The Doctor of Córdoba - Enchanted Islands Collection 5

In Cordoba, Andalusia, in a small square in the Jewish Quarter, tourists can still see the bronze bust of a figure with an emaciated face and an eagle's gaze: the inscription tells us it is Moses Maimonides, a Jewish physician, born in 1135 in that city, at the time of its peak. There, Arabs, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony, offering the world a model of civilisation and tolerance never again equalled. At the age of twelve, young Moses Maimonides became a disciple of the great Arab thinker Averroes, before falling in love with the study of medicine. He whom Christian scholastics would call the "Eagle of the Synagogue" for attempting, before Thomas Aquinas, to reconcile the Bible and Aristotle, was forced into exile due to the fanaticism of the new Arab conquerors. From the age of thirteen, he experienced a long period of wandering around the Mediterranean coast. Expelled from Palestine by the Crusaders, he ended his days in Cairo, as a physician and friend of Sultan Saladin, and also as a physician to the poor. He died in 1204, leaving behind a philosophical and scientific body of work that would shine throughout the centuries across the West.