Maimonides was a 12th century Cordovan philosopher and physician Maimonides is known in Jewish literature, on which he has exerted incalculable influence, as "Rambam," an acronym for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. His youth was spent from city to city, harassed by the religious persecution unleashed by the Almohads. Established in Cairo, he was a physician to the court of King Saladin and it is said that he also worked for Richard the Lionheart, in Arab lands, on the occasion of the third crusade. Maimonides was considered the most important Jewish philosopher of the post-Mudic era and his work influenced Christian and Arab thinkers.
Maimonideslifedata
1135 He is born in Cordoba.
1165 He fixes his residence in Egypt.
1160 His family goes into exile in the Moroccan city of Fez
1204 He dies in Al-Fustat (Egypt)
Yearsofformationandpilgrimage
Moses Maimonides was born in the city of Córdoba, on March 30, 1135 . He was the son of Rabí Maimón, judge and former member of the rabbinical court of Córdoba, and the daughter of a city butcher, who died giving birth to the future philosopher.
In 1148, when Córdoba suffered the invasion of the Almohads, the Maimonides family was forced to leave the city. The irruption of this Islamic Berber dynasty put an end to the peaceful coexistence of the different religious creeds and unleashed persecution against the Jews. Maimonides was then thirteen years old:, and until 1160, when the religious persecution eased, they established their residence in Fez, traveling through Spain from city to city —it is possible that they reached Provence in the south of France— seeking refuge. On his way through Almería he met Averroes. In spite of everything, in those years of fears, tribulations and discomforts, Maimonides traces the main lines of what will be his study plan and already begins his literary production, to which he will consecrate his life. In 1158 he begins the writing of his commentary on the Mishnah and, at the urging of a friend, he writes a commentary on the Jewish calendar. Like so many other Jews, Maimonides' family converted to Islam to save their lives, although he continued to profess his own religion in secret.
It is shocking that Rabbi Maimon's family and his two sons, David and Moses, and a daughter settled in Fez, where they were equally at risk. It is possible that the learned rabbi wanted to take lessons from Rabbi Judah ibn Sossam or wanted to contact Caliph Abd-el-Mumin , who was surrounding himself with intellectuals and had prohibited the burning of books.
Some scholars of the work of Maimonides have seen in the tragic fact of the apostasy the foundation of his rationalist philosophy. In a letter to the Jews, Maimonides justified conversion only to save face and continue Judaizing in secret, but faced with the dilemma of apostatizing or going into exile, he advised the latter option. And it is what the family of Rabbi Maimon did once again in 1165, when religious persecution was revived. That same year, Judah ibn Sossan, a friend and teacher of Maimonides, was tortured and executed for not wanting to embrace Islam.
They fled from Fez under cover of night, until they reached Ceuta, where they embarked for Palestine. During the journey, Maimonides continued his studies and work on his book. A month later they arrived in Akko.
At that time the Jews enjoyed freedom and lived in harmony with the Christians; Due to the continuous wars, however, Palestine was suffering from a severe economic depression. During the five months that they remained in Akko, Maimonides studied the customs and rites of the Jews and the flora of the country, as he had already done in Morocco. It is possible that the Maimón thought to find peace in a Palestine ruled by Christians, but the decline of the Jewish communities, the lack of illustrious men and the lack of educational institutions motivated a new move.
At the end of 1165 they arrived in Alexandria , a city that, despite not being the capital of Egypt, was a flourishing center of international trade. A few months later his father died. Maimonides received numerous letters of condolence from Western Arab countries and the Christian world. He was then thirty-one years old and for the first time the problem of earning a living was posed to him.
The problem was solved in the first instance by his brother David, who dedicated himself to the trade of precious stones thanks to the capital that they both probably received as an inheritance. Free of material concerns, Maimonides was able to dedicate himself to writing and correcting his book, as well as studying the customs of the Egyptian Jews and, of course, the flora of the country.
His new and definitive destination was Al-Fustat (currently Old Cairo), a city near Cairo, where the Nagid, the supreme leader of the Jews, was located, although at the service of the monarch of the country, and whose people were famous for just and peaceful. In 1168 Maimonides finished his great work, which had taken him ten years of work, the Book of Elucidation , commentary on the Mishna. Maimonides intended his book to improve the study of the Mishnah, a set of Mosaic laws, which had been displaced by the Talmud, but the commentary, with the exception of a small circle, went unnoticed.
In 1169 Maimonides suffered a tremendous blow. His brother perished in a shipwreck in the Indian Ocean while on one of his business trips. In misfortune he lost the family's money, along with that of other people who had also entrusted it to him to negotiate. He also left behind a wife and two children. For a year Maimonides was bedridden. The death of his brother plunged him into melancholy and
depression, and he was afflicted with heart disease. He himself tells that he was found at the gates of death.
Doctor and wise
In order to provide for his family, Maimonides practiced medicine. No doubt he could have turned to the rabbinate, but he was loathe to use the Torah as a means of earning a living. According to Maimonides, it was a mistake to think that the communities should bear the expenses of the teachers because neither the Torah nor any other book specified such a thing. To justify his point of view he wrote a booklet in which he made use of numerous citations from the Talmud. In it he stated, however, that it was permissible for scholars to entrust his money to others to conduct business on his behalf, a solution he ended up adopting.
In 1185 he was already a famous doctor and distinguished himself as one of the doctors of Al-Fadil, vizier of King Saladin . It is said that he also he rendered his services to King Richard the Lionheart .
Once his residence was definitively established in Al-Fustat, Maimonides displayed an intense and fruitful activity. In those years he married the sister of Abu'l-Ma'ali, one of the court secretaries, married in turn to the sister of Maimonides. He had only one son, Abraham, who would also become a famous scholar.
It is probable that in 1171 Maimonides held the honorary position of rabbi. Around 1177 he was already the head of the Jewish community of Al-Fustat. Maimonides' first task was to combat the Karaites, a Judaic sect that was considered closer to the Muslims than to the Jews themselves. His next step was the attempt to unify the Jewish community in Cairo, split into two groups, the Babylonians, whose Torah reading lasted one year, and the Palestinians, who took three years. But his most radical reform was the abolition of the repetition aloud of the Amida, a reform that was accepted throughout Egypt and admitted by contemporary masters. Between 1179 and 1180 Maimonides carried out a great codification. He had acquired great fame and prestige and inquiries about the law came to him from all parts of Egypt. In 1176 he was forced to issue a new decree against the Karaites' cleanliness regulations. The decree stated that any woman who did not observe these rules would lose all rights over her husband's property in the event of divorce or widowhood.
In 1190 he completed his great philosophical work , Guide for the perplexed , begun fifteen years earlier and dedicated to his faithful disciple Yosé ibn Sham'un, whom he loved like a son and had sent him chapter after chapter. Maimonides wrote this book thinking of those who hesitated between the Jewish religion and the Aristotelianism of the time. His purpose was to show that religion and philosophy were not antagonistic. The harmonization of faith and reason was criticized as rationalistic and disputes arose between the supporters of Maimonides and the orthodox Jews, mainly in Spain and Provence, with whose sages he maintained an intense correspondence. However, the work served for many centuries as a foundation for Jewish thought and would also influence Muslim and Christian thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas.
Written in Arabic, the Guide translated into Latin very soon and two weeks before the author's death the Hebrew translation was complete.
Maimonides died on December 13, 1204 . Both Jews and Arabs honored him with three days of mourning and a fast was decreed. He was buried in Tiberias, as was his wish. Legend has it that when, years later, his remains were transported to Palestine, the entourage was robbed by pirates who tried to throw the coffin into the sea. Seeing that not even thirty men could lift him, they considered the deceased to be a saint and provided an escort to the Jewish caravan. His tomb in Tiberias was the object of numerous visits.
A monument was erected to him with the following inscription:"There was no one, from Moses to Moses [Maimonides], comparable to Moses."