Thinkers Timeline

Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), a religious figure known in Hebrew as Rambam and in Arabic as Musa ibn Maymun, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician whose work shaped Jewish thought for centuries and influenced Christian and Islamic philosophy as well. He was born in Córdoba, in the part of al-Andalus then under Almoravid rule, where the great intellectual flowering of Jewish and Islamic civilisation was at its height. His father was a rabbinic judge. When Maimonides was about ten years old, the city fell to the Almohads, a Berber dynasty whose rulers offered non-Muslims the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The family was forced into a decade of wandering through Spain and North Africa before settling in Fustat, near Cairo, around 1166. There Maimonides rose to become the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and physician to the court of Saladin. He wrote in Arabic (using Hebrew letters) and in Hebrew. His three major works changed Jewish intellectual life permanently. The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168, in Arabic) made rabbinic law accessible to wider audiences and included his famous Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Mishneh Torah (1170-1180, in Hebrew), his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, organised the entire body of talmudic tradition into a single systematic presentation. The Guide for the Perplexed (completed around 1190, in Arabic) addressed those caught between traditional faith and Aristotelian philosophy, offering a sophisticated synthesis that remains one of the great works of medieval philosophy. He died in Fustat in 1204; tradition holds that his body was carried to Tiberias in the Galilee for burial, where his tomb is still visited. His influence on subsequent Jewish thought is difficult to overstate; the phrase from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses reflects the esteem in which later generations held him.