When the Almohad Berber dynasty conquered most of Muslim Spain, their puritanical, tough-nomad attitudes brought persecution on religious minorities. They ended the practice of “dhimmi” minorities as a protected class paying a higher tax. Now, Christians and Jews had to convert, leave, or die. Many left, and the family of Maimon ben Joseph was among them.
Maimon had two sons, David and Moses. Moses studied Torah in Hebrew and Greek philosophy in Arabic, while David was a merchant. After the family resettled in Morocco, then in Egypt, David died in a shipwreck. Moses ben Maimon needed to support both his own family and his brother’s. He became a doctor, probably building on studies begun in Cordoba. We know he also trained in medicine in Fez. In Egypt, his family settled in Fustat where there was a Jewish community and synagogue. He became their doctor.
Fustat was very close to the new city of Cairo, built by the Fatimid dynasty, but now home to Saladin—of Crusades fame. Moses’s reputation reached Saladin, who called him in to consult on his maladies that included asthma. Moses split his time between the royal court in Cairo and his Jewish neighborhood in Fustat for many years. He worked extremely long hours, seeing patients at all hours. Somehow, he managed to write books at the same time.
We know Moses as “Maimonides” in English because when his books were translated into Latin, his Hebrew name “ben Maimon” became “Maimonides.” He is also known in Hebrew as the Rambam, an acronym for “Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon.” Maimonides wrote treatises on Jewish law, theology, and philosophy; he really was very prolific. His most famous title is “Guide for the Perplexed.”
And of course he wrote about medicine. By writing in Hebrew, he made the medical lore of Greece and Rome easily accessible to other Jewish doctors. But he added to it, in fact warning other doctors not to accept anything they read in a book, but always to impose their own empirical testing on ideas. In addition to the theories of the four humors that were typical of his time, he recommended some ideas that still are right to modern eyes. For example, he recommended whole wheat bread and avoiding a lot of meat fat, vigorous aerobic exercise, avoidance of city pollution, and attentiveness to helping patients avoid depression. His medical titles include treatises on hemorrhoids, asthma, poison, and fertility. His fertility book is “On Cohabitation,” and it gives aphrodisiac prescriptions.