Maimonides of Córdoba: A Jewish Philosopher Writing in Arabic

Moses ben Maimon, known in the West as Maimonides and in Arabic as Musa ibn Maymun, was born in Córdoba in 1138 (some sources say 1135). His family fled when a new and harsher regime took the city, and after years of wandering through the Maghreb they settled in Fustat, old Cairo.

There he became the leading rabbi of his age and a court physician. His code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, is in Hebrew. His great philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed, written around 1190, is in Judeo-Arabic: Arabic written in Hebrew letters, the everyday language of the Jews of the Islamic world. He read Aristotle through Muslim philosophers and argued with them as colleagues.

The most important Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages did much of his thinking in Arabic.

Eight centuries later

Maimonides died in Fustat on the twelfth of December 1204. A bronze statue of him sits today in the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, and the synagogue at the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi is named the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue. Few lives show so clearly that the meeting of the Abrahamic peoples is not a new idea. It is a very old one, waiting to be remembered.