Maimonides' ‘Guide for the Perplexed’

Maimonides was born in Córdoba in 1138 (or 1135). When the Almohads conquered al-Andalus in the late 1140s and confronted Jews and Christians with the choice of conversion, exile or death, his family left; after years of wandering it settled in Fez, spent some months in the crusader kingdom in 1165 — Maimonides prayed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — and moved to Egypt, settling in Fustat between 1168 and 1171. There he completed his commentary on the Mishnah, became head of Egypt's Jewish community and wrote the Mishneh Torah, a code of Jewish law. After his brother David, a merchant, drowned in the Indian Ocean with the family's money, he earned his living as a physician, serving al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin's chief minister, and the Ayyubid court.

The Guide, written in Arabic in Hebrew characters, is framed as a letter to his pupil Joseph ben Judah, who had to leave Egypt before completing his studies, and was sent to him part by part. It is addressed to a believer versed in philosophy who is 'perplexed' by biblical language that seems to contradict reason. Maimonides argues that the Bible's descriptions of God's body and feelings are figures of speech, that God can be described only by what he is not, and that prophecy is a perfection of the intellect; he accepts Aristotle's physics and his proofs of God's existence but holds that the eternity of the world has not been demonstrated, and he explains the commandments by their purposes. He warns that the book deliberately leaves things unsaid, so that its deeper teaching would reach only the qualified few.

The Guide was translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon, with whom Maimonides corresponded about the translation; it was finished in 1204, the year of the author's death. It provoked bitter controversy: in 1232 rabbis of northern France and Montpellier banned the study of it, and copies of Maimonides' books were burned by the Dominicans in circumstances that remain unclear. In Latin it was read by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and Muslim scholars studied it too: Muhammad al-Tabrizi wrote an Arabic commentary on its philosophical propositions in the 13th century. Maimonides himself built on Aristotle and on the Islamic philosophers al-Farabi and Ibn Sina.