Story

Maimonides in Cairo

c. 1185 CE

Biblical Narrative

By the mid-1180s, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon — Maimonides, the Rambam (1138–1204) — was settled in Fustat, the old quarter of Cairo, having fled Almohad Andalusia as a boy, wandered through Morocco and the Holy Land, and lost his beloved younger brother David at sea on a trading voyage to India. He was now serving as court physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, vizier and chief counselor to Sultan Salah al-Din (Saladin), and shortly thereafter to Saladin's son al-Afdal. He had completed, in 1180, the Mishneh Torah — the most ambitious systematic code of Jewish law ever attempted, fourteen books in clear Mishnaic Hebrew that aimed to make all of rabbinic literature accessible to a single competent reader.

He was now writing, in Judeo-Arabic, his philosophical masterwork: Dalalat al-Ha'irin, the Guide for the Perplexed. Its addressee, named in the introduction, was a single student — Rabbi Joseph ben Judah ibn Shimon, then in Aleppo — but its true audience was the educated Jew who had studied Aristotle in Arabic translation and could no longer reconcile what philosophy taught about the eternity of matter, the impersonality of God, and the limits of human knowledge with what he had been taught at the table of his fathers about a God who walked in the garden in the cool of the day. The Guide, completed around 1190, would be translated into Hebrew within Maimonides's lifetime by Samuel ibn Tibbon under his close supervision.

He served simultaneously as Nagid — the official head of Egyptian Jewry, recognized by the Fatimid and then the Ayyubid courts. His responsa, more than 460 of which survive, came in from communities across the Mediterranean and beyond: from Yemen (the famous Iggeret Teiman of 1172, urging persecuted Yemenite Jews not to abandon their faith in the face of forced conversion), from Provence (replying to learned questions from the rabbis of Lunel), from Baghdad, from Aleppo, from Marseille on the question of astrology. He worked himself to exhaustion. In a letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon describing his daily schedule he writes that he rides each morning to the sultan's palace, returns to find the courtyard of his house full of patients waiting, eats a single meal in the afternoon, and only at night, when his strength has nearly failed him, can he turn to study and to writing.

When Maimonides died on the twentieth of Tevet 4965 (December 13, 1204), his coffin was carried up to the Galilee and buried in Tiberias, where his tomb remains a place of pilgrimage. The Jews of Fustat closed their shops; the Jews of Yemen wrote elegies. The Cairo Geniza — the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue where he had prayed — preserved hundreds of pages in his own hand: drafts of the Mishneh Torah, draft responsa, medical prescriptions, family letters. From these scraps the modern world has reconstructed a life unmatched in medieval Jewish history for breadth, productivity, and synthetic ambition.

מִמֹּשֶׁה עַד מֹשֶׁה לֹא קָם כְּמֹשֶׁה.פתגם יהודי עתיק (כנראה מן המאה הט״ז)

Archaeology · History · Genetics

Herbert A. Davidson's Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford 2005) is the standard modern intellectual biography, drawing systematically on the Geniza autographs to redate his works and reconstruct his daily life. Davidson establishes that the Mishneh Torah was completed by 1180, the Guide for the Perplexed in stages between roughly 1185 and 1191, and the Medical Aphorisms (Fusul Musa) and Treatise on Asthma in his final decade as a working physician. He shows that some traditional Maimonidean works (notably the so-called Treatise on Resurrection) are genuinely his, while others long attributed to him are not.

The Cairo Geniza autographs are clustered today in three principal collections: the Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge University Library, the Antonin collection at the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, and the Adler collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. They include drafts of the Mishneh Torah with Maimonides's own corrections, drafts of responsa with the question on one side and his Judeo-Arabic answer on the other, and a partial autograph of the Commentary on the Mishnah (the work of his early twenties), purchased by the Bodleian in Oxford from a Yemeni Jewish family in 1908. S. D. Goitein's monumental five-volume A Mediterranean Society (1967–88) reconstructed from these documents the social, economic, and family life of Maimonides's world.

Maimonides's medical writings, almost all in Arabic, were translated into Latin during his lifetime and the next century and entered the curriculum of the medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier. His Medical Aphorisms — 1,500 distilled medical observations drawn primarily from Galen, with Maimonides's own commentary — remained a standard reference into the seventeenth century. His Regimen of Health, written for the indolent and over-fed Sultan al-Afdal, advises moderation, exercise, and the avoidance of melancholy in terms a modern internist would not entirely disown.

The 'Maimonidean Controversy' of the 1230s, two decades after his death, saw rabbis in southern France ban the Guide for the Perplexed and the philosophical sections of the Mishneh Torah; rabbis in Spain countered with bans on the banners. In 1242 Dominicans burned copies of the Guide in Montpellier, allegedly at the instigation of the original Jewish ban. Two years later, perhaps not unrelatedly, the same authorities burned the Talmud in Paris. The episode is the subject of Daniel Jeremy Silver's Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy 1180–1240 (1965). It is also the deepest evidence we have that Maimonides's project — the reconciliation of revealed religion and demonstrative philosophy — touched a nerve so raw that the Jewish community itself could not contain the dispute.

Maimonides represents the most thoroughgoing attempt in the medieval period to construct an integrated synthesis of Jewish law, biblical religion, and Aristotelian philosophy.Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (2005)