Judah Ibn Tibbon Research Articles

From the Editor

From the Editor Michelle M. Hamilton This is our first volume produced during the pandemic. While the final stages of 48.1 were completed during the first intense weeks of the pandemic, this volume features work that the authors produced and revised in the midst of the pandemic. I am grateful not only to the authors, but also to the editorial team who has been diligent and always available, even as they (and all of us) have been in countless Zoom meetings about financial and other administrative crisis at our institutions, listening to updates and plans for how our colleges or universities, or our own children’s schooling attempt to confront the challenges of the virus, or attending crash courses on how to teach online (and if you haven’t, check out the articles by some of our colleagues detailing useful tips and lesson plans on teaching medieval Iberian literature on line, put together by Christi Ivers on La corónica Commons). The summer was hectic, stressful and busy, and I have to say the fall semester has kicked off in a chaotic and unsettling way. But amidst the stressful training, planning and, at least in my case, worrying, there were some bright sides. The inability to travel led many in our field/s to use the new (or at least new to many of us) tools for online collaboration to create virtual scholarly events and communities. I heard some excellent papers and conversations on medieval Iberian topics, including the notions of race and of how scholars of premodern and early modern Iberia have (or have not) dealt with it, Morisco literature and culture, at the virtual Medieval Academy panel on “Multilingualism, Multiculturalism, Multiconfessionalism in the Medieval Mediterranean” and at the Canceled Papers virtual conference at the University of Kansas, as well as several panels on Mediterranean history and culture at other digital events hosted by various universities across the globe. I have also been present in several graduate defenses with a host of scholars from around the world. Such activities show that, while we may not be able to travel phsyically, many colleagues are choosing to support and engage in new ways. I think that La corónica can continue to offer its support and help connect the scholarly community of specialists who work in and who are interested in premodern Iberia in this changing landscape. Two important contributions in the effort to strengthen our scholarly community that you will find in this volume are: 1. the forum on the [End Page 1] 2019 La corónica book award winner, S. J. Pearce’s The Andalusí Literary Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will. This forum is a new feature designed to stimulate scholarly dialogues not only about new scholarship, but about new ways of thinking about the field/s in which we work; and 2. the call for the next Nancy F. Marino Prize for best paper at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. This year’s winner was Rebecca de Souza (author of the article, “The Critique of Toxic, Noble Masculinity in Los siete Infantes de Lara,” in this volume). Please join us in honoring her at this year’s (virtual) social hour at the MLA, scheduled for Friday 8 January 2021 7:15–8:30pm EST (once we have the details we will post them on La corónica Commons and through MLA). In addition to the social hour, we also have two panels at MLA in January: “Isidore of Seville and the Persistence of Classical Antiquity,” cosponsored with LLC Medieval Iberian and Old English and chaired by Isidro J. Rivera; and a special session on “Race and Its Historiography in Medieval Iberian Studies,” organized by La corónica, cosponsored by LLC Medieval Iberian, and chaired by Isidro J. Rivera. Both panels have been chosen for inclusion in the sessions on the presidential theme “Persistence.” We are pleased to finally bring to you the present volume of the journal, which includes the excellent peer-reviewed articles and book reviews we regularly feature. In addition, the current volume of La corónica includes a new section dedicated to the La corónica...

The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will by Sarah J. Pearce

R&L 51.3-52.1 (Autumn 2019-Spring 2020) 251 BOOK REVIEWS The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will Sarah J. Pearce Indiana University Press, 2017. xiv + 276 pp. $60.00 hardcover. $59.99 ebook. In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, Sarah J. Pearce positions herself as a foremost scholar of medieval Iberian literary culture. This first monograph continues some of her earlier publications on the connections between the two major written languages of medieval Andalusi thinkers, Hebrew and Arabic, especially in the form of Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters). In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition, she emphasizes the concept of the cultural prestige of Arabic as expressed through a twelfth-century Hebrew letter—in the genre of an ethical will—produced by Judah Ibn Tibbon, an Andalusi Jewish émigré to southern France. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s will, however, is just the entryway into this monograph ’s focus, acting as a microcosm for understanding the status of Arabic in the minds of Judah Ibn Tibbon and other Judeo-Arabic authors more generally. Pearce’s analysis of this ethical will, along with a new translation of the primary source, reveal to modern readers the inner depths of this text and the Judeo-Arabic context of southern Europe. This book deservedly won the La corónica International Book Award in 2019, reflecting its contribution to medieval Iberian scholarship. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s biography is necessary to understand Pearce’s detailed inquiry into his letter. Born in Granada around c. 1120, Judah Ibn Tibbon fled the Almohad invasion and settled in Lunel in the middle of the twelfth century. Between 1172 and his death in 1190, he wrote this lengthy letter to his son Samuel, who was born and raised in Provence. Having left behind the Arabophone world for a southern French community with limited access to Arabic, Judah ibn Tibbon subtly weaves salient aspects of his former cultural sphere into the will, especially a preference for the written language Religion & Literature 252 of Arabic. In the ethical will, this ideal perception of Arabic emerges mainly in Ibn Tibbon’s use of biblical and philosophical sources, references to his own book habits, and poetics. Pearce presents these literary themes as collectively reflecting an agenda of Arabophone culture. Judah ibn Tibbon “uses his ethical will to transmit both Jewish and Islamic thought, assert the primacy of Arabic, and preserve Andalusi culture” (8). Judah Ibn Tibbon is known primarily as a translator, and it was his son Samuel who famously translated Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed from Arabic (Judeo-Arabic) to Hebrew. Rather than treat Ibn Tibbon the writer of an ethical will as a separate entity from Ibn Tibbon the translator, however, Pearce understands the ethical will as part of an ongoing conversation with its author’s translation program. The family of Ibn Tibbonid translators tend toward literal, word-for-word translation. However, Pearce argues that Judah Ibn Tibbon performs cultural translation in unexpected ways in his work. His translation is “not one that adapts metaphors and toponyms and idiomatic expressions but is rather one that conveys the sociocultural prestige of the source language through literal translation” (37). In other words, Pearce argues that Ibn Tibbon’s use of word-for-word translations is in itself a form of cultural translation. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition is divided into six chapters. Since the ethical will holds primacy among the monograph’s sources, the chapters appropriately center themselves around a particular aspect of the will and proceed into a discussion of its literary and cultural context. Each chapter title begins with a verse or line from the ethical will as a starting point for a discussion of Andalusi literary culture more generally. For example, the title of the third chapter reads: “‘On Every Sabbath, Read… the Bible in Arabic’: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature.” By using the ethical will as a conduit into literary culture, Pearce challenges the stark divides of artifacts into historical, cultural or literary categories . The ethical will, she argues, works in all three ways...

The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: the Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, written by S.J. Pearce

The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: the Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, written by S.J. Pearce

The Andalusi Literary & Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah Ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will by S. J. Pearce

The Andalusi Literary & Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah Ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will by S. J. Pearce

The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will by Sarah J. Pearce

Reviewed by: The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will by Sarah J. Pearce Sabahat F. Adil Pearce, Sarah J. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2017. xi + 262 pp. ISBN: 978-0-253-02596-8 Published in the Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will is a meticulously researched, highly engaging, and provocative monograph on a letter (or ethical will) written by the medieval Jewish scholar Judah ibn Tibbon to his son Samuel, the translator of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, a canonical work of Jewish thought. As Pearce suggests, Judah ibn Tibbon was a scholar and a polymath who fled from Almohad al-Andalus and settled in Lunel, Provence. It was after moving to this city that ibn Tibbon began work on the ethical will, which includes, among others, strikingly negative remarks directed towards his son. These remarks address, for example, his ignorance of Arabic and Hebrew languages, which were obviously crucial for literary and cultural exchange in the al-Andalus of the time. Pearce's work demonstrates how the ethical will is certainly a communication from father to son, but it also elucidates many more details about the context in which the document was produced. Featuring six main chapters that illuminate a range of themes pertinent to the ethical will, Pearce's work provides an incisive foray into Judah ibn Tibbon's work in light of his life and times. Each of the six chapters of this monograph constitutes a different thematic venture into the ethical will, accompanied by close analyses of pertinent sections of the text. Before the first chapter commences, readers encounter two sections: "Acknowledgments" and "A Note on Translations and Transliterations", as well as a substantive introduction entitled "'The Preface of Every Book is Its First Part': An Overview of Materials and Methodologies". It should be noted that the titles of the introduction and six chapters stem verbatim from texts by Judah ibn Tibbon, his son, or others. The introduction provides insights on the author and his son, situates the ethical will in the context in which it was written, and positions the book itself in terms of its methodological and foundational underpinnings. In terms of the former, Pearce points out that it is "grounded in an unwillingness to impose modern epistemological categories on medieval texts that transgress them" (11). Following this discussion, the author nonetheless situates it as "a work of cultural and literary history" (11), and, in terms of theoretical bases, she points [End Page 112] to an intellectual preference for New Historicism and poststructuralism, namely the work of Itamar Even-Zohar (12). One of the most striking aspects of Pearce's work is its ability to coalesce very particular textual citations from the ethical will with broader themes, thus making a medieval text accessible and attractive to a wide array of readers. For example, the first chapter, "'Pen, I Recount Your Favor!': Reading, Writing, and Translating in the Memory of al-Andalus", forges connections between Judah ibn Tibbon's ethical will and his relationship with (and attitudes towards) Judeo-Arabic and al-Andalus. In this vein, Pearce situates the ethical will in terms of preceding textual memorializations of al-Andalus. The second chapter, "'Examine Your Hebrew Books Monthly and Arabic Books Bimonthly': Autobiography and Bibliography in the Islamic West", considers the ethical will as evidence of the varieties of cultural knowledge that thrived in different libraries of the al-Andalus of the time. Furthermore, this chapter explores how the ethical will can be read as a library catalogue, which also raises questions of genre. The third chapter, "'On Every Sabbath, Read… the Bible in Arabic': Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature", examines how Judah ibn Tibbon situated the Hebrew Bible within a specifically Andalusi tradition, relying on the work not simply as a theological text, but also as "a cultural touchstone and as a literary text" (101). On a related note, the fourth chapter, "'The Words of the...

Avicenna in Medieval Hebrew Translation: Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s Translation of Kitāb al-Najāt, on Psychology and Metaphysics By Gabriella Elgrably-Berzin

Avicenna made a late entry into medieval Hebrew philosophy; the Andalusian roots and Averroan orientation of most Jewish thinkers did not make for a sympathetic audience. Small portions of the Avicennan corpus were rendered into Hebrew by Samuel Ibn Tibbon and Shem Tov Falaquera. A good deal of Avicennan thought was accessible by way of citations in Averroes. In the beginning of the fourteenth century, Todros Todrosi decided to produce Hebrew translations of the sections on psychology and metaphysics from al-Najāt. His translations are the subject of the book under review by Gabriella Elgrably-Berzin. Hers is a study of the translation of philosophical texts, not one in the history of philosophy. There is an introductory survey of the Hebrew translation movement, and additional probes into the historical and philological circumstances of these translations. I call attention in particular to the fine essay on ‘The Hebrew Tradition of Literalism’, outlining the efforts made to produce translations that are as close as possible to the Arabic, beginning with Judah Ibn Tibbon, who had the advantage of growing up in an arabophone culture. The translations carried on with Judah’s descendants and their followers, who, however well they may have learned the Arabic language, were increasingly removed from an Arabic speaking environment and more likely to be led to inaccuracies. The bulk of the book, however, is taken up by critical editions of Todrosi’s translations and its philological analysis. The latter still relies a good deal, as it must, on the pioneering work of Moshe Goshen-Gottstein. Berzin amasses a veritable thesaurus of Arabic words, especially those considered to be ‘technical terms’, and their Hebrew equivalents. To her great credit, she includes Hebrew texts by Levi Gersonides, who though not a translator, was a brilliant philosopher and scientist, and someone who had closely examined Avicenna’s opinions.

Poetry on the edge: modern medievalism’s marginal verses

This essay is a preliminary examination of the relationship between prose and poetry in the work of modern editors of medieval texts, work that typically separates out the two modes of writing, even where they coexist unitarily in the source materials. The principal vehicle for this examination is a unicum manuscript (Bodl. Mich. MS 50) of a twelfth-century Hebrew ethical will written by Judah ibn Tibbon, a Granada-born translator of Arabic philosophical and religious texts who spent most of his adult life in exile in the Provencal city of Lunel. The will is written in both prose and verse; the late medieval/early modern scribe’s decision to consign the prosodic portions of the text to a margin running down the outer edge of the page is evocative of the unease that subsequent students and editors of this and other texts produced by the Islamicate culture of Spain would confront when editing those texts for modern readers. By responding to this manuscript’s provocation of format, the essay stakes out the ground for future and continuing discussion of the marginal place of poetry with respect to the related prose in modern and contemporary scholarship.

God's Chosen People: Judah Halevi's Kuzari and the Sh Im m Doctrine By EHUD KRINIS, translated from Hebrew by ANN BRENER and TAMAR LIZA COHEN

The research that guided the composition of this book is grounded on an adapted doctoral thesis. Ehud Krinis authored the text in Hebrew and published it in English through an annotated translation by Ann Brener and Tamar Liza Cohen. This comparative inquiry is situated at the intersection between Islamic and Jewish Studies. Krinis conducted his textual analysis based on the methods of philology and historiography in mediaevalist studies while relying on a wide-ranging bibliographic body of primary and secondary sources. The scope of his inquiry builds on the scholarship of Shlomo Pines in terms of exploring the influence of Ismaili and Imami doctrines on Judah Halevi’s Kuzari as a mediaeval opus that defended a dogmatic belief in the ‘divine election’ of the children of Israel and their ‘promised’ territorial claim over the Holy Land. The Kuzari was composed in a dialogical style in the third/fourth decades of the twelfth century ce. It was written in Judaeo-Arabic (as an Arabic treatise set in Hebrew letters) and titled Kitāb al-Radd wa-l-dalīl fī l-dīn al-dhalīl (Book of refutation and proof on behalf of the despised religion), or also known as al-Kitāb al-Khazarī, or Kitāb al-Ḥujja. Judah ibn Tibbon translated it into Hebrew under the title Sefer ha-Kuzari (ca. 1167 ce), and it was later set in a Latinate rendition as Liber Cosri: continens colloquium seu disputationem de religione (transl. Johannes Buxtorf; printed edn., Basel 1660).

“The Types of Wisdom Are Two in Number”: Judah ibn Tibbon’s Quotation from the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-Dīn

Abstract The present study bears out an early twentieth-century suggestion that the twelfth-century Andalusi physician, translator, merchant and lexicographer Judah ibn Tibbon quoted directly from the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, the theological magnum opus of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, in the ethical will he wrote to his son Samuel. In addition to demonstrating, through a consideration of lexicographical evidence, that a sentence from that summa was indeed quoted, in Hebrew translation, in the text of the ethical will, the present article will set that quotation into its context as a part of the Tibbonid drive toward literal, word-for-word translation from Arabic into Hebrew. It will further consider the significance of the authorial decision by Judah ibn Tibbon, who fled Granada for Provence following the advent of Almohad rule in Iberia to include, alongside Andalusi sources, direct quotation from al-Ghazālī, a text that formed part of the intellectual underpinning of the Almohad movement.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon and the Esoteric Character of theGuide of the Perplexed

Samuel ben Judah Ibn Tibbon, translator of theGuide of the Perplexedand of other treatises of Maimonides, is in many ways also the first interpreter of Maimonides' philosophic teaching. The orientation of his interpretation of Maimonides' philosophy is already seen in his early writings—epistles, critical notes appended to his translations of theGuide, a philosophic glossary and the introductions to his translations. His interpretation was extensively developed, however, in his later and more comprehensive treatises—theCommentary on EcclesiastesandMa'amar yiqqavu hamayim. These treatises are explicitly devoted to philosophic exegesis of biblical verses, but are deeply impregnated with the proper interpretation of Maimonides' philosophy and with its problematics. Samuel Ibn Tibbon's writing had a decisive influence on Maimonidean thinkers throughout the thirteenth century, among whom may be numbered the authors of two comprehensive commentaries on theGuide, Moses ben Solomon of Salerno, and Zerahiah ben Shealtiel Hen.

An Analysis of the Ma’amar yiqqawu ha-Mayim by Samuel b. Judah Ibn Tibbon

An Analysis of the Ma’amar yiqqawu ha-Mayim by Samuel b. Judah Ibn Tibbon