rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 335
Cordoba in his teenage years and as a young man living outwardly as a
Muslim, may be the insistence on God’s unity and the wish to ground it
in a definition of right belief to root out heresy – hence the need for a
creed. Maimonides’ thirteen principles were to be enshrined in the syna-
gogue liturgy in the form of the hymn Yigdal, composed in Rome
probably in the fourteenth century and in widespread use since then at
the conclusion of the evening services of Sabbaths and festivals:
Great is the living God and praised.
He exists, and His existence is beyond time.
He is One, and there is no unity like His.
Unfathomable, His oneness is infinite ...
At the end of days He will send our Messiah,
to redeem those who await His final salvation.
God will revive the dead in His great lovingkindness.
Blessed for evermore is His glorious name!^30
Maimonides wrote primarily in Judaeo- Arabic, but in his forties he
wrote the Mishneh Torah in Mishnaic Hebrew, and he later cooperated
with the translation into Hebrew by Shmuel ibn Tibbon, a rabbi in
Lunel in Provence, of his philosophical Guide. He seems to have become
increasingly aware of the need to use Hebrew in order to reach a Jewish
readership in Christian Europe for whom Arabic, even in Hebrew char-
acters, was inaccessible. The wide distribution of Maimonides’ prolific
correspondence has become clear with the discovery of numerous let-
ters in his hand from the Cairo Genizah. It is hard to fathom how he
found the time to compose his medical treatises, or to fulfil his duties as
the leader of a fractious and fractured Jewish community in Cairo.^31
The exceptional influence of Maimonides as communal leader and
halakhist during his lifetime – one of the titles ascribed to him was that
of ‘the Great Eagle’, from the biblical book of Ezekiel, signifying his
quasi- royal status within the Jewish community – both lent authority to
his philosophical treatises and rendered them vulnerable to attack.
Polemic against his halakhic writings was already fierce in Maimonides’
lifetime, as we have seen, but the attack on his philosophy gathered
momentum only in the decades after his death. The strongest polemics
were by some of the rabbis in Provence most involved in mystical circles
(see p. 352), with objections specifically to Maimonides’ belief that resur-
rection (which he, like his opponents, reckoned a fundamental tenet of
Judaism) would be of the soul rather than the body (although Maimon-
ides himself, in his Treatise on Resurrection, argued that a spiritual