Chapter 10 - Moses Maimonides

Summary

The emotional difficulties of migration are demonstrated by the story of one of the medieval Mediterranean's most famous migrants, Moses ben Maimon, commonly called Maimonides. He is known as the greatest Jewish philosopher and scholar of religious law from the medieval period, and is still revered today as one of Judaism's most important thinkers of all time. His writings include biblical commentaries, a system-atization of Jewish law, philosophical texts, and advice letters to Jews around the Mediterranean world in response to questions of concern to them. He was revered in his lifetime as both the chief legal expert of his community and for Jews in many other lands. All of this impressive intellectual output, as well as his career as a medical doctor, was made possible because he found refuge in a new land after a long and difficult migration from the place of his birth. As a migrant, he had special insight into the traumas experienced by people living under oppressive regimes, which he brought to his scholarship and legal responsa. And his own experiences of those traumas shaped his answers to questions from Jews facing similar problems, leading him to recommend migration rather than enduring persecution.

Most likely born in 1138, Maimonides was a member of the vibrant Jewish community that had lived in Islamic Cordoba for centuries, until a new North African religio-political power conquered much of al-Andalus. In 1148, Cordoba fell to the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn: “those who proclaim the unity of God,” or “the unifiers”), an Amazigh-led movement to purify Islam of what they perceived to be corrupting influences. Among those influences was counted the presence of non-Muslim minorities, who were traditionally offered protected status according to the broader Islamic legal tradition. The Almohads, in contrast, emphasized the need for conversion to Islam by the peninsula's Jews and Christians. This reversal of the policy of protection for religious minorities led many Christians and Jews to pursue one of three options: to resist forced conversion (many who chose this path were sentenced to death), to convert nominally but continue to practise their religion in secret, or to flee to safer places. Maimonides and his family appear to have taken both options two and three.