332 A History of Judaism
Mezquita (mosque) had long dominated the urban landscape. With a
huge population of Arabs, Berbers, Vandals, Visigoths and Jews, the city
had been established under the rule of the Caliphate as a cultural bea-
con for science, medicine, philosophy, poetry and art. The Islamic library
of Hakam II was said to hold over 400,000 books, and, although it was
dispersed after his death, both the book market and scholarship con-
tinued to flourish in Maimonides’ time – the great philosopher and
polymath ibn Rushd, known to Christian Europe as Averroes, was an
older contemporary in the city.
Maimonides grew up here under the Berber Almoravid dynasty,
which gave relative protection to its religious minorities, including the
Jews, in the fashion standard in Islamic law. But when he was ten the
city was captured by the Almohads, a new dynasty, also of Berber ori-
gin, whose interpretation of Islamic Sunni law was far less liberal and
may have compelled Maimonides’ family to convert nominally to Islam.
The change of regime was to alter Maimonides’ life completely. The
family left Cordoba either for Christian Spain in the north or for Seville.
But in 1160, when Maimonides was twenty- two, he moved to Fez, close
to the Almohad capital, before travelling east in c. 1165 towards Pales-
tine, at that time under Crusader control. Maimonides did not reach
Palestine but settled in Egypt, where in due course he became doctor to
the Ayyubid court in Cairo, until his death in 1204. Nor were his per-
sonal peregrinations the only basis for his international outlook. In a
central period of his life in Egypt Maimonides was engaged in trade in
precious stones, which involved contacts far to the east – his brother
David was drowned in the Indian Ocean on a trading expedition. And
Maimonides was also much in contact with the Jewish communities
both of Provence (which included the Pyrenees) and of northern France
and the Rhineland, whose independence from Jewish authorities in the
Islamic world was increasingly affirmed precisely in Maimonides’ life-
time, not least because Christian Europe was itself asserting its power
against the spread of Islam in the slow Reconquista of Spain.^27
Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was intended for those who
wished to follow both the Torah and philosophy. He insisted that the
two were perfectly compatible. Aristotelian notions, which Maimonides
knew from translations into Arabic by Muslim scholars in the ninth and
tenth centuries, were placed in defence of the Torah on the assumption
that Aristotle’s philosophy was true – in all aspects apart from his
theory of the eternity of the universe, which Maimonides believed con-
flicted with the Bible and therefore must be wrong: