Who was Maimonides, and how did he try to reconcile Aristotle with the Torah?

Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, died 1204) was a Sephardic rabbi, widely acknowledged as one of the most influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, who also practised as a physician and wrote philosophy that tried to reconcile Aristotle with Jewish theology. After the Almohads conquered Córdoba in 1148, Jewish and Christian communities faced a choice between conversion to Islam, martyrdom or exile. His family, along with many other Jews, chose exile, and he settled in Fustat, in Egypt, by 1168.

There his life took an unplanned turn. The family's savings were lost in his brother David's business venture, so Maimonides took up medicine, for which he became famous. He became court physician to Saladin's chief secretary, then to Saladin himself. In a famous letter he said that even on Shabbat he would receive members of the community.

He wrote two great works. The Mishneh Torah is a comprehensive code of Jewish law that gathers all the binding laws from the Talmud, and later codes such as the Shulchan Aruch draw heavily on it. The Guide for the Perplexed, written in Judeo-Arabic, seeks to reconcile Aristotelianism with Rabbinical Jewish theology by finding rational explanations for many events in the text.

Both were controversial. The Mishneh Torah had no references and seemed to some to want to "cut out" Talmud study. Many communities revered the Guide, others deemed some of its ideas heretical, and it was often banned and, on occasion, burned in Paris in 1233. Yet Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus made extensive use of it.