's son in Cairo. In between he wrote the most important medieval Jewish work of philosophy.
Related questions
- Saladin destroyed a Crusader army in the summer of 1187 and recaptured Jerusalem within months. The battle that broke the Crusader military was?
- What did the curate Henry Whitehead discover during his six-month house-to-house investigation of the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak?
- In what year did the Aachen dancing mania — the larger, less famous predecessor of the 1518 Strasbourg outbreak — strike?
- How did Pope Clement VI survive the Black Death in plague-ridden Avignon?