(Moses ben Maimon). Born Mar. 30, 1135, in Córdoba; died Dec. 13, 1204, in Fustat, near Cairo. Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages.
In 1148, Maimonides left Spain because of the Almohad dynasty’s persecution of Jews; he lived in Morocco and Palestine, settling in Egypt in 1165. In 1187 he became a court physician to Sultan Saladin of Cairo. Maimonides’ chief philosophical work, Guide of the Perplexed, was published in Arabic in Egypt in 1190 and subsequently translated into Hebrew and Latin (a Russian translation is in S. N. Grigorian’s Iz istoriifilosofii Srednei Azii i Irana 7-12 vv., 1960).
Maimonides is the most outstanding representative of Jewish philosophy of the Middle Ages. He based his system on the teachings of Aristotle as interpreted by Arab thinkers. By synthesizing revelation and speculation, the Bible and Aristotle, Maimonides went beyond the limits of orthodoxy; his rationalism and “purification” of truth from miracle brought him the enmity of the adherents to religious tradition. He exerted an influence on the development of Scholasticism in the 13th-15th centuries, particularly influencing the medieval Aristotelians Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.
S. S. AVERINTSEV