Chapter 2 for The Guide to the Perplexed

II

Maimonides’ World

PHILLIP I. LIEBERMAN

Based on Maimonides’ own attestation, we may conclude that he completed his famous commentary on the Mishnah when he was thirty years old, in the year 1479 of the Seleucid chronology (corresponding to 1167/68 CE), a date that would mean that he came into the world in the year 1137/38 CE.¹ Indeed, both a report from Maimonides’ grandson and one from the fifteenth-century Granadan scholar Seʿadyah² Ibn Danan even give us the date—the fourteenth of Nisan³—although we should not dismiss the possibility that this is pure hagiography given the place of that date in the Jewish calendar, ushering in the Passover festival.⁴ An appreciation of the “Great Eagle,” as he would come to be called, demands an understanding of the much larger intellectual, cultural, and political context in which he lived and wrote. Sarah Stroumsa, for example, goes so far as to identify Maimonides as a “Mediterranean thinker” and points out that Maimonides “saw himself throughout his life as an Andalusian, and identified himself as such by signing his name in Hebrew as ‘Moshe ben Maimūn ha-Sefardi’ (‘the Spaniard,’ or in less anachronistic terms ‘al-Andalusī’).”⁵ Oliver Leaman, in turn, explains in his “Introduction to the Study of Medieval Jewish Philosophy” that “the medieval period is one in which the debate between philosophy and religion is regarded as having dominated the cultural atmosphere of the times. The main area of intellectual life was the Iberian Peninsula, and especially al-Andalus, the Islamic territories on the peninsula, with its large and well-integrated Jewish community.”⁶ Despite such emphases on the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula, the philosophical materials that engaged Maimonides and his Andalusian fellows were, in fact, the product of philosophical movements that we may locate far to the East—in particular, in Damascus of the seventh century CE and Baghdad of the eighth: “As Muslim acquaintance grew with the urban civilization of the Near East, with its Hellenistic legacy which had deeply shaped the earlier monotheisms, some Muslims began to develop a high form of religious, doctrinal or theological discourse known as kalām.”⁷ Many of the earliest group of kalām thinkers came from southern Iraq. It was the anti-Aristotelian practitioners of kalām—known collectively as the Mutakallimūn—who threw down the gauntlet that Maimonides, among others, would pick up centuries later on the other side of the Mediterranean.⁸ Before that happened, however, the Islamic ʿAbbāsid dynasty (750–1258 CE) rose to power. From their newly founded seat of Baghdad, the Greek philosophical tradition would capture the minds of a movement of translators who would make the philosophical works of Aristotle and Galen among many others, as well as the commentators on this entire literature, available to an Arabic-speaking audience. These translations were not, as some have argued, the result of the patronage of a few caliphs seeking adoration and glory through their support of philosophy; rather, translation of this massive library was a phenomenon sustained by the entire elite of ʿAbbāsid society.⁹ That the Greek philosophical classics were transmitted into Arabic, in many cases through a Byzantine Christian Syriac or Zoroastrian Persian intermediary, was for some a return to philosophy’s ancient roots: Al-Fārābī (872–951 CE) “located the birthplace of philosophy in Iraq, whence it was transmitted to Egypt, then to Greece, and finally rendered into Syriac and Arabic.”¹⁰ Transmission was more than simple translation; for example, Arabic versions read Aristotle “through the prism of a Neoplatonic tradition, that is, as interpreted by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus.”¹¹ Indeed, since Plato himself was translated infrequently relative to Aristotle, it was primarily through the Neoplatonic prism that his ideas were known.

The ʿAbbāsids’ massive library of Arabic versions of Greek philosophical classics was slow to make its way to the West, and the nature of its reception in the West was very different from what it was in the East. Rather than being the cultural production of an entire stratum of society, the early development of the philosophical library of al-Andalus—Islamic Spain—was primarily centered on the efforts of the Umayyad caliphs of Spain to establish their place as authorities in the temporal and cultural/literary domains independent of their erstwhile overlords, the ʿAbbāsids, in Iraq. Circumstances greatly favored these endeavors, and by the middle of the tenth century, “almost all branches of science and philosophy [were] imported from the East . . . [and] . . . al-Andalus [became] a major exporter of knowledge”¹² in the centuries following. The development of a massive library of scientific literature by the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (r. 929–961) and especially by his son al-Ḥakam II (r. 961–976)—which has been said to have run to some four hundred thousand volumes¹³—facilitated this venture and helped establish the Andalusian ruling family as major players in competition with the ʿAbbāsids in the East in the domain of science and philosophy. Indeed, the library “served as the focus of a whole nexus of cultural activities which helped lay the foundations for the massive explosion of literary productivity in Islamic Spain associated with the century and a quarter following al-Ḥakam’s death.”¹⁴ This institution more than any other allowed the Umayyads “to distance themselves from Baghdad, the capital of their rivals, and to compete with it as the centre of their own world.”¹⁵ Classics such as the compendia of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity) found their way into al-Andalus in the early eleventh century, and all the sciences began to grow apace. The development and patronage of knowledge in al-Andalus engendered a florescence that extended beyond confessional lines as Jewish and Christian littérateurs found support in the court of the Umayyads and their successors. And while in the early period of this development the main focus of the sciences was practical—mathematics, astronomy, and medicine¹⁶—the twelfth century saw patrons and clients alike in al-Andalus take a particular interest in philosophy. This is the world into which Maimonides was born.

It is difficult to separate the fate of philosophy in al-Andalus from the political, cultural, and religious developments of the time. The Umayyad caliphate disintegrated less than a century after ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III declared himself independent of ʿAbbāsid rule, followed by a period in which the rulers of fragmented states “encouraged literary and artistic creativity as likely to magnify their achievements and perpetuate the memories of their petty dynasts.”¹⁷ As the Umayyad caliphate experienced the establishment of a great repository of knowledge as defining its place in the intellectual life of Islam, then these “petty dynasts,” the Mulūk al-Ṭawāʾif (Hispanized as “reyes de taifas”), led to the dissemination of that knowledge beyond the library located in the Umayyad palace of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ on the outskirts of Cordoba and expanded it through the encouragement of not only literature and the arts but also science and philosophy. This patronage seems to have benefited a Jewish elite, some of whom rose to prominent government posts and some of whom also made important contributions to knowledge both sacred and secular.

The late eleventh century saw Christian rulers in the Iberian Peninsula capitalizing on the weakness of the fissiparous ṭāʾifas, with many of the local leaders paying tribute to Christian overlords who nonetheless continued to chip away at the Muslim domination of al-Andalus. The Christian takeover of Toledo in 1085 represented a watershed leading local dynasts to appeal southward for assistance from an emerging Islamic pietist/revivalist movement substantially made up of Berber peoples known as the al-Murābiṭūn (“those from the desert fortresses,” typically rendered in English as Almoravids) from the deserts of what is modern-day Morocco. The Almoravid advance into al-Andalus—intended to wrest control from the hands of both Christian rulers and petty Muslim rulers seen by their more ascetic North African brethren as dissolute and irreligious and hence more focused on poetry, literature, and philosophy than on Islam itself—lasted until the early twelfth century, when the Almoravids were replaced by another Berber dynasty known as al-Muwaḥḥidūn (“those who affirm the unity of God,” generally rendered in English as Almohads). The rise of these pietist movements represented a volte-face for the Jewish elites of al-Andalus who had fared well under the ṭāʾifas. Although the sobriquet al-Muwaḥḥidūn suggests the importance of tawḥīd, the uniqueness and oneness of God, the religious reforms of the Almohads were not simply a valorization of monotheism. Rather, the arrival of the Almohads witnessed a period of forced conversion and oppression of dhimmīs—that is, the “protected peoples” who lived under the agreement often known as the Pact of ʿUmar, in this case, Jews and Christians.¹⁸ These attacks on dhimmīs began in earnest within a few years of Maimonides’ birth, as Almohad forces occupied his birthplace of Cordoba in 1148 CE, and in many ways, Maimonides’ life may be seen as encompassing both the heights of Islamicate engagement with the timeless and universal problems of classical philosophy and the depths of religious persecution under a radical regime.

Maimonides’ family left Cordoba shortly after the arrival of the Almohads and seems to have remained in the Iberian Peninsula for some twelve years.¹⁹ The details of the family’s travels during this time are spotty, although it appears that they did sojourn in Seville, during which time Maimonides seems to have become particularly interested in astronomy. During this period, he appears to have met the son of the astronomer Jābir b. Aflaḥ (1100–1150), author of a famous commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest. He also studied under a pupil of Ibn Bājjah²⁰ (Latin, Avempace, ca. 1085–1138). Ibn Bājjah himself wrote a work on astronomy, not presently extant, to which Maimonides refers (Guide II 24). Exchanges with these scholars may have contributed to one of Maimonides’ earliest compositions, a treatise on the calendar, completed in 1157–58.²¹ It is during this period that Maimonides must also have perfected his training in classical rabbinic literature under his father, the rabbinic judge (dayyan) Maimūn b. Joseph (ca. 1110–ca. 1170),²² something that would have begun early on in Maimonides’ life. Moses’ father himself studied under the talmudist Joseph Ibn Migash (1077–ca. 1141), whose own teacher Isaac al-Fāsī came to lead an important rabbinic academy at Lucena some forty miles from Cordoba at the end of the eleventh century. We may say, then, that Maimonides came from a distinguished line of Andalusian rabbinic leaders stretching back to the ṭāʾifa period. Amid the continued depredations of the Almohads, some Jews converted and stayed in al-Andalus, but others chose to flee to Christian Spain, North Africa, or southern France. Maimonides’ time in al-Andalus came to an end around 1160, when his family, for reasons not entirely clear to us, decided to move from the Iberian Peninsula to Fez in Northwest Africa (Arabic, Maghrib), itself the very cradle of the Almohads.

The Maghribī period in Maimonides’ life, which would extend for some five years, has been the source of great controversy among scholars, mainly because it is puzzling that his family would move from one Almohad domain to another rather than taking the path of less resistance to Christian Spain or southern France. In his monumental biography Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds, Joel Kraemer challenges traditional explanations that the family’s relocation was due to their search for a teacher for their favorite son and speculates instead that conditions for dhimmīs may have been more favorable in Fez than elsewhere, since Almohad persecution was not uniform across its domains.²³ Alternatively, the family may have decided to live as crypto-Jews, and Morocco may have put sufficient distance between their place of origin in Cordoba and their adopted place of residence in Fez to guarantee that they would not be recognized as Jews.²⁴

Despite the difficulties of living life as a Jew, Maimonides’ study of classical rabbinic literature continued apace. Like his father, who wrote commentaries on the Bible and Talmud,²⁵ Maimonides contributed early on to the study of rabbinic literature by commenting on the Mishnah, the code of early rabbinic law that underpinned the Talmuds—starting this work in Fez when he was twenty-three and completing it in his Egyptian phase at the age of thirty. Moshe Halbertal identifies Maimonides’ decision to comment on the Mishnah as “an original idea; prior to Maimonides, no such attempt was made either by any of the Babylonian Geonim or by leading halakhists in Spain, Provençe, Germany, or France. The only known commentary on the entire Mishnah that preceded Maimonides’ was written in the eleventh century by R. Nathan, the head of the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel.”²⁶ Halbertal describes the Commentary on the Mishnah (hereafter CM) as a building block laying the groundwork for his comprehensive compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah—presenting the material systematized and organized to illuminate later talmudic understandings of the earlier mishnaic material.²⁷

Maimonides also pursued other studies in Fez, obtaining practical medical training. The great Andalusian doctors and medical theorists Ibn Zuhr (Latin, Avenzoar, 1090/91–1161/62) and Ibn Rushd (Latin, Averroes, 1126–1198) may not have been his teachers, but local physicians nonetheless opened up the world of medicine to him. Jewish physicians had actually served the Almoravid dynasty, but the Almohad persecutions enveloped the Maghrib, with the devastation being quite comprehensive. It is during this period that Maimonides wrote his “Epistle on Forced Conversion” (Hebrew, Iggeret ha-Shemad), a pastoral circular composed in the guise of a communique to a friend. Later communal letters provided support on similar matters to communities as far afield as Yemen.²⁸ The “Epistle on Forced Conversion” provided spiritual succor for those who chose forced conversion over death, over and above the objections of a heretofore unidentified rabbinic authority who regarded Islam as polytheism. Maimonides’ counsel was “to accept Islam provisionally and avoid martyrdom, to observe the commandments as far as possible, and to depart to a place where one can live openly as a Jew.”²⁹ And biding his time until early 1165, Maimonides may have done exactly that. Exactly how close Maimonides came to living an outward life as a Muslim and an inward life as a Jew during his interlude in Fez is a matter scholars have debated for nearly two centuries.³⁰

Departing the Maghrib with his father and brother David, he arrived in the Land of Israel in the middle of May, surviving a journey made arduous by rough seas. In the thick of a storm, Maimonides took a vow imposing on his family two days of fasting and charitable giving as well as a day of prayer and study in seclusion for himself.³¹ Maimonides arrived safely in the port of Acre on May 16, 1165. What followed was a pilgrimage with stops in Tyre, Jerusalem, and Hebron. A year later, the family left for Egypt—despite Jewish legal traditions prohibiting one’s departure from the Land of Israel.

In Egypt, the Maimonides family found an environment free from both the persecutions of the Almohads in the West and the Crusaders in the East. Religiously diverse, Fusṭāṭ / Old Cairo maintained a Jewish community of around four thousand souls in Maimonides’ time, a community well known to modern scholars for its Nachlass known as the Cairo Geniza. This massive collection of manuscript fragments—which is, in fact, the largest collection of documentary materials from the medieval Islamic world—contains scraps and manuscripts extending as far back as the ninth century. The documents of the Geniza made their way from their hiding place in a back room of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fusṭāṭ into various libraries and into the hands of private collectors from the middle of the nineteenth century.³² Fusṭāṭ was also an important entrepôt in the Mediterranean trade of the eleventh century and the Red Sea trade of the twelfth. The Maimonides family itself quickly became involved in this trade, and CM reveals Maimonides’ familiarity with the commercial practices of the twelfth century.³³ Moses’ younger brother David seems to have taken the lead in the family business, traveling east by caravan to the Red Sea port of ʿAydhāb and from there by ship to the Malabar Coast of India, a burgeoning trading diaspora that involved Jewish and Muslim merchants alike. But a shipwreck in 1177 swept David away and left Moses bereft of both his sibling and a key player in the family business.³⁴

David’s shipwreck affected Maimonides deeply. His words, in a letter now famous, depict a man “in a state of disconsolate mourning.”³⁵ By this time, Kraemer argues, Maimonides had already ascended to the position of raʾīs al-yahūd (“Head of the Jews”),³⁶ a role that he would have taken on just as the Jews’ Fāṭimid overlords in Cairo gave way to the Ayyūbid dynasty, which would control Egypt from 1171 to 1250. After a brief stint in this position in 1171 and 1172, Maimonides would return to scholarly pursuits, although it seems that he would again serve as raʾīs around 1198 or 1199.³⁷ But when free from the burden of high public office, Maimonides was able to write and think about academic law and to serve as a jurisconsult (Arabic, muftī) to the members of his community. Hundreds of his collected responsa survive, shedding light on daily life in his world.

In addition to his legal writing about practical cases, it is during this period that Maimonides wrote what he would come to call his magnum opus (Judeo-Arabic, taʾlīfunā al-kabīr)—that is, his comprehensive legal compendium Mishneh Torah (hereafter MT). This followed on the heels of another book, the Book of the Commandments, a milestone en route to the more expansive work, classifying and enumerating the 613 commandments in a manner that improved upon earlier attempts by legal authorities (including Seʿadyah Gaʾon) and even liturgical poets.³⁸ But the Book of the Commandments does more than just present a list; Maimonides supplies general rules (Judeo-Arabic, uṣūl) “for determining what should and should not be included in the enumeration of 613 Mosaic commandments.”³⁹ Organizing the commandments in the Book of the Commandments laid the groundwork for the further restructuring of the Law into thematic sections and then into individual laws in MT: “I have seen fit to divide this compilation by laws according to topic; and I shall divide the laws into chapters according to that topic; and each and every chapter I shall divide into smaller laws so that they might be committed to memory.”⁴⁰

In reorganizing the chaos of talmudic law into the clearly systematized passages of MT, Maimonides introduced a paradigm shift in the study of the Law. No longer would one need to wade through the sea of the Talmud in order to reveal the halakhah (i.e., the Law). Rather, the well-organized content and straightforward language of Maimonides’ composition found an eager audience in the diverse and dispersed Jewish communities on both sides of the Mediterranean in the twelfth century.⁴¹ But the clarity and relative brevity of MT came at a price—namely, that Maimonides generally refrained from citing the sources on which he relied in ascertaining the Law. Almost instantly, this gave rise to a cottage industry attempting to identify the sources of Maimonides’ rulings and occasionally challenging the Great Eagle’s decisions.⁴²

In the wake of his brother’s death, the study of the Law and the sciences sustained Maimonides.⁴³ But the study of the sciences did more than strengthen Maimonides’ spirit; it prepared him for employment in the practice of medicine. Through his relationship with al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, he was even chosen to treat the “King of the Franks” in Ashqelon early on in his time in Egypt, and when the Maimonides family lost its financial nest egg on David’s second India voyage, Maimonides took to practicing and writing about medicine in earnest. He drew on both his theoretical medical knowledge, relying on sources extending back to Arabic translations of Galen and his Hippocratic predecessors, and his early practical medical training in Cordoba. While serving as a medical practitioner,⁴⁴ Maimonides also contributed to the medical literature with his Medical Aphorisms as well as some nine other medical works.⁴⁵ Thus, in the field of medicine, he combined the theoretical with the applied and practical—as he had in his legal work, complementing his composition of MT with responsa that engaged the populace at large looking for practical guidance in the Law. Maimonides also seems to have been involved with the training of other medical practitioners.⁴⁶

Just as the goal of MT was to present a legal synthesis to an audience daunted by the meandering logic of the Talmud, the third pillar of Maimonides’ literary oeuvre may be seen as a philosophical and theological synthesis—a Guide to the Perplexed. In this work, Maimonides’ interests in the theological focus first and foremost on the Bible itself rather than the overlay of rabbinic materials whose lens for reading the Bible was itself the interest of CM, the Book of Commandments, and MT. It is in the Guide that Maimonides’ writings come full circle and his training in the secular literature of al-Andalus is made apparent: The philosophical literature that was the staple of the elites of Cordoba provides the rhythm on which Maimonides composes his melody. This was the starting point for the Guide, upon which Maimonides would have been able to build throughout his life. The North African interlude of a quarter century (Maimonides began the Guide in 1185), with its emphasis on the sciences of astronomy, medicine, and law, had not dampened the master’s ardor for philosophy; nor had a deep involvement in the marketplace and the practical arts of healing diminished his love of the speculative and theoretical. Maimonides’ putative audience for the Guide was his student Joseph b. Judah Ibn Simeon, who departed Fusṭāṭ for Aleppo and left the master with no alternative but to send him lessons—which he did seriatim. But the actual audience for the Guide was much broader—as Kraemer explains: “The first purpose of The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides explained, is to instruct a religious person, who believes in the law and has studied philosophy and is perplexed by the contradictions between the two. . . . For these people and others, Maimonides wanted to make the law respectable to philosophy and make philosophy compatible with the law. This dual endeavor required showing the true meaning of the law and the true nature of philosophy.”⁴⁷ In the Guide itself, Maimonides lays out the curriculum that ideally leads the initiate to understand difficult passages in the Bible: the natural sciences (physics), cosmology, and mathematics.⁴⁸ Only after mastering these sciences may one venture to metaphysics, which is “beyond physics” (Judeo-Arabic, baʿda ’l-ṭabīʿa). Yet a background in the classical sciences presents the student with only half the picture. Implicit in the Guide is the reader’s familiarity with not only the Bible itself and its rabbinic complement but also a library of heresiographical, theological, and quasi-anthropological literature of his time from outside the philosophical canon. This library included such important works as the Nabatean Agriculture, ascribed to the ninth/tenth-century writer Ibn Waḥshiyyah,⁴⁹ as well as lesser-known writings such as the still-unidentified Book of Ṭumṭum. These works provided Maimonides with a context for the biblical world and its cult of animal sacrifice, which was ancient Israel’s primary vehicle for communion with God. Although historical and theological developments took ancient Israelite religion far afield from the prescriptions of the “Written Torah” itself as that religion took shape in its rabbinic guise, Maimonides’ gaze in the Guide is focused on the Bible and its world. Thus, his readings of biblical law in the latter sections of Part III of the Guide are more attentive to the ancient law than its late-antique Rabbanite manifestation as he laid it out in MT. The Guide provides not an apology for rabbinic religion per se but instead an explanation of how the Bible itself can lead the individual to knowledge of God and ultimately to human perfection.

Even in Maimonides’ lifetime, the Guide had a complicated reception, the history of which was made even more difficult to decipher by Maimonides’ own revisions to the Judeo-Arabic text revealed by the fragments of the Cairo Geniza. The work was translated into Hebrew almost immediately by Samuel Ibn Tibbon (ca. 1165–1232) and Judah al-Ḥarīzī (ca. 1165/66–1225), and material differences in the philosophical arguments of the Guide persist in these various translations.⁵⁰ But the Guide’s focus on a rational or philosophic mysticism⁵¹ shines through the silver casing on his apple of gold.

Maimonides completed the Guide around 1191 and for the rest of his life remained involved in a host of pursuits: continuing to provide legal counsel as a rabbi despite his attestation that he composed MT “to be released from study and searching in his old age,”⁵² attending the Ayyūbid sultans as court physician and engaging in medical writing, serving the members of his community by healing body and soul, and mentoring his son, Abraham (1186–1237), to take the helm as communal leader. Fatigue and weakness restricted him in his old age, and death took him in the year 1204. His body was reportedly removed to Tiberias in the Land of Israel for burial,⁵³ but the legacy of Andalusian Jewry lived on in the dynasty he established in Cairo, and his intellectual inheritance is no less powerful today than it was when he put pen to paper in the twelfth century.

Notes

1. H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 9; Kraemer, Maimonides, 23.

2. As noted by Adolf Neubauer in 1890, the proper spelling of this name is Seʿadyah, which I will use throughout this introduction (Neubauer, “Post-biblical Biography,” 191–204). However, we will use the better-known spelling “Saadiah” in the translation.

3. H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 6–9.

4. Kraemer, Maimonides, 24.

5. Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World, 6–7.

6. Leaman, “Introduction,” 4–5.

7. Blankinship, “Early Creed,” 45.

8. For the specific philosophical positions of the mutakallimūn, see Goldziher and Lewis, Introduction, 67–115; for the role the mutakallimūn would play in subsequent Jewish philosophy, see Harry Wolfson, Kalām.

9. Gutas, Greek Thought, 1–8; see also Goodman, Translation, 477–97.

10. Kraemer, “Islamic Context,” 39.

11. Ibid., 44.

12. Heath, “Knowledge,” 115.

13. Wasserstein disputes this figure yet nonetheless notes that its significance does not rest upon its historical accuracy (“Library,” 99).

14. Ibid., 101.

15. Ibid., 102.

16. Heath, “Knowledge,” 117.

17. EI₂, s.v. “Mulūk al-Ṭawāʾif” (David J. Wasserstein).

18. Fierro, “Conversion,” 155–73.

19. Kraemer, Maimonides, 41.

20. Cf. Guide II 9.

21. For details concerning the treatise on the calendar, see Kraemer, Maimonides, 76–79.

22. H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 4.

23. Note that Davidson is less sanguine than Kraemer about using the Arabic prosopographical literature, to include the work of al-Qifṭī, for biographical data about Maimonides; see ibid.

24. Kraemer, Maimonides, 84. It is worth noting that while the Maimonides family may have moved to Fez to assume a Muslim identity and distance themselves from their Andalusian Jewish roots, it seems that the family’s subsequent move to Cairo was not sufficient to distance them from their time spent as crypto-Jews: as Kraemer explains, around the year 1190, a man living in Fusṭāṭ / Old Cairo named Abū ’l-ʿArab Ibn Muʿ īsha al-Kinānī publicly accused Maimonides of having converted to Islam back in al-Andalus. Any return to life as a Jew would mean the crime of apostasy, punishable by death. It was only through the intervention of Saladin’s chief administrator and Maimonides’ patron al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil, making the legal argument that Maimonides’ conversion had been made under duress and could therefore be reversed, that the family was saved from the long arm of the law. Davidson is skeptical of the accuracy of this narrative.

25. Ibid., 59.

26. Halbertal, Maimonides, 97. In fact, pace Halbertal, Maimonides was not the first post-talmudic figure to comment on the Mishnah. Halbertal himself notes the commentary of Rabbi Nathan b. Abraham (d. ca. 1045–51), but eminent scholars of the Babylonian academies such as Hayya Gaʾon (939–1038) and Seʿadyah Gaʾon (882–942) both penned commentaries on the Mishnah. Thus, Brody writes that “many references to such works, on the Mishnah as a whole or on selected tractates, are also to be found on ancient booklists” (Geonim, 269).

27. Halbertal, Maimonides, 97–99.

28. For a discussion of Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen and a translation of the text of the epistle itself, see Hartman and Halkin, Crisis and Leadership, 91–208.

29. Kraemer, Maimonides, 111.

30. For this debate, see the discussion in H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 17–28. For a recent counterargument, see Kraemer, Maimonides, 116–24.

31. For a translation of Maimonides’ own words, see Kraemer, Maimonides, 127.

32. For an introduction to the Cairo Geniza, see Cole and Hoffman, Sacred Trash.

33. Kraemer, Maimonides, 162. For a discussion of how commercial practices shaped Maimonides’ later legal magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, see Mark R. Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants.

34. My dating here relies on the reading of Maimonides’ correspondence by Isaac Shailat, who claims that David returned from an earlier trip in 1169–71 and died on a second voyage to India in 1176–77; cf. Maimonides, “Epistles of Maimonides,” ed. Shailat, 72–73, 198, cited in Kraemer, Maimonides, 544 n. 38. Although Kraemer notes Shailat’s identification of a second voyage, his biography does not specifically introduce the notion of a safe return and second voyage.

35. Maimonides, “Epistles of Maimonides,” 228–30, tr. Kraemer in Kraemer, Maimonides, 255–56.

36. Pace Davidson in H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 54–57, who questions whether or not Maimonides occupied the role of raʾīs al-yahūd.

37. Kraemer, “Goitein,” 227.

38. Non-Rabbanite Jewish figures also composed books of the commandments, including the proto-Karaite ʿAnan b. David and Benjamin al-Nahāwandī. For these and other non-Rabbanite Jewish figures and their writings, see Ben-Shammai, “Karaism”; and Astren, “Non-Rabbinic.”

39. H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 175. See also Friedberg, Crafting the 613 Commandments.

40. “Introduction to the Mishneh Torah,” tr. Lerner in Maimonides’ Empire of Light, 140, cited in Kraemer, Maimonides, 318; and Twersky, Introduction, 30.

41. For example, for the reception of the Mishneh Torah in Italy, see Ta-Shma, “Acceptance of Maimonides’ ‘Mishneh Torah,’” 79–90. The penetration of MT into Ashkenaz, beyond the Mediterranean, may not have been so deep.

42. Cf. EJ, s.v. “Arms Bearers (Nosei Kelim)” (Menahem Elon), in EJ, s.v. “Codification of Law.” Elon explains that the starting point for this literature was the Hassagot of Maimonides’ contemporary Abraham b. David of Posquières (ca. 1125–1198). The endeavor of the Nosei Kelim continues in the work of scholars such as Mark Cohen, who identified the practices of the medieval marketplace to find their way into MT (cf. M. R. Cohen, Maimonides and the Merchants).

43. Thus, Maimonides writes, “Were it not for the Torah, which is my delight, and for scientific matters, which let me forget my sorrow, I would have perished in my affliction. (Psalms 119:92).” Tr. and cited in Kraemer, Maimonides, 256.

44. See the famous letter of Maimonides to Samuel Ibn Tibbon describing his daily schedule of interactions with an ailing public in Forte, “Back to the Sources,” 47–90.

45. For these, see the editions and translations of Gerrit Bos.

46. Goitein, “Medical.”

47. Kraemer, Maimonides, 366–67.

48. Cf. Maimonides, Guide I 34.

49. See Hämeen-Anttila, Last Pagans of Iraq, for a partial translation and discussion of this work.

50. On these translations, see Shiffman, cited in Kraemer, Maimonides, 569 n. 38.

51. For a discussion of Maimonides’ mysticism, see Lenn Goodman’s “The Object of the Guide” in this volume.

52. Kraemer, Maimonides, 321.

53. H. Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 73.