The Mystery of Maimonides’ Puzzling Name

The name of the towering religious philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) is surely one of the best-known and most resonant of all Jewish names in the annals of world culture. But, as a name, it’s surely also one of the most puzzling.

The “Moses” part is easy enough. But what about “Maimonides”? More specifically, what’s Jewish about it? The word breaks down into “Maimon” plus the Greek suffix for “son of.” So: Moses son of Maimon, or, in Hebrew, Moshe ben Maimon, and in Arabic—for he lived in the Islamic world and wrote many of his works in Arabic—Musa ibn Maymun.

But what kind of a word is Maimon? It’s not to be found anywhere else in either Hebrew or Aramaic (the other tongue spoken widely by Jews in late-antique times). Instead, it’s a borrowing from the Arabic name “Maymun.” But that only adds to the mystery: why should Maimonides’ father, himself a Jewish scholar, not have had a Hebrew name?