Like any great thinker, Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) presents paradoxes to the inquirer. In his case, the paradoxes are patent, and deeply unsettling or enlightening, depending on your point of view. In this book by a distinguished Israeli academic, Maimonides is presented in the context of his own time, and with her deep scholarship worn very lightly, she displays him as something other than what generations of pious admiration have assumed.
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Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker by Sarah Stroumsa, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009