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His father died soon after, and later his brother met an untimely death when the ship on which he was a passenger on one of his business trips was wrecked in the Indian Ocean. Thereafter Maimonides gave up the jewel business and began to practice medicine, which at first did not offer him more than the barest necessities.
With the transference of the literary centre from Spain to Provence went the gradual disuse of Arabic as the medium of philosophic and scientific culture, and the age of translation made its appearance. Prior to, and including, Maimonides all the Jewish thinkers whom we have considered, with the exception of Abraham Bar Hiyya and Abraham Ibn Ezra, wrote their works in Arabic.
Proceeding to the more dogmatic elements of Judaism, Maimonides was the first to reduce the 613 commandments of Rabbinic Judaism to thirteen articles of faith. Hasdai Crescas criticised Maimonides's principle of selection as well as the list of dogmas, which he reduced to six. And Joseph Albo went still further and laid down three fundamental dogmas from which the rest are derived.
Maimonides and Gersonides were the great peaks that stood out above the rest; but there was any number of lesser lights, some who wrote books and still more who did not write, taking the great men as their models and looking at Jewish literature and belief through Aristotelian spectacles. Intellectualism is the term that best describes this attitude.
On the other hand, the rationalistic development during the past three centuries, which we have traced thus far, and the climax of that progress as capped by Maimonides was not without its influence on another class of the Jewish community, particularly in Spain and southern France; and these regarded Maimonides as the greatest teacher that ever lived.
Maimonides put the seal on the reluctance of Jewish theology to go beyond, or to fall short of, what historic Judaism delivered. Judaism wavers between the two opposite conceptions: absolute transcendentalism and absolute pantheism. Sometimes Judaism speaks with the voice of Isaiah; sometimes with the voice of Spinoza. It found the bridge in the Psalter.
Maimonides is aware that the Arabs are indebted to the Christians, Greeks as well as Syrians. The Muʿtazila and Ashariya, he says, base their opinions upon premises and principles borrowed from Greek and Syrian Christians, who endeavored to refute the opinions of the philosophers as dangerous to the Christian religion. There was thus a Christian Kalam prior to the Mohammedan.
Like Maimonides he employs Aristotelian proofs for the existence of God, proofs based on the eternity of motion; and like him Aquinas argues that if motion is not eternal and the world was made in time, the existence of God is still more readily evident.
A problem that occupied the minds of the Mutakallimun, Arabs as well as Karaites, but which Maimonides does not discuss, is the purpose of God's giving commandments to those who he knew would remain unbelievers, and refuse to obey. That God's knowledge and man's freedom co-exist and neither destroys the other, has already been shown.
Yes, it must have been that wolf in Rabbi's clothing he had talked to that morning in the poorhouse! the red-bearded reverend who had lent so sympathetic an ear to the tale of his life in Poland, his journey hither; so sympathetic an eye to his commentary on the great Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. The vile spy, the base informer!
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