Who was Moses Maimonides?
Judaism in Five Minutes - Sarah Imhoff
Alan Verskin [+]
University of Toronto
Alan Verskin is the Samuel J. Zacks Chair of Jewish History at the University of Toronto. His most recent book is Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The Sixteenth-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe (Stanford University Press, 2023).
Description
Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) was the most widely recognized Jewish leader of all time. Born in Cordoba, he spent most of his life in Egypt, where he wrote legal, philosophical, and medical works. Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed offers a methodology for reconciling religion with medieval science and philosophy. His Mishneh Torah is a complete code of Jewish law that is still consulted. Today, Maimonides’ disciples hail from every Jewish denomination. This is the product of Maimonides’s writing strategy, which fosters an intimacy with his readers, but which leaves room for them to independently develop his thought.