How does a religious refugee who spent years on the run become the personal physician to Saladin and write the definitive code of Jewish law still used today? This episode follows Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or the Rambam, from his birth in Cordoba around 1135 through the Almohad conquest of 1148 that forced his family into exile. We trace his wandering through southern Spain and Fez, Morocco, where he absorbed Aristotle and Islamic science, his emotional visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and his eventual settlement in Fustat, Egypt, around 1168.

We then examine the shipwreck that killed his brother David and sank the family fortune, plunging Maimonides into a year of bedridden depression documented in letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Because he refused to earn money from religious teaching, he turned to medicine and r ...