‘You Who Slumber: Awaken!’ Jewish-Muslim Philosophical Encounters in Late-Medieval Syria

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ABSTRACT In the fourteenth century, a Muslim scholar in Ḥalab (Aleppo) named ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Muwaqqit composed a vast and erudite commentary on the philosophically-themed opening chapters of Moses Maimonides’ comprehensive code of Jewish law. Two extant manuscripts provide evidence of intensive interest in this work, and sustained study of it, among Jewish scholars for a century following the work’s composition. These manuscripts offer us a unique insight into the world of late-medieval Muslim and Jewish scholars, and into an intellectual culture that in many ways transcended confessional boundaries. They provide evidence of a prominent scholar from the dominant Muslim majority engaging directly with the foreign-language literature of a religious minority, as well as precious insights into the final phase of classical Judaeo-Arabic intellectual culture. The present study seeks to situate these materials in their historical context for the first time, exploring the sources and intellectual alignments of its creators, as well as the ways in which Jewish and Islamic intellectual cultures in this period converged and diverged.