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Persecution of the Jews began in 1164 in Morocco, and two years later the Maimon family moved to Egypt, where they found a final refuge. (Despite being the adopted land where Maimonides achieved world fame, Egypt is conspicuously absent from the dozens of official observances of the anniversary year.) There he devoted ten years to the writing of the Mishneh Torah. Its preface contained what became Judaism's standard listing of the 613 biblical commandments, which deal with matters ranging from ritual slaughtering laws to recompense for injuries. Maimonides said that "no other work should be needed for ascertaining any of the laws of Israel."
Maimonides believed it was wrong to receive income from religious scholarship and earned his living as a doctor. Eventually he was appointed a physician to the Egyptian court of the storied Saladin, and became famous for voluminous medical writings.
Although the Rambam was an intellectual and something of an elitist, he cared greatly for the welfare of ordinary Jews. In Egypt, he was the religious and social head of his community. The newly published Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, by Abraham Halkin and David Hartman (Jewish Publication Society; $15.95), portrays an international leader of his faith who was courageous and compassionate, though sometimes blunt.
Maimonides' last major work was the Guide, which has long been the subject of dispute. Alvin Reines, a radical Reform rabbi in the U.S., thinks that Maimonides wrote on two levels, presenting the literal meaning of the Scriptures for the ignorant rabble while holding to a hidden antimiraculous religion in which God was an impersonal concept. Drawing on Maimonides' writings, more conventional scholars hold that the Rambam, though committed to traditional Judaism, sought to harmonize it with philosophy and science.
That blending involved some distinctly modern ideas. Maimonides argued that the biblical account of creation out of nothingness was a more plausible concept than the eternal universe of Aristotle. But he also declared boldly that if his philosophical thinking had substantiated Aristotle's view, he would simply have reinterpreted the Bible accordingly. Maimonides treated the sacrificial rituals commanded by biblical law as accommodations that God made to the Hebrews' pagan background.
Maimonides conceived his Mishneh Torah as a single unifying law code for Judaism. Although it never became that, his work substantially affected every later development in Jewish scholarship. By many accounts, Maimonides' legal compendium provided a strength that enabled Judaism to avoid factionalism during the Muslim and Christian persecutions of the Middle Ages. The Guide of the Perplexed influenced the metaphysical speculations of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian scholastics while being largely ignored by medieval Judaism. But for modern Jews, says Biblical Scholar Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University, Maimonides provides "the model of a person who is able to accept a religious position without compromising on intellectual honesty and freedom of inquiry."
FOOTNOTE: *Yale University Press has published 13 of a projected 15 volumes of a modern English edition.