How does a religious refugee who spent years on the run become the personal physician to Saladin and write the definitive code of Jewish law still used today? This episode follows Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or the Rambam, from his birth in Cordoba around 1135 through the Almohad conquest of 1148 that forced his family into exile. We trace his wandering through southern Spain and Fez, Morocco, where he absorbed Aristotle and Islamic science, his emotional visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and his eventual settlement in Fustat, Egypt, around 1168.

We then examine the shipwreck that killed his brother David and sank the family fortune, plunging Maimonides into a year of bedridden depression documented in letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Because he refused to earn money from religious teaching, he turned to medicine and rose to become court physician to Saladin, working a punishing schedule that left him too weak to speak. Alongside that practice he wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, reconciling Aristotelian logic with biblical faith through negative theology, and the fourteen-book Mishneh Torah, which stripped centuries of Talmudic debate down to clear final rulings and ignited the Maimonidean controversy that led to the burning of his books.

• How the Almohad abolition of protected dhimmi status forced Jewish families to convert, flee, or die
• Why the Cairo Geniza preserved Maimonides’s own account of his brother’s death and his year of grief
• His strikingly modern medical writings on asthma, diabetes, preventative care, and patient anxiety
• Apophatic theology explained through a black hole analogy, plus his view of evil as the absence of good
• The Golden Mean, his rule against convicting on circumstantial evidence, and the epitaph From Moses to Moses