The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, print pages 3123–3130. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/ 9781444367072.wbiee398 1 Maimonides, Moses James A. Diamond Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), or Rambam the Great Eagle, the acronym and sobriquet he has been revered by in the traditional Jewish academy since his life- time, is arguably the most seminal thinker to have emerged throughout the course of Jewish intellectual history. Virtually every current of Jewish thought intersects in his written legacy, be it philosophy, theology, biblical exegesis, rabbinics, or juris- prudence. He was born in Cordoba, Spain, and, after frenetic peregrinations caused by Almohadic Islamic extremism, ended in old Cairo (Fustat) Egypt, a somewhat more tolerant environment, where he led an active and exhausting career as com- munity head, physician, rabbinic decisor, and writer of much of his literary corpus that remains with us today. That corpus embraces a wide spectrum of Jewish thought and, although there is no tract dedicated exclusively to ethics and ethical theory, it was a subject that preoccupied him, as evidenced by its treatment in practically every genre of thought he engaged. Living within the Islamic orbit all his life, and exposed to its rich rapport with Greek science and philosophy by such Islamic thinkers as Al-Farabi (see al-farabi), of course influenced his formulations in all areas, ethics being no exception (see islamic ethics). However, of paramount importance to understanding, or reconstructing, his ethical theory is his own religious faith and tradition. While a prominent exponent of medieval Jewish rationalism, struggling with the reconciliation of reason and divinely revealed scripture, he was also a devout rabbinic Jew, thoroughly committed to Judaism’s combined foundational canon of the Old Testament and classical rabbinic literature, primarily represented by the Talmuds of both Palestine and Babylonia. Any account of his ethical theory then must take into consideration his dedication to Jewish law as refracted through the rabbinic lens, and cannot be divorced from his conceptions of God and revelation as the sources of the normative Jewish apparatus to which he remained dedicated (see rabbinic ethics). As is common for any medieval Jewish philosopher (see medieval ethics). Maimonides deems God the ground of all Being and the ultimate truth in the uni- verse which all human beings must aspire to know in the quest to perfect their humanity. Though there is scholarly debate, as there is with many of his positions on other issues, as to whether Maimonides considers ethical or intellectual perfection the summum bonum of life, the general thrust of his thought favors moral virtue as ancillary to the final end of intellectual virtue. Maimonides identifies the biblical “image of God” in which primordial man was created, or his “natural form,” with the capability of intellectual apprehension, an activity uniquely shared with God. Adam’s transition from his pristine paradisiacal existence to his post-sin expulsion is config- ured as a parable of intellectual decline from a single minded cognitive focus on