Maimonides

Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides, the Rambam — was the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages: a codifier of the entire law, a philosopher of the first rank, and a court physician. The epitaph became proverbial: "From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses."

Life in exile Born in Córdoba in Muslim Spain, Maimonides fled the persecutions of the Almohads, wandering through North Africa before settling in Fustat (Old Cairo), where he became physician to the vizier of Saladin and leader of the Jewish community. He wrote in Arabic and Hebrew and carried an immense correspondence with communities across the Jewish world.

The Mishneh Torah His [Mishneh Torah](/judaism/library/books/mishneh-torah) is the first complete, systematic code of the whole of Jewish law, written in lucid Hebrew and arranged by subject so that, he wrote, a person could know the entire law from Scripture and this book alone. Its boldness — omitting the give-and-take of the Talmud — drew both awe and criticism from other authorities, a debate that continued for centuries.

The Guide and the Thirteen Principles His philosophical masterpiece, [The Guide for the Perplexed](/judaism/library/books/guide-for-the-perplexed), written for the believer troubled by the apparent conflict of Torah and Aristotelian reason, argued for a rigorously non-corporeal understanding of God and the interpretation of anthropomorphic scripture. It provoked the fierce Maimonidean controversy: some rabbis banned it and even, in 1232, saw it burned, while others revered it. He also formulated the Thirteen Principles of Faith, later versified as the hymn *Yigdal* and widely — though not universally — received as a creed of Judaism. These disputes are presented here as the positions of the traditions, not adjudicated.

Legacy Maimonides shaped Jewish law, philosophy, and even medicine for all who came after. Revered across Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism — each drawing on him differently — he remains, with Rashi, one of the two indispensable names of the tradition.