# Maimonides **Moses ben Maimon** (1138–1204), known as Maimonides or by the acronym **Rambam**, was the most influential Jewish philosopher and jurist of the medieval period. Born in Córdoba under Almohad rule, he fled persecution to Fez and eventually settled in Fustat, Egypt, where he served as a physician and as head of the Jewish community. His two monumental works pull in different directions and the tension between them defines his reception. The **Mishneh Torah** is a comprehensive codification of Jewish law, written in accessible Hebrew and organized systematically — an attempt to make the whole legal tradition navigable. **The Guide for the Perplexed** is an esoteric philosophical work reconciling [[Aristotle]] with scripture, addressed to readers whose philosophical training has made literal religious belief impossible, and written — as [[Moshe Halbertal]] argues in *Concealment and Revelation* — with deliberate contradictions intended to be legible only to the prepared reader. ## Why he appears in this knowledge base Two reasons, both indirect. **The rationalist reading of idolatry.** Maimonides treats idolatry as fundamentally an *error* — a mistake about what exists, correctable in principle by better metaphysics. That reading is one of the two poles in [[Moshe Halbertal]] and [[Avishai Margalit]]'s [[Idolatry]], and the contrast with the *betrayal* reading is what generates the politically usable concept at [[Political Idolatry]]. **Transmission into Christian scholasticism.** [[Thomas Aquinas]] read and cited Maimonides directly, and the Maimonidean synthesis of Aristotelian reason with revealed law is part of the lineage behind [[Natural Law]] — the framework the contemporary religious right invokes for the claim that certain moral facts are discoverable by reason and therefore legitimately legislated. > [!note] Stub > Minimum-viable page created to support [[Political Idolatry]] and [[Idolatry]]. Expand with the Thirteen Principles of Faith, the negative-theology argument, the esotericism question, and the Maimonidean controversies. ## See also [[Moshe Halbertal]] · [[Idolatry]] · [[Political Idolatry]] · [[Natural Law]] · [[Philosophy of Religion]] · [[People Hub]]