Maimonides was born in Cordoba, Spain, in late March 1135. Cordoba had an established reputation as an intellectual center with a long history as a crossroads of different forms of thought; at the beginning of the Middle Ages, it was a bustling and populous town that attracted philosophers from Europe, Northern Africa, and the Arab world. Although some legends about Maimon-ides tell us that he misbehaved and was disinclined to study as a youth, there is little doubt that this intellectual and cosmopolitan climate helped to shape the boy who would grow up to be such a distinguished scholar.
Maimonides was the son of an acclaimed rabbinical scholar, and his father no doubt insisted on a rigorous schooling for young Moses and his brother David. The two boys would have received tuition in all of the usual disciplines of the day—Jewish studies, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, philosophy, and mathematics. Maimonides’s family was respected in the community and enjoyed a position of affluence and wealth; on the whole, Maimonides’s upbringing was probably a happy one.
But when Maimonides was 13 years old, the family’s security in Cordoba was threatened. In 1148 the city was invaded by a religious fanatical group called the Almohades; its citizens were given the choice of conversion to Islam, exile, or death. Maimonides and his family were thus forced to leave their home and stay temporarily in a variety of places throughout Spain until 1160, when they finally moved to Fez, in Morocco.
The position of the Jews in Morocco was little less precarious than it had been in Cordoba, however, and the family’s nomadic travels did not end there. Five years after coming to Fez they were on the move once again; they finally settled in Fostat, which has now been absorbed into the city limits of modern-day Cairo. Maimonides, who had begun several treatises on religious thought during his journeys in Spain and Morocco, could now focus his all of his energy on writing, and in this period he added to his growing canon of scriptural commentary and philosophical pronouncements.
But tragedy would befall him again when his father died fewer than 10 years after the family’s arrival in Egypt, and his brother David was lost at sea not long afterward. This left Maimonides in something of a predicament. Following their father’s death, David had supported his brother and enabled Maimonides to pursue a career of study and public service. His death left his family in financial ruin, and profit from those things in which Maimonides excelled most—rabbinical studies and ministry to the community—was, to him, a sin. He found a way to make his own living, training as a physician and eventually rising to prominence in that profession. He secured illustrious appointments to high-level officials and even the royal family, working first in the household of Grand Vezier Alfadil and then that of Sultan Saladin. He was so well regarded that he was even invited to the court of Richard I, king of the Franks, at Ascalon—although he declined this offer in favor of remaining in Fostat, where by 1171 he had been appointed a leader, or nagid, of the Jewish community. Despite what was by all accounts a busy and productive career as a physician, Maimonides did not abandon his earlier vocation of philosopher and scriptural scholar, and he continued to write and produce treatises on a variety of topics relevant to the intellectual and religious climate of the early Middle Ages.
By the opening of the thirteenth century he had written over 20 works. But the demands of his job and his dedication to religious philosophy, coupled with a constitution that was already badly affected by the stresses of exile and heavy personal losses, took a toll on Maimonides’s health. Even as he ministered to others, he is said to have often pronounced his diagnoses and prescriptions from a reclining position, being too tired to sit or stand. He continued working at a frantic pace until he succumbed to exhaustion in his seventieth year and died in December 1204. His death was marked by three days of public mourning in Cairo, which were observed by the Jews and Muslims alike, and a general fast was decreed in Jerusalem. Legend has it that his body was placed on a camel, which walked on its own volition to Tiberias on Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) in what is now Israel. There it was entombed at a site that people can still visit today.
His reputation as a gifted sage soon proved to survive him when Ibn Abi Usaybi, the first known biographer of Maimonides, described him thus: “[h]e was learned in the Laws of the Jews, and was counted among their learned and their sages. . . . He was unique in his time in the Art of Medicine and its practice, versed in the sciences and possessed of an excellent knowledge of philosophy.”1 Even today, the impact of Maimonides’s ideas reverberates in philosophy, medicine, and Jewish law.
World History
