Black People and Apes: ‘Racism’ in Moses Maimonides

This articles aims to investigate the identification between black people and monkeys, through one of the main (or rather, without any exaggeration, the main) representative of medieval Jewish thought, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), known to the Jewish world by the acronym RAMBAM, rabbi Mosheh ben Maymon. I will do so by starting with Chapter 51 of Part III in his Guide of the Perplexed, which the history of historiography has long used to support the idea of the rabbinic origin of racism, even to identify it as the birthplace of racial prejudice in Western thought.