Like many Jews, I had heard of Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and physician who was one of the most prolific scholars of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). But it wasn’t until I visited Spain in 2010 and found a small statute of Maimonides in Córdoba’s Jewish quarter that my curiosity about him was piqued. As it turned out, Maimonides had been born in Córdoba and had fled Spain with his family when he was only 15.
When I got back to the States, I looked up his history and discovered that a militant Islamic sect had assumed power in southern Spain around 1150 AD, and after two centuries of living in relative harmony with the Moors, Spanish Jews were being persecuted, forced to convert or wear garish yellow robes whenever they left their homes. Near the end of Ivanhoe, after the knight has saved Rebecca from a hideous death, Sir Walter Scott mentions that she and her father are going to Córdoba, where they have relatives. The Scottish author obviously didn’t realize that Córdoba was no longer safe for Jews.
In my research, I learned that the Maimon family had gone first to Morocco, only to discover that the same militant sect persecuting Jews in southern Spain also controlled Morocco and were making life difficult for Jews there as well. So, Maimonides and his family traveled onto Egypt, whose rulers at that time were more tolerant of other faiths. Indeed, as I discovered when doing research for Rebecca of Ivanhoe, Maimonides was so respected as a physician in Cairo that he was appointed court physician to Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria who conquered Jerusalem and defeated two crusading armies from the Christian west.
While writing Rebecca of Ivanhoe, I chanced across A Guide for the Perplexed, a novel by Dara Horn, which is based on the true story of how scholars in the 19th century found old writings by Maimonides and others hidden in a Genizat, a ritual storing of old documents that contain the word “God” in them. The Genizat was concealed behind the walls of an old Temple in Cairo, and I knew then and there I wanted to bring Rebecca and her family to Egypt where she could meet Maimonides. (As a healer living in the same time period, she had heard of him). In my novel, Rebecca meets the famous Jewish scholar at Ben Ezra synagogue, the very Temple where the Genizat was discovered (Ben Ezra is no longer an active place of worship but is open for tourism). At first, Maimonides brushes Rebecca off but he soon realizes he could use someone with her skills in the Sultan’s harem. If you want to find out what happens next, feel free to read Rebecca of Ivanhoe.
