Maimonides (1138-1204)

Key dates

Cordoba: childhood in Andalusian Spain

Maimonides was born in Cordoba, then the intellectual capital of Almoravid Al-Andalus, where Jews, Muslims and Christians shared — not without tension — the same urban space and the same Arabic-speaking learned culture. The exact date of his birth is the subject of genuine academic debate. The ancient tradition, taken up by his own grandson David ben Abraham (1222-1300), holds to March 30, 1135^[20]. But Maimonides himself gives, in the autograph colophon of his Commentary on the Mishnah completed in 1168, indications of age that place his birth rather "in the last third of 1137 or the first two-thirds of 1138"^[21] — it is this revision, supported by the reference academic biographies of Herbert A. Davidson and Joel L. Kraemer, that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy retains today^[22].

His father, Maimon ben Joseph, "a scholar of high merit"^[23], instructed him personally in the Law before entrusting him, as was customary, to the best Arabic-speaking teachers available. This twofold formation — Torah and Arabic philosophical culture — would shape Maimonides' entire work; he would write most of his books not in Hebrew but in Judeo-Arabic, the living language of his world.

Almohad fury and exile (1148-1160)

In 1148, Cordoba fell to the Almohads, a rigorist Berber dynasty that replaced relative Almoravid tolerance with a policy of forced conversion. Maimonides was then only thirteen:

"Moses was only thirteen years old when Cordova fell into the hands of the fanatical Almohades, and Maimon and all his coreligionists there were compelled to choose between Islam and exile." — Jewish Encyclopedia, article "Moses ben Maimon", 1906^[24]

The family chose exile, but did not leave Spain immediately: it wandered for eight or nine years across the Iberian Peninsula, and perhaps as far as Provence, before finding a more stable settlement^[25]. These were years of intense intellectual formation despite the instability: it was during this period that Maimonides began writing his Commentary on the Mishnah.

Fez, Moroccan refuge (c. 1160-1165)

Around 1160, the family settled in Fez, capital of Almohad Morocco^[26]. The choice may surprise — the Almohads reigned there too — but Fez then offered a first-rate milieu of Arabic medicine and philosophy, and the Jewish community seems to have enjoyed greater de facto tolerance there than had prevailed in Spain. It was there that Maimonides deepened his study of medicine and Aristotelian philosophy under Muslim masters.

Passage through the Holy Land (1165)

Around 1165, a new break: the family left North Africa for the Holy Land. The Jewish Encyclopedia's account is sober: "they embarked, went to Acre, to Jerusalem, and then to Fostat [Cairo], where they settled"^[27]. According to the biographical tradition taken up by the Jewish Virtual Library, Maimonides visited the Temple esplanade in Jerusalem and the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, the traditional burial place of the patriarchs^[28] — a brief pilgrimage that would durably mark his piety, before the country's economic and political conditions, then under Crusader domination, pushed him to continue toward Egypt.

Fostat: final settlement in Egypt

Maimonides settled in Fostat, a city adjoining Cairo, probably around 1166^[29] — some sources place this final settlement a little later, around 1168, without the divergence being settled in historiography. Fostat would remain his home until his death, thirty-eight years later. It was there that he wrote most of his work, practiced medicine, and led — in fact if not always in official title — the Jewish community of Egypt.

His brother David's death and the need to live by medicine

Shortly after the settlement in Egypt, tragedy struck the family. Maimonides' younger brother, David, a precious-stone merchant who supported the household, drowned at sea, probably in the Indian Ocean, around 1169^[30]:

"David perished at sea, and with him was lost not only his own fortune, but large sums that had been entrusted to him by other traders." — Jewish Encyclopedia, article "Moses ben Maimon", 1906^[31]

The blow was as much financial as moral. Maimonides himself wrote that his brother's loss pained him profoundly, plunging him into lasting depression^[32]. Deprived of the commercial fortune that had until then allowed him to study and write free of material worry, he now had to live by his medical knowledge — a biographical turning point that explains, more than any initial vocation, his career as a professional physician.

Physician to the Ayyubid court

Maimonides became personal physician to the vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil al-Baisami, the strongman of the Egyptian government under Saladin:

"[He] was appointed private physician to Saladin's vizier Al-Qadi al-Fadil al-Baisami, who recommended him to the royal family and bestowed upon him many distinctions." — Jewish Encyclopedia, article "Moses ben Maimon", 1906^[33]

His medical reputation, however, was only fully established after 1185, when al-Qadi al-Fadil, already de facto vizier under Saladin, became the true master of Egypt after Saladin's departure from the country in 1174^[34]. Several of his medical treatises — notably the Regimen of Health — were composed for al-Afdal, Saladin's eldest son. It should be noted, however, with the caution medieval history demands, that some popular claims about Maimonides' precise ties with Saladin himself rest on more fragile documentation than late biographical tradition sometimes suggests; the solidly established fact is his service to al-Qadi al-Fadil and to the Ayyubid court as a whole.

"Head of the nation": leading the Jewish community of Fostat

Around 1171-1177, Maimonides was recognized as the effective head of the Jewish community of Fostat^[35]. Popular tradition attributes to him the honorific title of "nagid" (prince, leader), but this precise point is disputed by the best sources: the Jewish Encyclopedia's own article "Nagid" notes that a marriage contract (ketubbah) dated 1172 "seems by its wording to indicate that Maimonides did hold the office" — without absolute certainty^[36]. The Jewish Virtual Library is even more categorical: "It is doubtful whether he actually held the appointment of nagid as is usually stated"^[37]. The title most solidly attested for Maimonides himself in the documents of the Cairo Geniza is rather "Ra'is al-Umma" (head of the nation/community); the office of nagid, on the other hand, is clearly established for his son Abraham ben Moses (1186-1237), who succeeded him in that post without ambiguity.

The Commentary on the Mishnah and the thirteen articles of faith

Maimonides' first great work, the Kitab al-Siraj ("Book of the Lamp"), better known as the Commentary on the Mishnah, was written in Judeo-Arabic and completed around 1168, when its author was thirty, as he himself states in the autograph colophon of the manuscript^[38]. In the introduction to a chapter of the treatise Sanhedrin (the chapter known as Helek), Maimonides sets out thirteen principles he holds to be the irreducible foundations of the Jewish faith^[39]:

These thirteen articles would later nourish the liturgical formula known as "Ani Maamin" ("I believe"), first attested in the Venice Haggadah of 1566, and the synagogue poem Yigdal, composed around 1300 and attributed to Daniel ben Judah of Rome^[40]. The twelfth principle — awaiting the Messiah — lies at the heart of the classic rabbinic Jewish objection to the messiahship of Jesus; the Ignispedia article devoted to Judaism develops this precise point, with the corresponding Catholic answer, and it is therefore not repeated here in detail.

The Mishneh Torah: the Law set in order

Maimonides' second great undertaking, the Mishneh Torah ("Repetition of the Law", also called Yad ha-Hazaka, "the Strong Hand"), occupied him for about ten years^[41], between 1170 and 1180 according to the generally accepted dating^[42]. The project was of unprecedented boldness: to codify the whole of written and oral Jewish law, in Mishnaic Hebrew — not in the learned Arabic he uses elsewhere — so as to make it accessible to every literate Jew of the Diaspora, without requiring prior mastery of the immense argumentative apparatus of the Talmud. The work is divided into fourteen books — Sefer HaMadda (Knowledge), Ahavah (Love of God), Zemanim (Times), Nashim (Women), Kedushah (Holiness), Hafla'ah (Separation), Zera'im (Seeds), Avodah (Divine Service), Korbanot (Offerings), Taharah (Ritual Purity), Nezikim (Torts), Kinyan (Acquisition), Mishpatim (Civil Laws) and Shoftim (Judges)^[43].

A work already controversial

The very ambition of the Mishneh Torah — giving legal decisions without systematically citing the Talmudic sources from which they derive — drew substantive criticism from the moment it appeared. Maimonides himself would admit regretting not having written a companion work citing his authorities for those decisions whose source was not evident from the context^[44]. His most important contradictor was the Provençal rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquières, known as Raavad (c. 1125-1198), whose critical glosses (hassagot) still accompany, printed in parallel, nearly all learned editions of the code^[45]. Raavad did not confine himself to questions of method: he directly contested one of the thirteen articles of faith, that of God's incorporeality, which Maimonides had just erected into an irrefutable dogma:

"Men, better and worthier than he, have held this view [attributing a body to God], for which they believe they have found authority in the Scriptures." — Abraham ben David of Posquières (Raavad), gloss (hassaga) on Mishneh Torah, Sefer HaMadda, Hilkhot Teshuvah III, 7^[46]

This episode is precious for a Catholic reader: it shows that Maimonidean negative theology, far from being self-evident, was discussed and contested within the rabbinic Judaism of his own time — a sign that it constitutes a genuine philosophical choice, not an unambiguous traditional given.

The project: a guide for "one who is perplexed"

Around 1190, in the last years of his life, Maimonides completed his philosophical masterpiece, Dalalat al-Ha'irin, "The Guide for the Perplexed"^[47]. The work, written in Judeo-Arabic, takes the form of letters addressed to a specific disciple, Joseph ben Judah ibn Shimon, who had left to study in Aleppo — a young man who was "perplexed", torn between his attachment to the Torah and his taste for Aristotelian philosophy, to whom Maimonides wanted to show that the two are not necessarily opposed^[48]. The Hebrew text, today the most widely read, is due to Samuel ibn Tibbon, who completed his translation at Arles in 1204 — the very year of Maimonides' death^[49]. In English, the classic translation remains that of M. Friedländer, published in 1881 and widely reprinted, notably by Dover Publications; in French, the reference translation remains that of Salomon Munk, published in three volumes between 1856 and 1866 with the original Arabic text alongside, reissued by Éditions Verdier in 1979^[50].

Negative theology: what cannot be said of God

The philosophical heart of the Guide is a rigorous doctrine of negative theology (via negativa): according to Maimonides, no positive attribute can be affirmed of the divine essence without surreptitiously reducing it to the measure of creatures. Every statement about God must therefore be understood either as the negation of an imperfection, or as the description of a divine action — never as a direct description of what God is:

"Clearly, then, the more you can prove inapplicable to God, the better: and the more you affirm of Him, the more you anthropomorphize and the further you stray from real knowledge of Him." — Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, I, 59^[51]

He pushes this logic to its limit:

"Between our knowledge and His knowledge there is nothing in common, as there is nothing in common between our essence and His essence." — Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III, 20^[52]

Only the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), according to Maimonides, truly refers to the divine essence rather than to a divine action — all the other names of God in Scripture, including "Mighty" or "Merciful", in reality designate only his effects perceptible in creation^[53]. This doctrine owes much to Islamic philosophy — Maimonides cites Al-Farabi more than any other thinker of the falsafa, and takes from Avicenna the cardinal distinction between essence and existence^[54]. By an entirely independent path, it meets the approach Saint Thomas Aquinas would follow a century later in his own doctrine of the divine names — to the point that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that, for a traditional theist such as Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides "may have gone too far", leaving "a conception of divinity (...) too thin for the average worshipper"^[55] — a salutary nuance distinguishing Maimonidean negative theology, radical to the point of agnosticism about attributes, from Thomist negative theology, always completed by the analogy of being.

An unsettled dispute: Creation versus the eternity of the world

On the question whether the world was created in time or is eternal — the classic Aristotelian thesis — Maimonides adopts a remarkably prudent position. He loyally sets out the three possible positions (creation ex nihilo, eternal matter informed by God, pure eternity of the world according to Aristotle), and leans toward the first without claiming to demonstrate it apodictically:

"Based on his explicit remarks, Maimonides prefers the theory of Moses [creation] but allows one to hold that of Plato as a reasonable alternative." — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article "Maimonides"^[56]

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy specifies that Maimonides "[did] not claim to have demonstrative proof that God created the world ex nihilo and de novo. Neither did he claim that he could conclusively refute the second and third approaches"^[57]. This methodological prudence has nourished, since the work of the philosopher Leo Strauss, an academic debate over a possible "esoteric" doctrine hidden behind the text of the Guide — Strauss maintaining that the text's deliberate contradictions signal its author's real position, closer to Aristotelian eternity than he lets appear. This line of reading, in the minority today among specialists (Davidson, Ivry, Seeskin notably dispute it), nonetheless remains an obligatory reference of all learned discussion of the Guide^[58].

Prophecy according to Maimonides

The Guide devotes long developments to the nature of prophecy, which it places on a scale of eleven ascending degrees, Moses alone occupying a rank apart, above all others^[59] — a ranking confirmed by the Jewish Encyclopedia as Maimonides' standard doctrine on the subject^[60]. Three natural conditions are required to prophesy — perfection of the imagination, moral perfection, intellectual perfection — but they do not suffice: God retains a sovereign right of veto over the effective granting of prophecy:

"Even if one has the capacity for prophecy and has duly prepared himself, he may yet not actually prophesy. The will of God is the decisive factor." — Jewish Encyclopedia, article "Prophets and Prophecy", after The Guide for the Perplexed, II, 32^[61]

Moses, alone among all the prophets, receives divine inspiration without the intermediary of imagination or angelic mediation:

"This I hold to be — if we except Moses — the highest degree a prophet can attain according to Scripture." — Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, II, 45^[62]

The problem of evil

The third book of the Guide proposes a classification of evil into three categories: evils tied to the mere bodily condition (statistically rare), evils men inflict on one another, and evils man inflicts on himself — this last category being, according to Maimonides, "the largest class, and (...) far more numerous than the second class"^[63]. Divine Providence, he adds, is exercised over each creature in exact proportion to its intellectual perfection:

"Divine Providence is connected with Divine intellectual influence (...) those creatures (...) will become subject to the action of Providence in the same proportion as they are acted upon by the Intellect." — Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, III, 17-18^[64]

This whole doctrine rests finally on a fundamental hermeneutical method: the equivocity of the biblical terms used to describe God, which must never be read in a literal, corporeal sense, but always reinterpreted in light of negative theology — a key to reading that Maimonides illustrates with the biblical parable of "apples of gold in settings of silver" (Prov 25:11), an image of the hidden meaning beneath the apparent meaning of the sacred text^[65].

"Rabbi Moses" in the Summa Theologiae

A century after Maimonides' death, Saint Thomas Aquinas read and abundantly cited The Guide for the Perplexed, which he knew under its Latin title, Doctor Perplexorum, and whose author was for him "Rabbi Moses". In the Summa Theologiae, at the very moment he explains why the divine names designate principally God's action and not his essence, Thomas writes:

"Hence they assert that when we say that God lives, we mean that God is not like an inanimate thing (...) and the same in like manner applies to other names; and this was taught by Rabbi Moses." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 13, a. 2^[66]

At least three other passages of the Summa name Maimonides explicitly: on providence toward irrational individuals (Ia, q. 22, a. 2)^[67], and twice on the reason for the ritual precepts of the Mosaic Law (Ia-IIae, q. 102, a. 3^[68], and q. 105, a. 2^[69]) — Thomas takes up there, for example, the Maimonidean explanation that "the Law chose that manner of slaying which was least painful to the slain animal."

A veiled debt: Thomas's deliberate silence

The deepest link between the two thinkers is yet, paradoxically, the least explicitly acknowledged by Thomas himself. The method of the via remotionis (way of negation), which structures the opening of the treatise De Deo in the Summa contra Gentiles, owes much to Maimonides — but Thomas refrains precisely from naming him at that strategic point. The scholar Mercedes Rubio devoted a specific study to this silence:

"The last chapter examines the reasons behind Aquinas' silencing of Maimonides' name when introducing his Five Ways for the knowledge of the existence of God, despite the evident relation between these and Maimonides' Four Speculations." — Mercedes Rubio, Aquinas and Maimonides on the Possibility of the Knowledge of God, Springer, "Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy" series, 2006^[70]

This fact deserves to be known to the Catholic reader: the third Thomist way, founded on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, extends a metaphysical reflection that Avicenna and then Maimonides had already developed before Thomas — a point set out in greater detail in the Ignispedia article devoted to the argument from contingency. Likewise, the question of the logical limits of divine omnipotence — what God can or cannot do without contradiction — finds in Maimonides an early and rigorous formulation, developed in the article Can God lift a stone too heavy to lift?, and his rational demonstration of divine unity is presented in Why would there not be several gods?.

William of Auvergne, the first great Latin reader

Even before Thomas Aquinas, the bishop of Paris William of Auvergne (d. 1249) knew and used the Guide for the Perplexed, available in Latin translation from the 1240s:

"William was also familiar with, and drew upon, Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, which became known in Latin translation in the West in the 1240s." — Encyclopedia.com, article "William of Auvergne"^[71]

Revealingly, the same source stresses, William names another Jewish philosopher of his corpus (Avicebron) but refrains from naming Maimonides, "probably because he knew Maimonides was a Jew"^[72] — further evidence of a medieval Christian reception of the Rambam that was both real and cautious, sometimes even concealed.

What classical theism owes to Maimonides

Beyond nominal citations, it is a whole grammar of thinking about God that Christian Scholasticism shares with Maimonides: the absolute simplicity of the divine essence, the identity in God of essence and existence, the refusal of all composition in God. The Ignispedia article on Edward Feser recalls that classical theism — that of Augustine, Anselm, Thomas and Maimonides — conceives God as subsistent Being itself (Ipsum Esse Subsistens), by contrast with the modern "theistic personalism" that pictures God as an overpowering person among beings^[73]. On this precise point, Jews and Christians of the classical tradition speak, without always knowing it of one another, a common metaphysical language — a heritage more broadly illustrated by the Ignispedia article on the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas, where Maimonides figures explicitly among the recognized sources of the greatest Catholic theologian.

The twelfth of Maimonides' thirteen articles of faith — the future coming of the Messiah — condenses the classic objection of rabbinic Judaism to the messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth: since the traditional criteria of messiahship (universal peace, restoration of Israel, rebuilding of the Temple) are manifestly unfulfilled, the Messiah, for Maimonides, has not yet come^[74]. The Ignispedia article on Judaism sets out this objection in detail — with the precise formula of the twelfth principle, its source in the commentary on the treatise Sanhedrin, and the Catholic answer founded on the distinction between Christ's first redemptive coming and his glorious return — and it is therefore not repeated here.

Medical treatises for the Ayyubid court

In the last decades of his life, while pursuing his legislative and philosophical work, Maimonides wrote some ten medical treatises, all in Arabic, largely founded on Galen and Hippocrates but enriched by his own clinical observation: the Medical Aphorisms (Fusul Musa), about 1,500 sentences arranged by subject; a treatise On Asthma, whose reference scholarly edition is due to Gerrit Bos^[75]; a treatise On Poisons and Protection against Lethal Drugs, dated 1198 or 1199 and written at the request of al-Qadi al-Fadil^[76]; a treatise on hemorrhoids; and the Regimen of Health, composed for al-Malik al-Afdal, Saladin's eldest son, who according to the sources suffered from digestive troubles and melancholy.

Death in Fostat, burial at Tiberias

Maimonides died at Fostat on December 12, 1204 (20 Tevet 4965 in the Hebrew calendar), after a life entirely devoted to study, care of the sick and spiritual direction of his community^[77] — the Jewish Encyclopedia gives for its part the date of December 13, a minor divergence of one day between sources^[78]. His body was, according to the best-attested tradition, transported and buried at Tiberias, in Galilee; but the Wikipedia article devoted to Maimonides' tomb honestly recalls that "there is no contemporary evidence for his removal from Egypt"^[79]: the earliest source attesting the Galilean burial is the chronicler Al-Qifti, corroborated by later chronicles of the 13th-15th centuries, though dissenting historians (notably Armand Kaminka) maintained that the body in reality never left Egypt. The picturesque tales sometimes accompanying this transfer — protective Bedouins, a wandering camel that supposedly stopped precisely at the site of the present tomb — belong to late legend, not to verifiable history.

Opposition from Solomon of Montpellier's circle

A generation after Maimonides' death, part of the rabbinic world turned violently against his philosophical legacy. In 1232, Rabbi Solomon of Montpellier, with two of his disciples, Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi and David ben Saul, obtained the banning of the Guide for the Perplexed:

"In 1232 Rabbi Solomon b. Abraham together with two of his pupils, Jonah b. Abraham Gerondi and David b. Saul, prohibited the 'Moreh Nebukim' [the Guide for the Perplexed]." — Jewish Encyclopedia, article "Montpellier", 1906^[80]

The accusations brought against the work were many: denying miracles, reducing prophecy to a purely natural phenomenon, undermining the Torah's authority, rejecting traditional eschatology, practicing excessive allegorization of the sacred text, denying the historicity of certain biblical persons and events, and encouraging laxity in observance of the commandments^[81].

The 1232-1234 burning and its disputed link with the Talmud auto-da-fé

Solomon of Montpellier went so far as to solicit the support of the Dominican ecclesiastical authorities against Maimonides' partisans within Judaism itself^[82]. Around 1233, according to the most widespread dating — other sources speak of 1232 or 1234, the divergence being unresolved — copies of the Guide were confiscated and delivered to the flames at Montpellier^[83]. One tradition reports that Jonah Gerondi, one of the instigators of this censorship, drew the link, a few years later, between this burning and the burning of the Talmud organized at Paris in 1242 — to the point of publicly repenting in the synagogue of Montpellier. But the most rigorous source consulted on this point calls this causal link "tenuous":

"Although the connection between the burning of the Guide and the subsequent burning of the Talmud is tenuous, it set a dangerous precedent." — Jewish Virtual Library, article "Burning of the Talmud"^[84]

The historian must therefore resist the temptation of too neat a narrative: the two auto-da-fés belong to the same climate of growing anti-Jewish repression in 13th-century France, but their direct causal articulation remains debated, and cannot be presented as an established fact.

"From Moses to Moses": the legend of an epitaph

One formula is very often cited as the epitaph of Maimonides' tomb: "From Moses [the biblical prophet] to Moses [Maimonides], there was none like Moses." It should however be presented accurately: no academic source consulted attests it as engraved from 1204. The earliest documented testimony about a real inscription on the tomb, due to the chronicler Gedaliah ibn Yahya (Shalshelet HaKabbalah, 16th century, more than three centuries after Maimonides' death), reports a quite different text^[85]. Piquantly, the same formula would be reused, more than three and a half centuries later, as the epitaph of the great Polish decisor Moses Isserles (the Rema, d. 1572 at Krakow) — a sign that it is a transmissible commemorative formula rather than an original and unique epitaph attached to the Tiberias tomb alone.

The Tiberias tomb today

The burial site, located in central Tiberias, has become one of the principal Jewish pilgrimage sites of Israel^[86]. The land only passed into Jewish ownership in 1920, through purchase by Rabbi Ya'akov Moshe Toledano, and the site underwent major renovation between 2018 and 2019.

An invented face: the mystery of Maimonides' portrait

No authentic portrait of Maimonides, executed in his lifetime, ever existed — a fact confirmed by an academic study published in a peer-reviewed medical journal:

"We have no way of knowing what Maimonides really looked like, yet a single utterly imaginative 'portrait' has successfully defined our conception of Maimonides for ever." — Yitzhack Schwartz, Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 2011^[87]

All so-called "traditional" depictions of Maimonides — those found on book covers, stamps, modern statues — in reality derive from a single posthumous 1744 engraving, published in Blasio Ugolino's Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, captioned "after an ancient painting" without any supporting evidence, and whose clothing traits are stylistically closer to Ottoman fashion than to that of a 12th-century Andalusian-Egyptian scholar^[88]. The reader should therefore regard every image of Maimonides reproduced in this article as a late, conventional representation, not a faithful portrait.

The Cordoba statue

The city of Cordoba nonetheless wished to honor its most illustrious child: a bronze statue, the work of sculptor Amadeo Ruiz Olmos, was unveiled on June 7, 1964 on the Plaza de Tiberíades, in the city's old Jewish quarter, for the 760th anniversary of Maimonides' death^[89].

Three reference academic biographies

Contemporary research on Maimonides rests on three great scholarly biographies, published a few years apart: Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford University Press, 2005), whose central argument is that "a significant portion of the information about Maimonides, taken for granted for decades or even centuries, is in reality supported by no credible evidence"^[90]; Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds (Doubleday, 2008), which systematically exploits the documents of the Cairo Geniza^[91]; and Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton University Press, 2009), of which one academic review notes a suggestive parallel with Thomas Aquinas: both seeking to persuade their own religious community to fully embrace philosophical strategies from outside^[92].

A Catholic can, without reserve, recognize in Maimonides one of the greatest metaphysical minds the monotheistic world has produced. His negative theology, his doctrine of divine simplicity, his rational demonstration of God's unity belong to an intellectual heritage that Christian Scholasticism received, discussed and integrated — to the point that Thomas Aquinas cites him by name in his own Summa^[93] and that his method irrigates, often without naming him, the classical doctrine of Catholic theism^[94]. On this purely philosophical ground — the unity, simplicity and incorporeality of God, the limits of what human reason can affirm of Him — Jews and Christians of the classical tradition stand allied against the same errors: crude anthropomorphism on one side, the materialism that purely and simply denies God on the other.

But this real metaphysical convergence must not conceal what irreducibly separates Maimonides' work from the Catholic faith. His thirteen articles ignore — necessarily, since they formulate the classic rabbinic creed — the Trinity and the Incarnation; his twelfth principle, awaiting a Messiah still to come, stands frontally opposed to recognizing Jesus as the Messiah already come, a question the article on Judaism treats in detail with the appropriate Catholic answer. His very negative theology, fruitful as it is, sometimes goes — the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy rightly notes^[95] — further than Thomas Aquinas would go, to the point of leaving uncertain the possibility of a true analogy between human language and divine being; Catholic theology, while retaining the essence of the negative way, always completes it with the way of analogy and, above all, with the Revelation of a God who, in Jesus Christ, made himself known in human flesh — a radical surpassing that nothing in Maimonides' system could anticipate, or even conceive.

The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate, recalled in what terms the Catholic Church must regard the Jewish people, of whom Maimonides remains one of the greatest doctors:

"The Jews still remain most dear to God because of their fathers, for He does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues." — Second Vatican Council, declaration Nostra Aetate on the Church's relations with non-Christian religions, October 28, 1965, § 4^[96]

It is in this spirit — of genuine esteem for an immense intellectual heritage, and of entire fidelity to the Revelation received in Christ — that the Catholic reader can approach Moses Maimonides: not as an adversary to refute, but as an elder brother in the search for the one God, whose intelligence prepared, without knowing it, some of the tools Christian theology would later bring to their full measure.

• Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works, Oxford University Press, 2005 — the reference academic biography on questions of dating and documentary authenticity.
• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds, New York, Doubleday, 2008 — a biography founded on the documents of the Cairo Geniza.
• Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker, Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 1881; reprint Dover Publications. In French: Le Guide des égarés, trans. Salomon Munk, 3 vols., Paris, 1856-1866; reissue Verdier, "Les Dix Paroles" series, 1979.
• Kenneth Seeskin, article "Maimonides", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides/.
• See also, in Ignispedia, the articles Judaism, The argument from contingency, Can God lift a stone too heavy to lift?, Why would there not be several gods?, Edward Feser, Saint Thomas Aquinas and The Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas, each extending one precise aspect of Maimonides' philosophical legacy.