The preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician, who twice reorganized his tradition from inside the Islamic world: once by gathering the whole of Jewish law into a single clear code, the Mishneh Torah, and once by trying to square Aristotle's philosophy with the Hebrew Bible in The Guide for the Perplexed, a project so bold it provoked book-burnings among his own people even as it made him, in the tradition's own phrase, the one of whom 'from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses.'
A doctor in Cairo wrote to a friend that he had no time to talk. He rode each morning to treat the sultan's vizier, returned home exhausted to find his courtyard crowded with patients, and only at night, half-collapsed, could he turn to the work he cared about most. That doctor was the leading legal authority of the Jewish world and the boldest Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, and he did almost all of it in stolen hours. The strangest thing about Maimonides is that the same mind which calmly told Jews exactly how to live also told them that nearly everything they thought they knew about God was wrong.