The Great Islamic Rabbi, Did one of Judaism's most venerable sages live as a Muslim?

There are few things all Jews can agree on, but one may be that there is no figure in Judaism in the last 1,000 years who is as revered as Moses ben Maimon (1135-1204), better known by the Greek form of his name, Maimonides. Reformers and ultra-traditionalists, rationalists and mystics claim him as their inspiration. He created the template for medieval and modern Jewish thinking on matters stretching from law to science, medicine to philosophy, messianism to politics.

Joel L. Kraemer's extensive biography Maimonides brings this venerated rabbi and physician to life for a new generation of readers. It is the work of a scholar deeply engaged with Maimonides' ideas and the world in which he lived; the book is lucid, entertaining and incisive. While many biographies of Maimonides have been written, Kraemer does what few have attempted: He presents the great Jewish sage as deeply embedded in an Islamic cultural, religious and intellectual milieu.

The book is divided into two parts: an analysis of the Islamic context in which Maimonides lived, describing in detail the places he frequented (Spain, Morocco, the Holy Land and Egypt) and the people he met; and a survey of his writings, including volumes of letters and records of his extensive medical practice as well as his 14-volume code of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, and his philosophical masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed.
ad_icon

Among Maimonides scholars there is a long-standing debate regarding the allegation that as an adolescent he and his family converted to Islam (either in his Spanish hometown of Córdoba or later in the Moroccan city of Fez) to avoid the ire of the Almohad dynasty, and that he lived as a Muslim until early adulthood. No credible evidence of this exists in Jewish sources. We know, however, that many in his family's social class did feign conversion to survive the militant Islamic regime that expanded across Northern Africa and much of the Iberian peninsula in his lifetime. Citing four Arabic sources, Kraemer surmises that Maimonides "practiced Islam in Fez and eventually left and sailed to Acre. We do not know whether he was already a practicing Muslim when he came to Fez."

The Jewish position has been that Maimonides did not convert but rather engaged in "taqiyya" or dissimulation and, at most, lived as if he were a Muslim, something quite common of Jews in that perilous period. As I read Kraemer, that distinction (outright conversion vs. dissimulation) may be important to many Jews, but it is practically irrelevant to this biography. By Kraemer's lights, Maimonides did not simply live and work among Muslims; his entire worldview was infused with Islamic methods, ideas and ideology. The author argues, for example, that the subtle balance in Maimonides's legal code between "preservation of tradition on one side, and change and progress on the other" stems from his melding of the Talmudic tradition with key principles of Islamic legal interpretation.

The Washington Post