334 A History of Judaism
beings. 2. The unity of God: His oneness is not like that of a simple body
which is numerically one ... Rather he is one with a oneness that is abso-
lutely unique ... 3. The denial of corporeality to God: none of the accidents
of bodies, such as motion and rest, appertain to him either by essence or
by accident. 4. God’s pre- existence. 5. God is the one who should be wor-
shipped and exalted. 6. Prophecy. 7. The prophecy of Moses our Teacher:
we should believe that Moses was the father of all the prophets. 8. The
Torah is from heaven: we should believe that the whole Torah which is in
our possession today is the same Torah as was handed down to Moses,
and that in its entirety it is from the mouth of the Almighty. That is to say,
that the whole Torah came to him from God in a manner which is meta-
phorically called ‘speaking’, though no one knows the real nature of that
communication save Moses to whom it came. He fulfilled the function of
a scribe receiving dictation. 9. Abrogation: this Torah of Moses will not be
abrogated, nor shall another Torah come from God. 10. God has know-
ledge of the deeds of men and does not disregard them. 11. God rewards
him who obeys the commands of the Torah and punishes him who trans-
gresses its prohibitions. 12. The Messianic Age: we should believe and
affirm that the Messiah will come. 13. The resurrection of the dead.The thirteen principles were effectively a creed. They have generated
both enthusiastic endorsement and strong dissent down to the present
day.^29
Some of Maimonides’ stances in his philosophical Judaism seem to
have been inspired by opposition to the claims of Islam, but the rel-
ationship between his thought and Islam was complex not least because
he came into contact with Muslims of very different kinds. The Sunni
Almoravids under whose rule he had been born were generally opposed
to rational speculation altogether, whereas the Shiite Fatimids who were
in control of Egypt when Maimonides first arrived there developed an
Ismaili theology based on Neoplatonism. The Sunni Ayyubids in whose
circles he ended his days adopted the distinctive speculative theology
associated with the Persian philosopher and mystic Ghazali, whose
books had been publicly burned in the Maghreb by the Almoravids in
- In adopting one element of Islamic theology, then, Maimonides
might implicitly decry the approach of a different branch of Islam, and
there is evidence from his letters that he was aware of the need to be
careful about the impact his work might have in relation to his Muslim
patrons. But one distinctive example of his inheritance from Almohad
Islam, which had so dominated Maimonides’ life as an exile from