Why I Write... and How I Write

Abstract

Abstract Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1135–1204) was born into an eminent Spanish rabbinical family. When Cordova was conquered by an Islamic sect, the family first fled to Morocco and then, in 1165, to Egypt. While remaining the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, Maimonides became a physician and eventually the personal physician of the Vizier of Saladin. Among his ten treatises of medicine, his Regimen of Health is extended discussion of preventive medicine. He wrote texts on logic but also published commentaries on the Talmud (Commentary on the Mishnah), on the 613 biblical commandments (The Book of Commandments), and a codiffication of Jewish law (the Mishneh Torah). Like his other treatises, his major philosophic work, The Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), was originally written in Arabic but soon translated into Hebrew and then Latin. Although he knew Aristotle only indirectly through his reading of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, Maimonides used Aristotelian philosophy to attack astrology and naive literal readings of biblical texts, many of which he interpreted as anthropomorphic expressions of a more profound, systematically developed metaphysical and theological system. The Guide treats a wide range of topics: the creation, the divine attributes, Providence and responsibility, the independent rationality of Jewish law. The work exhibits and articulates an elaborate theory of language, which licenses polysemous writing directed to different audiences with different levels of understanding.