Maimonides Was Saladin's Vizier's Doctor and Wrote the Rules That Still Govern Jewish Law

Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — was born around 1138 in Córdoba, Andalusia, while it was still under the relatively tolerant rule of the Almoravids. He was ten when the Almohad caliphate took the city in 1148 and abolished the dhimmi protections that had let Jews and Christians live as legally inferior but identifiably distinct subjects. The choice the new rulers offered was conversion or exile. The Maimon family chose exile and spent the next decade moving around the Maghreb, with extended stops in Fez and Acre, before settling in Fustat (now part of Cairo) around 1166.

He made his living, increasingly, as a physician. His brother David, the family's merchant, drowned in the Indian Ocean sometime in the 1170s while bringing back the family's gemstone capital from a trading voyage; Maimonides wrote that he was bedridden for nearly a year afterward. Around 1185 he was hired as personal physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, the chief minister of Sultan Saladin, and from there became one of the senior medical authorities at the court. His private letters complain that on a typical day he saw the sultan's family in the morning, royal household members in the afternoon, and reached his own home so exhausted he could barely stand.

In the evenings he wrote. The Mishneh Torah, completed in 1180 in fourteen books, is the first comprehensive written code of Jewish law — a topic that had until then existed mostly in the form of Talmudic argument. The Guide for the Perplexed, finished about 1190, is a systematic attempt to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology and remains the foundational text of Jewish rationalism. His Thirteen Principles of Faith were eventually canonized in the prayer book.