It’s an understood feature of human psychology that people are influenced by the environment
in which they grew up, but it’s a little more rare for someone to embody the entire
ethos of their hometown.
So lets wind our clocks back to the Medieval Islamic Golden Age and zoom into the southern
Iberian Peninsula, and we’ll land in the great city of Cordoba — quite possibly one
of the best tickets to draw in the Historical Lottery of Where To Be Born.
Cordoba was the heart of a thriving medieval civilization in what is now Spain but what
was then known by its Arabic name Al-Andalus.
Although it was ruled by Muslims for several centuries, Al-Andalus was multiethnic and
multifaith, being the longtime home to Christians and, critically for our story today, several
Jewish communities.
And this is where we meet our protagonist: a Jewish scholar from Cordoba who became the
foremost legal authority on the Hebrew Bible, an invaluable philosopher of the relationship
between reason and spirituality, and, while he was at it, the personal physician to one
of the most powerful kings in medieval history.
His Muslim peers knew him as Mūsā Bin Maymūn, while fellow Jews called him by his Hebrew
name Moshe Ben Maimon, and European Christians used the Latin rendering of Moses Maimonides.
Now, it is critical to disclose our personal biases when doing historical analysis, so
I must alert you to the fact that Maimonides is kind of the coolest.
SO, to see how this man of many names grew up in a land of many cultures and became a
man of many, many talents, Let’s Do Some History.
By the time of Maimonides’ birth in Cordoba in 1135, Al-Andalus had quite a history behind
it.
The Umayyad Caliphate first conquered Iberia from the Visigoths in the 710s, and in the
decades after it became the independent Emirate of Cordoba (756), and later the Caliphate
of Cordoba in 929.
At that point, Al-Andalus was a prosperous trading hub with links to the Mediterranean
Muslim world as well as the Merchant Republics of Italy and even the actual Vikings up along
the north Atlantic.
Seeing as it was great business to be a relatively open society, Al-Andalus attracted talent
from its non-Muslim subjects and from travelers all over the medieval world, so the state
went out of its way to let these people actually function in society.
Cordoba was one of many Muslim states to implement legal and religious protections for non-Muslims,
known as Dhimmi.
Religious toleration is of course nice for its own sake, but enshrining those protections
in Law made for a much more stable society than, say, the European states where Jews
or Muslims might sometimes be allowed to live, but could easily be kicked out on a whim.
It makes a ruckus and it’s bad for business.
Though Cordoba was remarkable by the standards of the day, it was hardly a utopia, as political
authority was pretty handily concentrated among the Arab ruling class, and all Dhimmi
had to pay a special tax.
That would still prove, quite literally, a small price to pay, as this mosaic of Islam
Christianity and Judaism produced a treasure-trove of cross-cultural art and, critically, scholarship,
stretching from the classical period to the most groundbreaking modern writings.
And this was the intellectual environment in which Maimonides grew up, with one of the
medieval world’s best libraries and universities just a quick walk across town.
But soon, the rest of the world would have an opportunity to catch up, as the magnificent
multiculture of Al-Andalus got quite thoroughly smushed in 1148.
See, when Maimonides was 10, the ruling Almoravid dynasty disintegrated into several independent
states (this is actually the second time that happened but it’s fine), and 3 years later
Cordoba was conquered by the Moroccan-based Almohad dynasty.
They differed slightly from their predecessors in that they hated everything that Al-Andalus
had previously stood for, abolishing Dhimmi status and forcing non-Muslims to convert,
leave, or die.
So young Moshe Ben Maimon and his family were a little stuck, and they seem to have chosen
to fake a conversion publicly while continuing to study and practice Judaism in private,
where Maimonides continued learning from his very well-educated father.
Their next decade spent in and around Cordoba was a tad bit tense, what with the looming
threat of death and the acute possibility that their neighbors knew them just well enough
to see through the ruse, SO, in 1159 they hopped across the Straits of Gibraltar to
settle in the Moroccan city of Fès.
The downside is they were right in the Almohad heartland, but now they were anonymous, so
their disguise of We Totally Converted For-Real We Super Promise was far more believable.
This worked fooooor 6 years.
In 1165 a Rabbi who helped teach Maimonides and his brother was found out to be Jewish.
He refused to convert, so he was executed, and this was the sign to pack it up and go.
They travelled east across North Africa for the next few years, intending to settle in
the Holy Land, but discovering upon their arrival that the Christian Crusader Kingdom
of Jerusalem was quite unwelcoming of Jews.
Presumably their quota of Token Jewish Friend was filled by Jesus, so the rest could scram.
As such, Maimonides and family doubled back to the Egyptian Fatimid Caliphate, which had
many of the same policies on religious toleration as good old Al-Andalus.
This marks the extraordinarily rare occasion in which Openly-Jewish man named Moses finds
unexpectedly warm welcome in Egypt — not where I expected that story to go!
After arriving in 1168, Maimonides spent the remaining 36 years of his life in Cairo.
And for many of the reasons I hyped up Cordoba (for trade, cultural fusion, religious toleration,
baller architecture, the list goes on), Medieval Cairo is absolutely insane.
When legendary travelers like Ibn Battuta go out of their way to come back to Cairo
again and again, writing passages about how it’s the most majestic city in the world,
we ought to recognize that it was a neat place.
SO, Maimonides, now living openly-Jewish in one of the most splendid locations on earth,
had access to incalculable volumes of collected scholarship from the eastern Islamic world,
which added to his already-bursting knowledge of Jewish theology, biblical law, and classical
philosophy.
However, his career as an independent scholar would be derailed by two massive shocks.
The first was personal, as Maimonides’ brother David sailed out to the Indian Ocean in the
hopes of getting rich but drowned at sea, losing the entire family fortune in the wreck
and leaving Maimonides to take care of his widow and daughter.
The tragedy left Maimonides bedridden with grief for an entire year, and for the rest
of his life he was inconsolable for the loss of his beloved brother.
So now needing to financially support two families, Maimonides set aside his private
scholarship and put his knowledge to use as a physician.
The Second major shock was political, as a Fatimid Vizier declared himself the Caliph
of a new dynasty in 1174, and so Saladin became the man in charge of Egypt.
Maimonides may well have been frantically recalling his childhood memories of when the
Almohads came into town, but unlike last time Saladin was perfectly happy to keep everything
running smoothly, and that meant continuing the policy of religious toleration, so Maimonides
was in the clear.
And in fact, these two plotlines converge, as his career as a physician swiftly made
him famous in Cairo and resulted in him becoming the personal physician to Sultan Saladin himself.
This is even more bonkers when we recall that medicine was Maimonides’ fallback job, and
that he used his prestige from working in the royal court to promote his philosophical
and legal scholarship.
SO, all that biographic context brings us to the point of what Maimonides was actually
writing about.
Because his life’s story is inherently fascinating for the places he lived and the huge historical
events he witnessed firsthand, but his books are the reason he is, to this day, so highly
esteemed in Philosophy and Law in general and Judaism in particular.
Over the course of his life he wrote dozens of books and treatises on a variety of topics,
but three stick out.
His earliest Big Boy Smart Book was the Commentary on the Mishna, published shortly before his
arrival in Cairo.
It’s a comprehensive analysis of the entire Oral Torah, and while scholarly commentary
on Biblical law was a tradition dating back millennia, no one did it all at once like
that.
The introduction section to the work also included several relevant philosophical essays
and a set of 13 principles defining the Jewish Faith.
Like all but one of Maimonides’ works, this was written in a hybrid language called Judeo-Arabic,
which is Arabic speech transliterated into the Hebrew script.
The only exception to that trend was his next great book, The Mishne Torah, which was written
entirely in Hebrew, and casually sets out to explain every aspect and detail of Jewish
law.
all of it.
whole thing.
just casj…
This absolute mammoth of a task was accomplished by cutting through centuries upon centuries
of previous scholarship and distilling complex issues into simple and straightforward principles
that any Jewish reader could understand, and, critically, have access to all in one place.
With the Jewish Diaspora spread so far across civilizations, scholarship from, say, Al-Andalus
developed along a different trajectory from that of, say, Egypt.
So having been to many different places and having conversed directly with Rabbis from
various local communities, Maimonides was in an excellent position to bring together
disparate interpretations into one book.
He didn’t just say that “these are the rules, you gotta do them, book says” but
he explained why the rules are there and what they accomplish.
His greatest philosophical work is the Guide for the Perplexed, written in the style of
a letter, a very long letter, from him to a student of his that is unsure of whether
to purse religious studies or philosophy.
The answer of course is “Porque no los dos?” as Maimonides harmonizes the rationalism of
Aristotelian philosophy with the prophetic Revelation that’s central to Jewish theology.
So, taking a cue from the earlier Muslim scholars Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, Maimonides takes his
own crack at fortifying theology with reason by using philosophy as a vehicle to explore
the majesty of divinity.
This does require wrangling some pesky contradictions, since Genesis doesn’t really jive with classical
physics, but Maimonides argues that much of the narrative in the Torah is allegorical
rather than literal: because while human reason is powerful, it’s limited, and the actual
nature of God is far more complex than our puny human minds can comprehend, so us smooth-brain
dum dums can only understand Him allegorically.
And this supports his conception of Negative Theology: We can’t know what God is, so
we can only describe him by what He’s not.
It’s a swerve, but it works!
These were of course rather spicy positions to take, so The Guide was periodically banned
and even burned, but Maimonides’ didn’t care.
He retorted that he’d rather teach truth to one intelligent man than entertain 10,000
fools, and damn if those aren’t words to live by.
He may have been writing to a mainly Jewish audience but man was he dropping some universal
truths.
Maimonides remains a monumental figure in the history of Jewish thought, and his work
inspired centuries of later philosophers and Abrahamic theologians.
Meanwhile, I haven’t even mentioned his medical writings, but they were a crucial
step in medieval science.
Even though his specific prescriptions are now out of-date, his systematic approach to
medicine, focus on the patient’s well-being, and attention to public hygiene all remain
foundational to the way doctors and nurses to their work.
And I think that’s neat.
Maimonides himself is not a historian and he didn’t write about the history he experienced,
but his life and his ideas derive directly from the world he lived in.
Maimonides is so fascinating because his life serves as a viewpoint through which we can
clearly experience a massive and winding period in History that’s usually pretty tough to
pin down.
He leads us through the glories and struggles of two towering civilizations on each end
of the Mediterranean, but his experience as a Jewish scholar in particular gives us an
extra angle into Medieval Islamic multiculture, and the tangible result of all that are his
writings: carrying the torch from Muslim thinkers before him by investigating Judaism with a
philosophical perspective.
To me, he embodies the history and the character of the Islamic Golden Age in a way that few
others can…
And he was Saladin’s DOCTOR.
GOD he’s so cool!
Thank you so much for watching.
I had to stretch a little to make Maimonides count as a History-Maker but seeing as I make
the rules around here I’m confident in my choices.
It had been entirely too long since I last talked about Al-Andalus, so I’m glad I was
able to rectify that here.
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