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Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds
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About Maimonides: The Life And World Of One Of
Product Description This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the social, religious, and political issues of his time. Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled Spain, in 1138 and died in Cairo in 1204. He lived in an Arab-Islamic environment from his early years in Spain and North Africa to his later years in Egypt, where he was immersed in its culture and society. His life, career, and writings are the highest expression of the intertwined worlds of Judaism and Islam. Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers of humankind. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers. Now, in a dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of Maimonides’ rich life. MAIMONIDES is at once a portrait of a great historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the twelfth century. Joel Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to re-create a remarkable period in history when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense intellectual exchange and religious conflict. About the Author JOEL L. KRAEMER, John Henry Barrows Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, is the author of Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam and Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, and is the editor of Perspectives on Maimonides. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Cordoba Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen, Im dunkeln Lau die Gold-Orangen gluhn . . . Knowst thou the land of flowering lemon trees? In leafage dark the golden orange glows . . . —Goethe If birthplace influences destiny, Moses ben Maimon could not have chosen to be born in a city more conducive to greatness than Cordoba. We have knowledge of Moses ben Maimon's birth from his own hand in the colophon to his Commentary on the Mishnah, completed in Egypt in 1168. Midway in his life's journey, after years of exile and then a newcomer to Egypt, he invoked a distinguished lineage--sevengenerations of eminent scholars and magistrates. He said that he began to compose the Commentary when he was twenty-three and completed it in Egypt in 1167 or 1168, when he was thirty years old. To be more accurate, then, he was born sometime in the last third of 1137 or the first two-thirds of 1138. The conventionaldate for his birth, 1135, which we still find in library catalogues, biographies, and encyclopedias, is based on what Maimonides' grandson, David ben Abraham (1222-1300), wrote. According to his grandson, Maimonides' birth fell on the eve of Passover, 14 Nisan, the holiday of Redemption, a date of symbolic significance. Yellin and Abrahams, in their eulogistic biography of Maimonides, added the exact hour of his birth and createdan aristocratic lineage back to Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi and King David. We do not hear about Maimonides' ancestors prior to his father, Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph. Even if they wrote legal responsa, commentaries, and treatises
