Around 1180, in Fustat, the old city beside Cairo, a rabbi who earned his living as a physician completed the Mishneh Torah, a code of Jewish law in fourteen books. He wrote it in Hebrew, left out almost all of his sources, and said in its introduction that a reader who knew the Torah and then this code would need no other book. About ten years later he finished a very different book for a single pupil who had left for Syria. He wrote it in Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew letters, and warned in its introduction that it would contradict itself on purpose. Maimonides, known to Jewish readers as Rambam from the initials of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, wrote both books, and he held that they taught one truth.
That truth was that the Law of Moses, read rightly, and the philosophy of Aristotle lead to the same God: one with no body, no parts and no description. The Bible gives God a hand, a face and a throne, while the philosophers held that the first cause of all motion can have no body. Maimonides answered that each of Scripture's bodily words about God has a second, figurative sense, and that a true statement about God says only what God does or what God is not. To call God powerful is to deny that he is powerless. In the code he made this law: whoever believes that God has a body and a shape has no share in the world to come.
His family reached Fustat only after years on the move. In 1148 the Almohads, a Berber dynasty that offered non-Muslims conversion, exile or death, took Córdoba, and the family left. They moved through Spain and North Africa, reached Fez in 1160, sailed to Acre in 1165 and settled in Fustat around 1166. How they lived under Almohad rule is uncertain. Ibn al-Qifti, a Muslim historian of the next century, reported that Maimonides had professed Islam in the Maghreb and returned to Judaism in Egypt; historians still dispute the report. The code later set out, as law, when a Jew must die rather than break a commandment and when he must not.
The two books were written for different readers, and the code was for everyone. It begins with God, the angels and the turning spheres of heaven. It identifies these with the secrets the Talmud's rabbis had guarded, then tells every reader, learned or simple, to master the commandments before venturing among those secrets. The Guide for the Perplexed was for the few who had learned philosophy and could no longer take the Bible's words literally. On the question that most divided the philosophers from the Law — whether the world had a beginning — Maimonides argued that neither Aristotle's eternal world nor creation could be proved, and chose creation. Had eternity been proved, he wrote, the verses of Genesis could have been read figuratively, as he had read the verses about God's body.
Both books drew fire in his lifetime and after. Abraham ben David of Posquières, a Provençal rabbi, wrote objections to the code that are still printed beside it, and others feared a code without sources would replace study of the Talmud. Samuel ben Eli, head of the rabbinic academy in Baghdad, charged that Maimonides did not believe in the resurrection of the dead; Maimonides answered in 1191 with his Treatise on Resurrection. In 1232 the rabbis of northern France banned the Guide and the code's first book.
Thomas Aquinas read the Guide in Latin and drew on it. In 1670 Spinoza, in his Theological-Political Treatise, took Maimonides as the leading case of bending Scripture to fit reason, and objected that had reason convinced Maimonides the world was eternal, he would have read Genesis to say so. Maimonides' Thirteen Principles of faith, first set down in his commentary on the Mishnah, are still sung in synagogues in the hymn Yigdal.
Most of this was written in the time left over from medicine. His younger brother David, a merchant in the India trade, drowned in the Indian Ocean carrying money that belonged to both of them and to others. Maimonides wrote years later that he lay ill for about a year afterwards and still mourned him eight years on. From then on he lived by medicine: he served as physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin's chief counsellor, and later to the sultan's household, and he wrote medical works as well. In a letter of 1199 he told Samuel ibn Tibbon, his Hebrew translator in Provence, not to expect much of his time: he rode to Cairo every morning, and in the afternoon he came home to rooms full of patients, Jews and gentiles, who kept him until night. He died in Fustat in 1204.