Insights into the Hebrew Bible from the Son of Judaism’s Greatest Medieval Philosopher

When the great Moses Maimonides, known in Hebrew as the Rambam, died in 1204, his only son Abraham—then merely nineteen years old—succeeded him as the spiritual leader of Egyptian Jewry, and spent much of his life defending his father’s teachings as they became the subject of fierce theological controversies. A great scholar in his own right, Abraham wrote a Judeo-Arabic commentary on the books of Genesis and Exodus, which for centuries was unavailable to most scholars. Moshe Maimon, who recently produced an annotated Hebrew translation of this work, discusses it in an interview by Eliezer Brodt: