Daily Medieval

European Jews were not accustomed to contemplating either Arabic philosophy or what they called "Greek wisdom," the works of Arist...

Recent posts have talked about different individual's attitude toward Maimonides and what they did about it—sometimes with radical conse...

Yonah Gerondi had an Italian student in Barcelona named Hillel ben Samuel (c.1220 - c.1295) The grandson of a known Talmudic scholar, Hillel...

Yonah Gerondi, or Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi (c.1200 - 1263), was a 13th century rabbi from Catalonia in Spain. He was a cousin of Nachmanide...

Born in 1235 in Barcelona, Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet became known as the Rabbi of Spain because of his reputation for knowledge and wisd...

Yesterday we started looking at some of the predictions about the Jewish Messiah appearing in the 12th century. The 13th century had its ow...

Yesterday's post explained how Abner of Burgos ' conversion to Christianity from Judaism may have started with doubts after treating...

We have previously mentioned the dinar   here and here . Usually of gold, it was used alongside the dirham , usually of silver and of a les...

Many works of Christian mysticism in the Middle Ages are biographies or autobiographies of mystics, sharing their revelations, their visions...

Around 1100CE, monastic schools started to discover the works of Aristotle, thanks to Judea-Islamic translations. Just as scholarly study wa...

I suppose if we wanted to find a Christian parallel to Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas would be an obvious choice. Born into the aristocracy, not...

Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed  is available now in paper, digital, and audio form; in case you don't get around to ordering a ...

Moses ben Maimon (1138 - 1204) was a rabbi, a philosopher, an astronomer, and the personal physician of Saladin. (Saladin was most recently ...

Sar Shalom ben Moses got too big for his britches. Born into a distinguished family of royal physicians in the Fatimid court in Egypt, he he...

Let me start by saying that "tax farming" and a "tax farmer" are not really about agriculture, except in a tangential se...

First, let's talk about the name. He was born Moses ben Nachman. He sometimes called himself Ramban , an acronym for Rabbi Moses ben Nac...

The rounding up and burning of the Talmud and other important Jewish works, and the Disputation of Paris, in France in the early 1240s were ...