Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds by Joel Kraemer

4.5/5

The legendary Jewish scholar Musa ibn Maymun, known today as Maimonides, was born in the fading light of Andalusian civilization and ended his life in the bustling imperial metropolis of Islamic Cairo. We have relatively scant personal details about Maimonides life, other than that he married even though he was famous in his time. What is known about him, separate from his incredible intellectual achievements, was that he lived between Spain, Morocco and Egypt, had a younger brother who perished in a shipwreck, had children who took up similar intellectual pursuits to their scholarly father, and served in various powerful roles under different Islamic leaders. The lack of personal detail, even about someone quite famous, owed to the style of the medieval period in which personal biography was uncommon. Yet we are understandably curious to know more about the man behind his timeless writings.

This brilliant history takes a different tack to get at understanding Maimonides life: it reconstructs the world around him using other sources from his times, and then fills in the blanks with what we do know about Maimonides from his own personal correspondence and witness accounts of his major life events. The book also covers his writings on philosophy and religion to give a general overview of his thought and achievements. The result is a satisfying biography that also serves us a captivating image of the world he lived in, as well as Maimonides lasting contributions to Jewish intellectual thought.

Maimonides was a polymath of a type common in the pre-modern Islamic world, as well as in classical Greece and Rome. He was a doctor, political leader, philosopher, religious scholar, and judge all in one. Maimonides also engaged in common trade, something that he encouraged intellectuals and religious figures to do rather than simply living off the people. Maimonides lived as a Jew in the Islamic Caliphate and was subject to the Pact of Umar which protected minorities, but also kept them within a subordinate place in the social hierarchy. As a man, Maimonides was greatly esteemed for his knowledge by elite Muslims who sought him out for companionship and intellectual discourse. Like other educated Jews, he also worked at a high level in government, serving the royal court of various regimes as a doctor and advisor. Following the conquest of Cairo by Saladin al-Ayubi, Maimonides was appointed as Chief of the Jews in the Caliphate and served essentially as communal governor of their affairs, as well as their representative to the sultan.

Maimonides spent his entire life writing and working for the uplift of the Jewish people. But he also was clearly in search of knowledge for its own sake. His writings laid the groundwork for much of the religion of Judaism as we understand it today. won’t recount all the details here, but he more than anyone Maimonides was responsible for codifying Jewish rules in practices into formal laws that are studied and examined by religious authorities to this day. Inasmuch as regularization of practice and behavior is a signifier of modernity, you can say that Maimonides helped the Jews become modern. His writings transformed the Jewish people from being simply a tribe with a particular history, which is how they had seen themselves, into a people who bore a systematized religion with a particular philosophy on human origins and legal methods similar to Islam and to a lesser degree Christianity. He put Judaism on a sound intellectual footing at a time when its account of God and mankind was under challenge by other traditions.

Maimonides lived at the height of the Islamic golden age and his intellectual perspective was heavily shaped by that. The philosophical precepts for Judaism's views on the origins of the universe and proofs of God which Maimonides laid down in his books drew heavily from Islamic thinkers whom he read and discoursed with. Among his favorites were al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd; but many others also helped shape Maimonides thought. Maimonides had a complex relationship with Islam, praising it sometimes as the world's preeminent civilization while lamenting at other times the oppression suffered by Jews in the Maghrib and Yemen. Despite that, or because of the times he lived in, Maimonides unambiguously preferred Islam to Christianity in his writings. Maimonides viewed Christianity as polytheism due to the contentious doctrine of the Trinity, while he considered Muslims at the end of the day to be monotheists like the Jews. This is perhaps the basis for his famous ruling, which is still part of Jewish law today, that Jews may enter mosques if need be but not churches. It is interesting to note from reading Maimonides work that Jewish self-identification has been flexible over time. The greater inclination to identify with Christianity today is a product of the fact that the West is in ascendance and many Jews live there (see: the post-WWII invented term “Judeo-Christian civilization”), whereas in the past the default was to assume a greater closeness between Islam and Judaism.

Maimonides intellectual and cultural contributions reverberate even today. I enjoyed reading about his life in this beautiful and ingeniously constructed history. It was great for learning about Jewish history, but I enjoyed it even more as a way to access the universal lessons of this wise man, many of which have fortunately been preserved for us by time. One practical lesson I took away from his writings is how to be more conscientious in prayer (or meditation if you prefer). Even in Maimonides time, when the pace of life was slower and technology not yet an all-encompassing distraction, people often rushed to treat prayer like a task to get out of the way. Maimonides counselled sitting quietly for a bit before starting the ritual, and then again after, to make sure one that ones mind is centered and focused on the divine objective. It was nice to personally receive this guidance from Maimonides over a distance of centuries. The "Rambam" or "Great Eagle,” as is still known by Jews today was a titan of intellectual history, no less than Ibn Sina or Aristotle. He deserves to be remembered as such, not just by Jews but by people of all backgrounds.