Significant Persons Essay- Nereash Nicholson

Religious traditions change and develop over time. Often this is because of the influence at critical times of significant individuals that interpret the religious traditions on anew. They set the tradition as part or part of it on a new path. Judaism has always valued learning and the quest for knowledge throughout history. It has also produced its share of strong personalities with definite opinions on many subjects. Jews have always been at the forefront of social change and intellectual development. One such person was Moses Mainonides.

Mainonides was born in Cordova, Spain around 1135. During this time, the end of the ‘golden ages’ Mainionides and his family moved constantly around town to town to find a safe place to live for nearly a decade. This was due to Almohads conquering Mainonides and his families home town and resulted in them with a choice of exile, death or converting to Islam. They chose exile. Therefore meaning their travelling around did not stop there. After they travelled around southern Spain and Mainonides was much older, they lived in Egypt. Here Mainonides supported his family by serving as a court physician to the sultan of Egypt. Here was the start of Mainonides career as a physician. Mainonides had previously studied medicine and law at the University of FES at Morocco. Mainonides was born into a family of rabbinic scholars but rabbis receive no pay therefore leading him into the training of a physician and becoming one of the most influential and important Jews in History.

Mainonides was the first to write a systematic code of all Jewish law therefore leading to the significance of Mainonides in Jewish history. His basic intentions were to compose a book that would guide Jews on how to behave in all situations just by reading the Torah and his code, without having to expand large amount of his time searching through the

Talmud. This did not sit well with Traditional Judaism as they feared that people would rely on his code and no longer study the Talmud. Within his commentary of the Torah, Mainonides includes his 13 principles of faith, some of which include, the existence of God, the pre-eminence of Moses among the prophets and reward of God and retribution of evil.

Mainonides did not only influence the Jewish community but also Christian leaders. He brang Greco Roman, Arab, Jewish and Western all together in one person. Yet his teachings of Jewish laws and ethics were not met by his opposition however, managed to convey his ideas and his teachings today are seen as the corner stone of Orthodox Judaism.

In conclusion Mainonides among modern scholars remains the most widely debated and controversial Jewish thinker. By all major movements in modern Judaism, he has been adopted as a symbol and an intellectual hero and to philosophers such as Leo Strauss, he has proven to be immensely important. Mainonides importance to diverse systems of thought lies in the philosopher’s embrace of paradoxical and often contradictory ideas. Mainonides reconciliation of the philosophical and traditional has given his legacy an extremely diverse and dynamic quality.