Córdoba’s exile became Egypt’s rabbi and Aristotle’s heir
Moses ben Maimon—Maimonides or Rambam—died 12 December 1204 after a career that made him a towering medieval Torah authority. Born in Córdoba on Passover Eve of 1135 or 1138, his family fled Almohad forced conversion after 1148. From Fustat he led Egyptian Jewry while critics, especially in Spain, shouted back.
The Almohads, a Berber dynasty, took Córdoba in 1148 and ended the protected status that non-Muslims had bought with a special tax, leaving Jews and Christians to choose conversion, martyrdom or exile. Converts were suspected of pretending and made to wear marking clothes. Maimonides' family left rather than convert, and over some twenty years lived in Fez, Acre, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo before settling in Fustat between 1168 and 1171.
He had learned Torah from his father, Maimon ben Joseph, a rabbinic judge whose own teacher Joseph ibn Migash had studied under Isaac Alfasi. Young Moses also devoured Greek philosophy in Arabic translation. In Egypt he won fame as astronomer, philosopher and physician, even serving as personal doctor to Saladin. Drawing on Aristotle and on Muslim thinkers from al-Farabi and ibn Sina to ibn Rushd, who lived in his own day, he became a figure in the history of Islamic science too.
Jews as far away as Iraq and Yemen welcomed his rulings on law and ethics, and he rose to lead Egypt's Jewish community, though critics in Spain were loud. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries canonical weight as a code of Jewish law, as do his thirteen principles of faith. Some historians see his lifetime as the close of Spain's Jewish golden age; others stretch that age to the end of the Reconquista in the fifteenth century.
His names multiply across languages. Arabic sources call him Abū ʿImrān Mūsā ibn Maymūn al-Qurṭubī, the Cordoban. Greek turned son of Maimon into Maimonides, Hebrew shortened it to Rambam, and admirers dubbed him the Great Eagle. He died in Fustat in 1204 and is said to lie in Tiberias, where his tomb draws pilgrims.
Source: Maimonides
