Maimonides

Why this Chapter exists

One man, read by three traditions at once.

Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) wrote in Arabic and in Hebrew, practiced medicine in a Muslim ruler’s court circle, and wrote law and philosophy for Jews. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars read him in his own time and after, and Jewish readers have studied him without a break for more than eight hundred years.

Object Spotlight

A page of the law code, painted in gold.

The page makes its statement before a word is read. A column of dense Hebrew script runs down one side. Beside it rises a tall blue frame, and inside it the opening word of the section glows in gold leaf, with a small painted figure hugging a Torah scroll. Around the edges, vines curl through the margins, and small animals and people climb among them. It looks like a king’s prayer book, the kind of object made to be shown off.

It is, in fact, a law book. This is a hand-copied manuscript of the Mishneh Torah (“the repetition of the Torah”), Maimonides’ enormous code of Jewish law, finished around 1178. A code is a single organized rulebook. The Talmud, the multi-volume record of rabbinic law and debate, makes a reader chase an answer through long arguments. Maimonides sorted the legal tradition by subject and wrote it out in clear Hebrew, so a literate Jew could look a matter up. The text itself is plain and practical. What you are looking at is what later hands did with it: a scribe copied it onto parchment, and an artist in Italy decorated it with gold.

The owners of this copy paid for gold leaf and for months of an artist’s labor to decorate a book of legal rulings. The artist, Matteo di Ser Cambio of Perugia, was not Jewish. He was hired to decorate a Jewish law code written by a man who had served in a Muslim ruler’s court.

The text these painted copies preserve is still printed and studied today, more than eight hundred years after Maimonides finished it. The illuminated manuscripts are now held in libraries. This one belongs to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.

Córdoba and the Almohad break · 1138–1148

The city he lost at ten.

Moses ben Maimon was born in Córdoba, in the Muslim-ruled part of Spain known as al-Andalus, in 1138, the date many modern scholars accept. (The traditional date, still given in some reference works, is 1135.) His father, Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph, was a scholar and a dayyan, a judge in the Jewish religious court, in the Córdoba community. The family belonged to the Jewish scholarly world of al-Andalus, which in the previous century had produced major Hebrew poets, philosophers, and legal scholars.

Córdoba in the early 1100s was still an important center of Jewish life. Its Jews lived under Muslim rule as dhimmis, a protected but legally lesser minority. The community ran its own institutions, supported its scholars, and kept ties across the Mediterranean Jewish world.

That ended in 1148, when Maimonides was about ten. A movement called the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn, “those who declare God’s oneness,” a militant religious-political movement out of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco) conquered Córdoba. The Almohads broke sharply with the practice of earlier Muslim rulers. Those rulers had let Jews and Christians live as protected minorities under a recognized legal status. The Almohads suspended those protections and offered non-Muslims a choice: convert to Islam, go into exile, or die. Enforcement varied by ruler and decade. Many Jews fled, and others were forced to convert.

The Maimon family fled Córdoba. The Almohad conquest broke up or destroyed the Jewish communities of al-Andalus across the late 1140s and 1150s. Where the family lived for the next eight or nine years is not recorded. By about 1160 they had settled in Fez, in Morocco.

The years of wandering · 1148–1166

From Spain to Egypt, the long way.

The years from 1148 to 1166 took the family from Spain to Egypt. Exactly where they went, and when, is only partly known. The pieces that survive sketch the route:

• Fez, from about 1160. The family lived for about five years in Fez, inside Almohad Morocco itself. There Maimonides began his earliest surviving work, including parts of the Commentary on the Mishnah (the early code of rabbinic law, explained below) that he would finish later in Egypt. How a Jewish family lived in a city where Almohad law forbade open Jewish practice is still debated. Jews who lived outwardly as Muslims while keeping Jewish practice in private were called anusim, “the forced ones,” in Hebrew sources.
• The Letter on Apostasy (Iggeret HaShemad). Written during or just after the Fez years. It addresses the standing of Jews forced to convert to Islam under Almohad pressure. Maimonides took a gentler line than some rabbis of his day: he held that Jews living under coercion kept their Jewish identity, and urged them to get out, to places where Jewish life could be lived in the open.
• A brief stay in the Land of Israel (1165). In 1165 the family sailed from Morocco and landed at Acre, in the Crusader kingdom (European Christian armies had taken Jerusalem in 1099). They stayed about five months. Maimonides prayed at the site of the Temple in Jerusalem and visited the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, the traditional tomb of Abraham. The family did not settle. Jewish life in the Land of Israel in this period is traced in the Continuous Presence Chapter.
• Egypt (1166). After a short stay in Alexandria, the family settled in Fustat, the old city of Cairo, in Fatimid Egypt, in 1166. Egypt had a large, established Jewish community living openly under Muslim rule. Maimonides spent the rest of his life there.

Maimonides’ father died around this time, either in the Land of Israel or in Egypt. His younger brother David, who had supported the family through the Indian Ocean gem trade, drowned in the Indian Ocean on a business trip around 1169. Maimonides’ own letters describe the loss. He writes that he lay ill with grief for about a year. He took up the practice of medicine in part to support the family once David’s income was gone.

Fustat · 1166–1204

The center of a life’s work.

Maimonides lived in Fustat for the last thirty-eight years of his life. His law code, his philosophy, and his medical writing all come from these years. The main threads of that period:

• Leading the community. Documents from the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom of discarded writings kept by the Jewish community of Fustat, indicate that Maimonides acted as head of the Egyptian Jewish community, probably from about 1171 and again in the 1190s. Whether he formally held the title ra’is al-Yahud (“head of the Jews”), and for how long, is debated. Egypt’s Jewish community was then among the most important in the Islamic world, with Fustat at its center.
• Court physician. Maimonides became a physician in the court circle of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn), the ruler who established Ayyubid power in Egypt and who took Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. He continued under Saladin’s son al-Afdal. His letter to his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon describes the sheer demands of the medical work and how it pressed against his time for scholarship.
• The three great books. The Commentary on the Mishnah was finished around 1168, the Mishneh Torah around 1178, and the Guide of the Perplexed around 1190, all written here, alongside the medical works and the letters.
• The letters. From Fustat he wrote to Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and beyond, in Yemen, in Provence in southern France, and in North Africa. The letters survive in later rabbinic collections and in the Cairo Geniza.

Maimonides died at Fustat on December 12 or 13, 1204. Public mourning was ordained in Fustat for three days, and in Jerusalem a public fast was held. His body was carried to Tiberias, in the Galilee region of the Land of Israel, where tradition holds he asked to be buried. His grave there is still a place of Jewish pilgrimage.

Commentary on the Mishnah · completed c. 1168

The first great work.

His first big book set out to solve a problem. The Mishnah (the early collection of rabbinic law, edited around 200 CE, that sits at the base of the Talmud) was studied everywhere, but a student opening it cold had little help making sense of it. So around 1168, about thirty years old, Maimonides wrote a running explanation he called the Kitāb al-Sirāj, “the Book of the Lamp” (in Hebrew, Pirush HaMishnah). He wrote it in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew letters, the everyday literary language of Jews across the Islamic world) and it was later translated into Hebrew, the form in which it became standard.

It broke ground in several ways. It was the first comprehensive commentary on the whole Mishnah to become widely influential, treating the Mishnah as one connected work rather than a stack of separate tractates. It organized the legal material around underlying principles. It also carried a set of philosophical introductions to particular tractates that laid down positions Maimonides would build on for the rest of his life. The most influential of these introductions:

• The General Introduction: on the history of the rabbinic tradition, the relationship between the Oral and Written Torah, the rabbis’ transmitted tradition alongside the written Bible, and how rabbinic law is to be interpreted.
• The introduction to Sanhedrin, chapter 10 (Helek): where Maimonides set out what became his “Thirteen Principles of Faith”: a short list of core beliefs covering the existence and nature of God, prophecy, divine providence, the messianic future, and resurrection. The Thirteen Principles later entered Jewish prayer books in two adaptations, the Yigdal hymn and the prose creed Ani Ma’amin (“I believe”), and both are still recited.
• The Eight Chapters (Shemonah Perakim): his introduction to Tractate Avot, the “Ethics of the Fathers.” Drawing on the ethical thought of Aristotle, it sets out a framework for shaping human character, the virtues, and right action.

The Mishneh Torah · completed c. 1178

The whole of Jewish law, in one book.

Next he set out to cover the whole of Jewish law, including laws no longer in practice, in a single organized book. He called it the Mishneh Torah (Hebrew for “Repetition of the Torah”), finished around 1178 after about a decade of work, when he was about forty.

Its ambition was unusual. Maimonides gathered Jewish law from the Bible, the Mishnah, the two Talmuds (the Babylonian and the shorter Jerusalem Talmud), and the later legal literature. He arranged it by subject instead of following the winding order of Talmudic debate. The goal, as he explained in his introduction, was a single reference a Jew could consult for an ordinary legal question without having to work back through the whole Talmud each time.

How the work is built:

• Fourteen books. Hebrew writes numbers with letters, and fourteen is written yod-dalet, which spells yad (“hand”). The work is therefore also known as the Yad ha-Hazakah, “the Strong Hand,” a phrase from the last verse of Deuteronomy.
• The opening. It begins with the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, on the nature of God, the basis of belief, and prophecy, before any rules of practice.
• Full scope. The fourteen books cover the whole of Jewish practice: prayer and blessings, Sabbath and festivals, marriage and divorce, business, and criminal law. They also include the laws of the Temple, kept in the code even though Rome had destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, more than a thousand years earlier. The final book, the Book of Judges, ends with the “Laws of Kings,” on political authority and the messianic future.
• Written in Hebrew. Unlike his other two great works, written in Judeo-Arabic, the Mishneh Torah is in clear Hebrew modeled on the language of the Mishnah, which gave it reach to Jewish communities across the diaspora whatever their spoken language.

Its reception was wide and not without argument. Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières (Rabad, c. 1125–1198), a scholar in Provence, wrote sharp critical glosses (hassagot) on points of philosophy and law. He objected in particular that Maimonides gave rulings without citing his sources. Rabad’s glosses are printed alongside the code in the standard editions.

The Guide of the Perplexed · completed c. 1190

The book for the believer who also reasons.

His third great work was for a different reader: the believer who had also studied philosophy and felt the two pulling in opposite directions. Finished around 1190, the Guide of the Perplexed (Hebrew: Moreh Nevuchim, in the original Judeo-Arabic Dalālat al-Ḥā’irīn) set out to show that faith and reason need not conflict. He wrote it in Judeo-Arabic. Samuel ibn Tibbon made the standard Hebrew translation during Maimonides’ lifetime and consulted him by letter about it.

The “perplexed” reader of the title is a specific kind of person: someone educated in both the Jewish tradition and the philosophy of Aristotle, who finds the two pulling against each other and does not know how to hold both. The book is framed as private instruction (addressed to one student, Joseph ben Judah) working through exactly those tensions. The questions it takes up:

• How to read the Bible’s language about God. When scripture speaks of God’s “hand” or “face” or “anger,” Maimonides argues, the words are figurative. To read them literally is to misunderstand a God who has no body and no human attributes.
• What can be said of God at all. His answer is a “negative theology.” A person can state what God is not (not physical, not changing, not made of parts) but cannot positively capture God’s essence in human terms.
• Whether the world is eternal or created. He weighs the Aristotelian view that the world always existed against the biblical view that it was created in time, and concludes for creation while acknowledging that neither side can be proven outright.
• Why the commandments exist. He argues that the commandments serve reasons a person can grasp, building moral character, ordering a just society, turning the mind toward the contemplation of God.
• What the highest human life is. The closing sections place intellectual understanding of God and the order of the world at the summit of human achievement, resting on a foundation of just action and a working community.

Within the Jewish world the Guide set off the Maimonidean Controversies of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a long dispute over whether Aristotelian philosophy belonged inside the tradition at all.

The medical corpus

The doctor of the Ayyubid court.

Medicine was a major body of Maimonides’ work alongside the religious and philosophical writing. He wrote about ten medical treatises during the Fustat years. They draw on the Greek medical tradition (Hippocrates and Galen) and on the Islamic one (Ibn Sīnā, known in Latin as Avicenna, and al-Rāzī, known as Rhazes). The principal works:

• Medical Aphorisms (Fuṣūl Mūsā, in Hebrew Pirkei Moshe): a large compilation of medical observations in twenty-five chapters.
• Regimen of Health: a treatise on staying well through diet, exercise, and habit, written for al-Afdal, Saladin’s son.
• Treatise on Asthma: written for a particular patient, on understanding and managing the condition.
• Treatise on Poisons and Antidotes: on the medical response to poisoning, with the remedies of the day.
• Further treatises on specific medical questions.

His medical standing reached well beyond the Jewish community. The documented record names the vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil and, later, Saladin’s son al-Afdal among his patients. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi’a, the thirteenth-century Arab historian of medicine, gives him a respectful entry in his Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians. He reports that Saladin himself sought Maimonides’ medical advice. Some modern biographers doubt that he treated Saladin in person.

The correspondence

Letters to frightened communities.

Maimonides’ surviving letters, preserved in later rabbinic literature and in the Cairo Geniza, are among the closest views we have of his daily life and of the role he played for Jews far beyond Egypt. The major ones:

• The Letter to Yemen (Iggeret Teiman): written around 1172 to Jacob ben Nathaniel al-Fayyumi, head of the Yemenite Jewish community. Yemen’s ruler, ‘Abd al-Nabi ibn Mahdi, had, in Maimonides’ words, “decreed compulsory apostasy for the Jews,” and many converted to Islam. The community was also stirred by a local would-be messiah. Maimonides made a steady case for patience and endurance, set against the long history of such moments.
• The Letter on Astrology: written around 1194 to the scholars of southern France, the sages of Marseilles. Against the common medieval view, held across the Christian and Islamic worlds alike, that astrology was real knowledge, Maimonides argued it was groundless.
• Personal correspondence: letters to his student Joseph ben Judah, to his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, and to family and correspondents around the Mediterranean. The Geniza letters in particular have let scholars reconstruct his actual day-to-day life.

The reception across traditions

Read across three traditions.

His readers came from three religious traditions and span eight centuries. The main lines:

• The Jewish reception. His place in the Jewish tradition has been central ever since. The Mishneh Torah became a foundational reference for later Jewish law, later paired with Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law (the subject of its own Chapter in this Unit). The Guide has been read continuously, with a long line of commentaries and modern study.
• The Christian reception. Albert the Great engaged him in the thirteenth century. Albert’s student Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica became a standard work of Catholic theology, cited him repeatedly by name as “Rabbi Moyses,” and the German mystic Meister Eckhart took up his metaphysics.
• The Islamic reception. His medical works were part of the Arabic medical literature and were treated with respect by figures like Ibn Abī Uṣaybi’a. His philosophy, though less circulated in the Islamic world than his medicine, was known and engaged there as well.
• The modern reception. Sustained modern engagement runs from Hermann Cohen (Religion of Reason, 1919) through Leo Strauss, whose work from the 1930s onward reshaped how scholars read the Guide, to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Isadore Twersky, Moshe Halbertal, Kenneth Seeskin, and many others.

Contested elements in the record

What historians still debate.

Parts of the Maimonidean record are contested. The main open questions:

• The Fez years and nominal conversion. Whether Maimonides and his family lived as outward Muslim converts in Almohad Fez is not settled. Medieval Muslim writers report a formal conversion, and some modern scholars, including Joel Kraemer, accept that the family lived outwardly as Muslims. The traditional Jewish account holds that they kept a Jewish identity throughout.
• The philosophical positions. What Maimonides actually held on resurrection, miracles, and the eternity of the world has been argued over since the Middle Ages. A long scholarly debate, sharpened by Leo Strauss, asks whether his private (“esoteric”) views matched his public (“exoteric”) statements. Strauss’s reading is influential and itself much disputed.
• The Maimonidean Controversies. From the 1230s into the early 1300s, Jewish scholars disputed whether his philosophical project belonged inside the tradition. In 1232, during the dispute, Dominican friars burned copies of his books. Whether they acted on their own or after a denunciation by Jewish opponents of Maimonides is still disputed.
• Specific legal rulings. Particular positions in the Mishneh Torah were contested by later authorities (the Rabad glosses, and the commentaries of Nahmanides and others) and that record of disagreement survives in the rabbinic literature.

Sites that survive

Where the record stands.

• Tiberias, in the Galilee, Israel, the tomb of Maimonides. His burial place, in the center of Tiberias, and still a site of Jewish pilgrimage.
• Córdoba, Spain, the Plaza de Tiberíades. A small square in Córdoba, named for Maimonides’ burial city, holding a statue of him by the sculptor Amadeo Ruiz Olmos (1964).
• Fustat / Old Cairo, Egypt, the Rambam Synagogue. Rambam, from the initials of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, is the name Jewish tradition uses for Maimonides. The synagogue in Fustat traditionally tied to Maimonides’ communal life, restored in the late 2000s.
• Hamburg, Germany, the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. Founded at the University of Hamburg in 2015, the present-day academic center for research on Maimonides. maimonides-centre.uni-hamburg.de →

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. Maimonides maps the medieval world through one life (Muslim Spain, Almohad Morocco, the Crusader-era Land of Israel, and Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt) and the movement of philosophy, law, and medicine across the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian worlds.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • analyze Maimonides’s works as primary sources
  • trace the movement of philosophy, law, and medicine across the medieval Jewish, Islamic, and Christian worlds
  • examine how one life maps a connected medieval Mediterranean
  • compare Maimonides the “system-builder” with Rashi the “text-explainer”
  • construct evidence-based historical arguments.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because Maimonides was read across the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions, this Chapter supports world history, philosophy, religious studies, and the history of medicine and science internationally.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 9.4 (Rise of Transregional Trade Networks) and 9.5 (Political Powers and Achievements). For grades 7–8, anchored through Common Core literacy and interdisciplinary humanities.
• Common Core RH.6–8, RH.9–10 & RH.11–12. Students assess an author’s purpose and point of view (RH.6–8.6, RH.9–10.6, RH.11–12.6) and corroborate evidence across sources (RH.6–8.9, RH.9–10.9, RH.11–12.9), working from Maimonides’s own writings (the Mishneh Torah, the Guide of the Perplexed, his letters), later commentary, and modern scholarship.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 and D2.His.14 (grades 6–8 and 9–12). Students investigate historical context, continuity and change, and causation.