Comments by "Sam Aronow" (@SamAronow) on "History-Makers: Maimonides" video.

To say that medicine was Maimonides' "fallback job" is to misunderstand the Jewish context. Until fairly recently, being a rabbi was a part-time, unpaid position. Technically speaking, it isn't a position at all but rather a qualification, like a JD, that enables one to perform any number of duties relating to the practice of Jewish law. Some rabbis at this time were practicing professionally, but it was rare until the 19th century and Maimonides himself disapproved of it.
1700
@Gala-yp8nx And those types of folks really hate it when you put Jesus’ life and sayings into the Jewish context of the period. I get daily hate comments telling me that Judaism is an elaborate hoax invented to conceal Jesus’ divinity because Christianity is the original version of Judaism.
81
For a good while after the Almohads, Christian Spain was actually the engine of Jewish thought. While it is true that Muslim countries were somewhat more likely to allow religious toleration, there was no shortage of exceptions on both sides. The simplified narrative of "Muslim Spain good, Christian Spain bad" seems to date back to the 19th century, when Spanish Liberals in support of Queen Isabel II began extolling the virtues of the Sephardic Golden Age as a rejoinder to the ultra-conservative Carlists. Suffice it to say that for a good few centuries, Christian Spain had inherited Muslim Spain's legacy of toleration before gradually abandoning it due to complicated European power politics.
31