Word: mishneh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Within Judaism, Maimonides is held in high regard by the Orthodox, who frequently quote his sayings and avidly study the Mishneh Torah* (Repetition of the Law), his magisterial systematization of biblical commandments and the Talmud. Many Orthodox ignore his philosophical masterpiece, The Guide of the Perplexed, which continues to inspire secularized Jews and is required reading in the Jewish studies departments that are proliferating in U.S. universities...
...years later the Maimon family moved to Egypt, where they found a final refuge. (Despite being the adopted land where Maimonides achieved world fame, Egypt is conspicuously absent from the dozens of official observances of the anniversary year.) There he devoted ten years to the writing of the Mishneh Torah. Its preface contained what became Judaism's standard listing of the 613 biblical commandments, which deal with matters ranging from ritual slaughtering laws to recompense for injuries. Maimonides said that "no other work should be needed for ascertaining any of the laws of Israel...
Maimonides conceived his Mishneh Torah as a single unifying law code for Judaism. Although it never became that, his work substantially affected every later development in Jewish scholarship. By many accounts, Maimonides' legal compendium provided a strength that enabled Judaism to avoid factionalism during the Muslim and Christian persecutions of the Middle Ages. The Guide of the Perplexed influenced the metaphysical speculations of Thomas Aquinas and other Christian scholastics while being largely ignored by medieval Judaism. But for modern Jews, says Biblical Scholar Nahum Sarna of Brandeis University, Maimonides provides "the model of a person who is able to accept...