Maimonides (Rambam)

About this figure

Moses ben Maimon, known by the Hebrew acronym Rambam and in Latin as Maimonides, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician born in Córdoba, in Muslim Spain, in 1138. When he was a child, the persecution of non-Muslims by the conquering Almohad dynasty forced his family into years of wandering across Iberia and North Africa, eventually settling in Fustat, near Cairo, in Egypt, then under the more tolerant rule of the Fatimid and later Ayyubid caliphates. There Maimonides built a career as a physician, eventually serving in the court of Saladin's family, while also serving as a leader of Cairo's Jewish community.

His most influential works span both Jewish law and philosophy. In the Mishneh Torah, completed around 1180, he undertook the ambitious project of systematically codifying the entire body of Jewish religious law in clear Hebrew prose, organized by subject rather than by the traditional order of the Talmud, so that a reader could locate any legal ruling without wading through centuries of accumulated argument. Later, writing in Judeo-Arabic, he composed the Guide for the Perplexed, completed around 1190, a work addressed to students troubled by apparent conflicts between the Hebrew Bible and Aristotelian philosophy; in it Maimonides argued for a rigorously rational, non-anthropomorphic conception of God and offered techniques for reading scripture's more figurative language in ways compatible with reasoned inquiry, drawing heavily on Aristotle as transmitted through Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi and Avicenna.

Maimonides' rationalist approach was controversial among some of his Jewish contemporaries and successors, provoking disputes over his works that continued for generations after his death, even as his legal and philosophical writing became foundational for later Jewish thought. He died in Fustat in 1204 and, according to tradition, was buried in Tiberias, in present-day Israel, where his tomb remains a site of pilgrimage.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.