Maimonides

Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides, was born in Córdoba in Muslim Spain, usually dated 1138. When the Almohad rulers began persecuting Jews and Christians, his family left Córdoba and after years of wandering settled in Fez, then briefly in the land of Israel, and finally in Fustat (Old Cairo) in Egypt. After his brother David, a merchant who supported the family, drowned in the Indian Ocean, Maimonides earned his living as a physician and rose to serve the household of Saladin's vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil and later Saladin's son. He wrote medical works in Arabic, including Medical Aphorisms and a Regimen of Health, stressing diet, exercise, moderation and the health of the soul. He was also the leading Jewish legal scholar of his age: his Mishneh Torah, completed around 1180, arranged the whole of Jewish law in fourteen books, and his Guide for the Perplexed sought to reconcile Scripture with Aristotle's philosophy. Thomas Aquinas cited him with respect. He died in Fustat in 1204.

Faith: The greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, author of the Mishneh Torah, a compendium of Jewish law. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

See also: Avicenna · Thomas Aquinas · Moses