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Full Description
This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most
influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a
philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it
brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the
social, religious, and political issues of his time.
Maimonides
was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled Spain, in 1138 and died in Cairo
in 1204. He lived in an Arab-Islamic environment from his early years
in Spain and North Africa to his later years in Egypt, where he was
immersed in its culture and society. His life, career, and writings are
the highest expression of the intertwined worlds of Judaism and Islam.
Maimonides
lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and
the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the
Mishneh Torah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal
codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers of
humankind. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in
the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works
in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for
centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to
mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His
Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious
tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced
generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers.
Now, in a
dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of
Maimonides’ rich life. MAIMONIDES is at once a portrait of a great
historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the
twelfth century. Joel Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to
re-create a remarkable period in history when Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense
intellectual exchange and religious conflict.
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