'Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds,' by Joel L. Kraemer

The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds

Joel L. Kraemer

Doubleday: 622 pp., $35

The medieval rabbi called Moses ben Maimon -- better known by the Greek honorific form of his name, Maimonides -- is a transformative and even revolutionary figure. According to his latest biographer, Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides is not only "the foremost Jewish scholar of all time" but also "one of the greatest minds in the Western world," a polymath whose life and work show how religion, law, medicine, philosophy and science can flourish in a single human mind. Above all, Maimonides is offered as something of a role model for those of us who live, as he did, amid a clash of civilizations.

Kraemer, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, tells us that he has been studying Maimonides since 1947, when he was only 14, and his new book is a towering work of scholarship that sets a benchmark for the serious study of the man. At the same time, however, it is also a lively, lucid and engaging effort at making Maimonides accessible to the lay reader. Kraemer sets out not merely to praise Maimonides but also to tease out fact from fiction and to chip away the accretion of myth and legend that has hidden the real man from history.

"[T]he historian should gather and interpret evidence by methods like those employed by the detective. . . .," explains Kraemer, citing the late Yale historian Robin Winks as his inspiration. "We harvest the evidence and force it to yield its secrets."

Thus, for example, Kraemer points out that something as basic as the year of his birth in Cordoba, Spain, commonly given as 1135, is wrong, and he points out that the error was introduced in a work written by Maimonides' own grandson. "To be more accurate," writes Kraemer in a characteristic display of scholarly discipline, based on a chronology derived from Maimonides' own hand, "he was born sometime in the last third of 1137 or the first two-thirds of 1138." Nor do we have any evidence that his mother died in childbirth, a much-cited but wholly invented biographical detail. And Kraemer pauses to explain why the mother of Maimonides is absent from the historical record: "Women were expected to be modest, pious, and withdrawn from public view," he explains. "Unless they entered the public sphere by gaining economic power or owned important property, there was no reason for mentioning them."