Maimonides: Life, Mishneh Torah and the Guide for the Perplexed

Moses Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, known by the acronym Rambam; c. 1138–1204) was the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages: a legal scholar, a philosopher and a court physician. Born in Córdoba and active for most of his life in Fustat (Old Cairo), he wrote a commentary on the Mishnah containing his Thirteen Principles of faith, the Mishneh Torah, the first comprehensive code of Jewish law, and the Guide for the Perplexed, a philosophical interpretation of the Bible in the light of Aristotelian thought. A Jewish saying sums up his stature: "From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses."

Life of Maimonides: From Córdoba to Cairo§

Maimonides was born in Córdoba, then part of Muslim al-Andalus, into a family of scholars; his father Maimon was a rabbinical judge. A traditional date gives his birth as 1135, but many scholars now prefer 1138, based on a statement in one of his own works. When he was about ten, in 1148, the Almohads, a strict reforming Berber dynasty, conquered Córdoba and ended the toleration of Jews and Christians, who were pressed to convert or leave. The family spent years wandering in Spain and North Africa, settling around 1160 in Fez in Morocco, itself under Almohad rule. Whether the family outwardly professed Islam during these years is a question historians still debate; Maimonides' Epistle on Martyrdom defended Jews who had been forced into nominal conversion.

In 1165 the family sailed to the Land of Israel, visiting Acre, Jerusalem and Hebron, and then moved to Egypt, settling first in Alexandria and then in Fustat. Maimonides' younger brother David, a merchant in the India trade, supported the family until he drowned in the Indian Ocean, probably in the 1170s; Maimonides later wrote that the loss left him ill and grief-stricken for a year. He became a leader of Egyptian Jewry, corresponding with communities from Yemen to Provence. He died in December 1204 and, according to tradition, was buried in Tiberias, where his tomb is still visited.

Maimonides the Physician§

After his brother's death Maimonides turned to medicine for his living. He became a physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, the chief minister of Saladin, and later served Saladin's son al-Afdal. A letter to his translator Samuel ibn Tibbon describes his crowded days: attending the court in Cairo each morning, then returning home to find his antechambers full of Jews and non-Jews, nobles and commoners, waiting for treatment, so that he could study only on the Sabbath.

He wrote about ten medical works in Arabic, including a treatise on asthma, a Regimen of Health for al-Afdal, a work on poisons and their antidotes, a commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and his own collection of medical aphorisms drawn largely from Galen. They emphasise moderation in diet, exercise, sleep and emotion, and the influence of mental states on health — themes that also appear in his ethical writings, which apply Aristotle's doctrine of the mean to the life of the pious Jew. Several were translated into Hebrew and Latin and read in medieval Europe.

The Commentary on the Mishnah and the Thirteen Principles§

Maimonides' first great work, completed in 1168, was a commentary on the entire Mishnah, written in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters) and known as the Siraj, "Lamp" (see rabbinic Judaism and the Talmud). It includes several important essays. The introduction to the tractate Avot, known as the Eight Chapters, sets out a psychology and ethics influenced by Aristotle and al-Farabi. The introduction to the chapter Helek of tractate Sanhedrin, which discusses who has a share in the world to come, lists Thirteen Principles of Jewish faith: the existence of God, his unity, his incorporeality, his eternity, that he alone is to be worshipped, prophecy, the unique prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, its immutability, God's knowledge of human deeds, reward and punishment, the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead.

The idea of a Jewish creed was new and controversial; scholars such as Hasdai Crescas and Isaac Abarbanel later questioned or revised it. Yet the principles entered the liturgy through the hymn Yigdal, composed in fourteenth-century Italy, and the Ani ma'amin ("I believe") prose formulas printed in many prayer books. During the Holocaust Jews sang Ani ma'amin as a hymn of faith in the coming of the Messiah.

The Mishneh Torah: A Code of All Jewish Law§

The Mishneh Torah ("Repetition of the Torah"), completed around 1178–80, is Maimonides' legal masterpiece and the subject of the discussion in halakha, Jewish law and ethics. In fourteen books — hence its other name, Yad ha-Hazakah, "the Strong Hand", yad having the numerical value fourteen — it sets out the whole of Jewish law, including laws that no longer applied after the destruction of the Temple, such as sacrifices and the laws of the king and the Messiah. It was written in clear Mishnaic Hebrew and arranged by subject, and, most controversially, it gave conclusions without citing sources or recording debates.

Maimonides said that he wished a reader to be able to know the whole Oral Law from his book without needing any other. The first book, Sefer ha-Madda ("Book of Knowledge"), begins with the foundations of belief — God's existence and unity, the love and fear of God, the nature of the angels and the heavenly spheres — and continues with ethics, Torah study, idolatry and repentance. The code was preceded by the Sefer ha-Mitzvot ("Book of the Commandments"), which enumerated the 613 commandments according to fourteen principles. Critics, notably Rabbi Abraham ben David (the Rabad) of Posquières, wrote sharp glosses on the code, but it became one of the foundations of all later codes, including the Shulchan Arukh.

The Guide for the Perplexed§

The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalalat al-ha'irin), completed around 1190 in Judeo-Arabic, was addressed to a gifted disciple, Joseph ben Judah, and to readers like him: believing Jews who had studied philosophy and were troubled by the apparent conflict between reason and the literal sense of scripture. Its first part explains the biblical terms that seem to describe God in bodily form — "hand", "face", "sitting", "descending" — as equivocal words with spiritual meanings. Maimonides argued that God's essence is unknowable and that positive attributes compromise his absolute unity; we can know only what God is not, and what his actions are. This "negative theology" is discussed further in Jewish philosophy from Philo to Maimonides.

The second part treats proofs of God's existence, drawn from Aristotle and the Islamic philosophers described in Islamic philosophy, the question of whether the world is eternal or created — Maimonides argued that neither can be proved and accepted creation as taught by the Torah — and the nature of prophecy, which he explained as a natural perfection of intellect and imagination, crowned by God's will. The third part discusses providence, the problem of evil, the book of Job and the reasons for the commandments; notoriously, he explained the sacrificial laws as a divine concession to the religious customs of the ancient world, intended to wean Israel gradually from idolatry.

The Guide is deliberately esoteric. Maimonides identified the rabbinic "work of creation" (ma'aseh bereshit) with physics and the "work of the chariot" (ma'aseh merkavah), the mystical vision of Ezekiel discussed in Merkavah mysticism, with metaphysics. Because the rabbis forbade teaching these subjects openly, he said he would scatter his ideas through the book and that some contradictions in it were intentional. Readers have argued ever since over its true teaching. The book was translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon in 1204 and, more freely, by Judah al-Harizi, and a Latin version was used by Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics.

Controversy and Legacy§

Maimonides' rationalism provoked fierce opposition. During his lifetime his treatment of the resurrection of the dead was challenged, and he responded with a Treatise on Resurrection (1191). After his death, in the 1230s, the "Maimonidean controversy" divided the communities of Provence and Spain; opponents banned the study of the Guide and the Book of Knowledge, and copies were reportedly burned in Montpellier by the Christian authorities — an event that shocked both sides. A second controversy over philosophical study broke out around 1300. Later, many kabbalists sought to claim Maimonides for their tradition: Abraham Abulafia wrote commentaries on the Guide as a mystical text, and legends told that Maimonides had embraced Kabbalah at the end of his life, a claim historians reject.

He was also a firm critic of magic and superstition. He ridiculed the writers of amulets and the makers of divine names, condemned the addition of angels' names to the mezuzah (see tefillin, tallit and mezuzah) and, in a letter of about 1194 to the rabbis of southern France, rejected astrology as having no basis in science. In later centuries Maimonides became a model for Jewish rationalists, including Moses Mendelssohn and the scholars of the Jewish Enlightenment, while his code remains a daily study text in traditional yeshivot.

Frequently asked questions§

Why is Maimonides called the Rambam?§

"Rambam" is an acronym of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, following the Hebrew custom of naming great rabbis by their initials. The Greek-style name Maimonides means "son of Maimon".

What are Maimonides' Thirteen Principles?§

They are thirteen beliefs Maimonides listed in his Commentary on the Mishnah as the foundations of Judaism, including God's existence, unity and incorporeality, the prophecy of Moses, the divine origin of the Torah, reward and punishment, the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead.

What language did Maimonides write in?§

He wrote the Mishneh Torah in Hebrew, but most of his other works, including the Commentary on the Mishnah, the Guide for the Perplexed and his medical writings, in Judeo-Arabic, which was the everyday scholarly language of Jews in the Islamic world.

Was Maimonides a mystic?§

Not in the kabbalistic sense. He was a rationalist philosopher who interpreted the mystical traditions of the rabbis as physics and metaphysics. Kabbalists nonetheless revered him, and some later legends claimed him as one of their own.

Sources and further reading§

• The Guide for the Perplexed — Moses Maimonides, 1963
• Mishneh Torah — Moses Maimonides, 1180
• Maimonides: Life and Thought — Moshe Halbertal, 2014
• Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds — Joel L. Kraemer, 2008
• Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works — Herbert A. Davidson, 2005
• A Maimonides Reader — Isadore Twersky (ed.), 1972