A folk legend survived about how Moses ben Maimon, known to the world as Maimonides or the Rambam (1138-1204), supposedly fled the court of his king in Egypt. The story is unhistorical in its details but interesting in its shape.
The king, it says, had grown suspicious of Maimonides and threatened his life. Maimonides asked for three days to prepare himself. During those three days he concocted a specific mixture and instructed his students to have it ready. When he was brought home senseless, they were to apply it according to his careful directions.
On the appointed day Maimonides appeared before the king and requested that his veins be opened, ostensibly as a kind of humble offering. The surgeon cut, but because Maimonides had calculated the angle and timing in advance, the vital artery was missed. He collapsed, apparently dead, and his body was sent home. His students applied the mixture. He revived.
He then fled Egypt and took refuge in a cave. There, in the cold safety of stone, he wrote the Yad ha-Chazakah, the Strong Hand, a towering code of Jewish law in fourteen divisions. The name is a pun. The Hebrew letter yod, which spells Yad, also has the numerical value of fourteen.
The real Maimonides did flee Cordoba, did spend time in Fez and the Land of Israel, and did write the Mishneh Torah, completed in 1178 in Fustat. He was indeed court physician to Sultan Saladin. But the dramatic escape from Egypt in the legend is embroidery. This passage from Hebraic Literature (1901) captures how folk memory preserved him: not just as a philosopher, but as a man who outsmarted death to finish his book.