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Maimónides

Index: El milagro secreto, Artificios, Ficciones, OC,Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. 511. Israel. Testimonio Argentino: Israel, BS,Borges en Sur 1931-1980. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1999. 59. Libro para la pausa de sábado, TR2,Textos recobrados 1930-1955. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001. 16.
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Moses ben Maimon, Jewish rabbi, physician and philosopher, 1135-1204, author of the Guide for the Perplexed

Fishburn and Hughes: "A Jewish philosopher, jurist and physician, born at Cordoba and forced to flee from Spain in the persecutions of 1149. He settled first in Fez and then in Cairo, where he became head of the Jewish community and also physician to the Sultan. Maimonides was the leading Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. His Commentary on the Talmud contains a codification of Jewish religious doctrine, its interpretation by existing authorities and his own comments on their moral and philosophical implications. His major philosophical work, written in Arabic, is the Guide for the Perplexed. Basing his interpretation of Judaism upon the systems of Aristotle, Maimonides seeks to achieve a harmony between reason and faith. The Guide was translated into Latin as early as the thirteenth century and exerted a profound influence upon Christian as well as Jewish and Moslem thought. Regarding dreams, in book 2 chs 36-8 of the Guide Maimonides discusses the relationship between prophecy, or divine emanations, and dreams. Breaking with traditional interpretations of the dream as a means of protection from anticipated danger, he develops his idea of the dream as a vision in which the action of the imaginative faculty becomes so perfect that you can see a thing as if it were outside you, and the thing which is produced in the dream appears as if by external sensation. Ch. 36 includes quotations of famous sayings, such as 'Dream is one sixtieth of prophecy', The windfall of prophecy is one dream' and 'If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a dream' (Numbers 12:6). Although the discussion includes many ideas which seem closely relevant to Borges's story 'The Secret Miracle', the exact assertion attributed by the narrator to Maimonides has not been traced. The idea mentioned in the story that the final interpretation of dreams rests with God stems from Genesis 40:8." (123)