History-Makers: Maimonides

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.

Special thanks to our community of supporters
on Patreon, if you’d like to see your name

up here like these cool cats, hop on over
to Patreon.com/OSP.