Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides, or Rambam — was a physician to the Ayyubid court, the pre-eminent codifier of Jewish law, and the author of the most philosophically ambitious work of medieval Judaism.
The Guide for the Perplexed, written in Arabic around 1190, addresses the reader who has studied philosophy and can no longer read scripture literally without contradiction. Maimonides's answer is neither surrender: he argues for a rigorous negative theology in which nothing positive can be predicated of God, reads the anthropomorphic language of scripture as accommodation to ordinary understanding, and treats the law itself as having intelligible purposes that reason can partly recover. The book is deliberately difficult, addressed to a few and constructed so that its harder conclusions surface only to careful readers.
Its Christian reception was immediate and substantial. Latin translations circulated by the 1240s, and Aquinas cites him repeatedly as "Rabbi Moses", drawing on his treatment of creation, prophecy and the limits of demonstration even while disagreeing with him. For scholasticism he supplied something close to a template: a worked demonstration that a revealed legal tradition could be squared with Aristotelian philosophy without either being abandoned.
His afterlife runs further than that. Spinoza read him closely and defined his own position substantially by rejecting him, making the Guide one of the texts against which modern biblical criticism formed. Leibniz annotated him. And in the twentieth century Leo Strauss spent years on Maimonides and the Islamic philosophers before emigrating; his account of persecution and the art of writing — that philosophers under threat write so as to be understood by some readers and not others — is derived directly from that reading, and became one of the most contested interpretive methods in modern political philosophy. Strauss's own entry in this roster records those years; this is the figure they were spent on.