Maimonides: Life and Thought

Moshe Halbertal's Maimonides: Life and Thought, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, is a modern scholarly intellectual biography of Moses Maimonides, tracing his legal, philosophical and communal work from Cordoba through Fez and Cairo. Its strength is that Halbertal is a leading scholar of Jewish thought and the book is a peer-reviewed university press monograph widely used as a standard modern account. Its limit is that it is one scholar's synthesis and interpretation of a famously contested figure, so a claim resting on a disputed point of Maimonidean interpretation, such as the relation between his legal and philosophical works, should be checked against the wider secondary literature rather than this book alone.