"Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Tarah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers." "Now, in a dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of Maimonides' rich life, Maimonides is at once a portrait of a great historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the twelfth century. Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to re-create a remarkable period In history when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense intellectual exchange and religious conflict."--Jacket.