Moses Maimonides

Jewish scholar and philosopher

• Born: March 30, 1135
• Birthplace: Córdoba (now in Spain)
• Died: December 13, 1204
• Place of death: Cairo, Egypt

Maimonides was and remains one of the most influential Jewish philosophers in history. He classified Jewish law, life, and observance, as defined in the Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud; interpreted the philosophical bases of Judaism in the light of Aristotelian thought; established the early foundations of psychotherapy by combining study of medicine and psychology; and influences both Jewish and Christian thinking to this day.

Early Life

Moses Maimonides (MOH-zehz mi-MAHN-uh-deez) was a child of destiny, recognized as such by the family and society into which he was born. His birth as son of the renowned Maimon ben Joseph was regarded as so important that the day, hour, and minute were recorded, as well as the fact that it occurred on the eye of Passover, which fell on the Sabbath. The young Maimonides (sometimes referred to as the Second Moses) was extraordinarily sensitive to his religious and intellectual heritage and to an awareness of his destiny to be a leader of his people. As a result of this precocity, the child spent no time playing or attending to his physical health, lest such activities interfere with his life’s mission.

Although Maimonides’ boyhood and physical characteristics are not recorded, biographical accounts place much emphasis on his intellectual development. His major teacher was his father, who was a Talmudic scholar, a member of the Rabbinical Council, dayan (judge) of Córdoba (a position held for generations in the family), and an acknowledged scholar and writer in the areas of Bible exposition, Talmudic commentary, astronomy, and mathematics. The young boy’s knowledge expanded from other sources as well: Jewish scholars, his relatively untroubled interactions with the life and scholars of the Spanish and Arab communities of Córdoba, and countless hours reading the manuscripts in his father’s library. In turn, Maimonides, entrusted with the education of his younger brother, David, began to develop his classification skills as he transmitted his own knowledge to the younger boy.

When Maimonides was thirteen, the religiously fanatical Almohad faction captured Córdoba. Jews and Christians were initially forced to choose between apostasy and death but later were allowed the third option of emigration. Historical sources are unclear as to how long Maimonides’ family remained in Córdoba, in what other cities they lived, or whether they formally converted or professed belief in the other monotheistic religion while continuing to practice Judaism. In their writings, both Maimonides and his father addressed the difficulties of living as a Jew and the minimum expectations afforded the still-practicing Jew in a hostile environment. Clearly, between 1148 and 1160, when the family settled in Fez in Morocco, Maimonides, in addition to his other activities, was collecting data for the three great works of his career.

In Fez, Maimonides studied medicine, read extensively, and wrote while his father and brother established a thriving jewelry business. While ostensibly involved with the Arabic community, the family remained faithfully Jewish. This period of accommodation with Muslim leaders and thought was broken by the prominence given to Maimonides’ Iggereth Hashemad (c. 1162; letter concerning apostasy), which reassured the many Jews who were similarly accommodating to their environment. Because this leadership position thrust on Maimonides threatened the family’s security, they emigrated to Palestine in 1165. After remaining five months in Acre, the family settled in Egypt, living first in Alexandria and then in Cairo.

During the family’s stay in Alexandria, Maimonides’ father died, and his brother David drowned. David’s death was particularly grievous, as Maimonides wrote: “For a full year I lay on my couch, stricken with fever and despair.” At the age of thirty, Maimonides began to support himself and David’s wife and children financially by putting to use the medical career for which he had prepared during his years in Fez. Embarking on his dual career of Jewish scholarship and medicine, Maimonides made notable contributions that remain relevant and significant to the present day. His personal life remains obscure, but his letters indicate that his first wife died young. He remarried in 1184 and fathered both a girl and a boy, Abraham, who later followed in his father’s path of scholarship and leadership. In fact, ten generations of the Maimonides family followed as leaders of the Cairo community.

Life’s Work

Maimonides’ twofold scholarly approach throughout his life was to examine existent knowledge in a field through classification followed by integration. In clear and succinct form, he would then publish the results, which had a major impact as each succeeding generation continued to find new, contemporaneous, and ever-relevant meanings in his writings.

The achievements of Maimonides, one of history’s “men for all seasons,” are broad and deep. He has been equally influential in four areas: religion, philosophy, psychology, and medicine. In the fields of religion and religious thought, Maimonides made his significant impact primarily through two major works: Siraj (1168; The Illumination) and Mishneh Torah (1180; The Code of Maimonides, 1927-1965). The first was written in Arabic, the second in Hebrew. Siraj is a commentary on the Mishnah, the early compilation of Jewish law. Maimonides’ intent in this work was to clarify for Jews the complex discussion of law of which the Mishnah is composed and to provide an understandable framework of guidelines for living a life satisfactory to God. Probably the most important section of The Illumination is the statement of Maimonides’ articles of faith, the basic principles of Judaism, which include the existence of a Creator, the unity of Deity, the incorporeality of God, the external nature of God, the worship and adoration of God alone, the existence of prophecy, the greatness of Moses as a prophet, the gift of the law to Moses by God on Sinai, the immutability of the law, the knowledge by God of the acts of humans, reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, the coming of the Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead.

The Code of Maimonides continues the explanation of Jewish law with a codification by subject of the content of the massive Talmud in fourteen books, each representing one area of Jewish law. The work begins with a statement of purpose, followed by book 1 on God and humans. It ends with a poetic longing for the Messianic Age, when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.”

Maimonides’ contributions to religion and religious thought overlap his contributions in philosophy. His major philosophical contribution, however, is Dalālat al-ḥa՚irīn (1190; The Guide of the Perplexed, 1881), in which he addresses and reconciles the rationalist Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish beliefs and faith. His treatments of philosophical constructs include discussions of God, Creation, prophecy, the nature of evil, Divine Providence, and the nature of humans and moral virtue.

More than his other writings, The Guide of the Perplexed has become part of mainstream philosophy of all society rather than remaining unique to Judaism. One reason for its generalized significance may be that it represents the beginnings of psychotherapy. In the section on the nature of humans and moral virtue, Maimonides defines a life satisfactory to God as one that approaches happiness through development of intellect and control of appetites by morality, referring especially to control of the sexual drive. This work also represents a bridge between Maimonides’ contribution in the second area, philosophy, and his major contributions to both the third and fourth areas, psychology and medicine.

In the study of medicine, Maimonides’ significant contribution was in his clear, textbook descriptions of major areas of the discipline he describes metaphorically as one of the “strange women [in addition to his betrothed, the Torah] whom I first took into my house as her handmaids [and who have] become rivals and absorb a portion of my time.” Maimonides’ medical writings date between 1180 and 1200 and include most notably A Physician’s Prayer (The Medical Aphorisms of Moses Maimonides, 1970, 1972), an encyclopedia, a glossary of drug names, treatises on asthma and poisons and their cures, and Physiology and Psychology of Married Life.

Significance

Maimonides’ contributions span and integrate history. His contributions begin with his scholarship in religion and religious thought that explores concepts and events from Creation to the giving of the Torah, to the canonization of prophetic thought in the Mishnah and the Talmud. His scholarship then moves to philosophical contributions that integrate the Jewish world of antiquity with the Greek world of Aristotle and with the Arabic worlds of Spain and Egypt of the twelfth century. In his contributions to psychology and medicine, Maimonides foreshadows modern practices in healing and Freudian thought.

History shaped Maimonides’ insights as he codified and synthesized Jewish literature. In turn, Maimonides guided the insights of his contemporaries and those of succeeding generations as he responded to the realities of medieval Spain and the traditions of Aristotle, developing a new blend of faith and rationalistic thought. He influenced the thought of succeeding scholars by providing new religious, philosophical, psychological, and medical foundations on which to build the concept of a good life.

Bibliography

Amundsen, Darrel W., ed. Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Covers the connections between medicine and religious faith, canon law on medical practice, medical ethics, and more.

Arbel, Ilil. Maimonides: A Spiritual Biography. New York: Crossroad, 2001. A brief biographical introduction to Maimonides as a rabbi and Jewish philosopher. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Bratton, Fred. Maimonides: Medieval Modernist. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Acquaints the Christian world with the life and works of Maimonides from the viewpoint of a Christian. This easy-to-follow text places Maimonides in perspective in the environment of medieval Spain and evaluates the scholar’s writings in relation to their impact on the Jewish-Christian worlds and European thought.

Cohen, Robert S., and Hillel Levine, eds. Maimonides and the Sciences. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2000. A survey of Maimonides’ Aristotelianism, naturalism, “repudiation of astrology,” epistemology, and science of language. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Katchen, Aaron L. Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis: Seventeenth Century Apologetics and the Study of Maimonides’“Mishneh Torah.” Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Concentrates on seventeenth century Holland, in which the Mishneh Torah began to be translated and distributed widely. Included are an extensive bibliography and indexes to biblical passages from specific works, to specific titles from the Mishnah, to the Babylonian Talmud, to the Midrashic literature, and to other general literature.

Katz, Steven T., ed. Maimonides: Selected Essays. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Part of the Jewish Philosophy, Mysticism, and the History of Ideas series, this volume contains reprints of fourteen essays in four languages. Together, the essays represent the best of pre-World War II scholarship on Maimonides’ writings.

Kreisel, Howard. Maimonides’ Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. A discussion of Maimonides’ legal and political ideas, including those on the intellect, the idea of “the good,” ethics, and the “love and fear of god.” Includes an extensive bibliography and an index.

Maimonides, Moses. Rambam: Readings in the Philosophy of Moses Maimonides. Translated by Lenn Evan Goodman. New York: Viking Press, 1976. This careful translation and commentary on Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed and Eight Chapters (part of the commentary on the Mishnah) is also valuable for its long and helpful general introduction and for its annotated bibliography.

Neusner, Jacob, ed. Collected Essays on Philosophy and on Judaism. 3 vols. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003. Vol. 1 discusses Maimonides and Greek philosophy. Part of the Studies in Judaism series.

Roth, Leon. Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. An excellent exposition of the thinking of Maimonides, especially in his The Guide of the Perplexed, in relation to the writings of Baruch Spinoza. Although the book supposedly focuses on Spinoza, the author notes strongly that Maimonides influenced not only Spinoza but also “the course of European speculation,” from Saint Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas to G. W. F. Hegel.

Seeskin, Kenneth. Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Discusses the far-reaching influence of Maimonides’ work in religious philosophy. Chapters cover “the urge to philosophize,” monotheism, monotheism and freedom, creation, and more. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Yellin, David, and Israel Abrahams. Maimonides: His Life and Works. 1903. 3d ed. New York: Hermon Press, 1972. A complete treatment of the life of Maimonides. Noteworthy are the still-valuable selected bibliography of books by and about Maimonides in English, the extensive notes, and the genealogical table of Maimonides’ descendants through four generations.