Congress lecture

Venue
12th EAJS Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Date
18 July 2023

Distinguished Panel: “New Discoveries in Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts of Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology”

Yoav Meyrav
A Philosopher Hiding in the Margins: An Anonymous Scholar’s Critique of a Metaphysical Text

A large part of MS Bodleian Opp. Add. Qu. 10 reproduces a collection of philosophical texts compiled and copied by an anonymous scholar who had a special interest in metaphysics. One of the works in this collection is an anonymous translation of Moses Halevi’s “Metaphysical Treatise.” Our scholar had a very special interest in this text, as he annotated it heavily, both in the margins and with lengthy interpolations. Despite their polemical character, sometimes to the point of slander, the comments reveal a highly trained scholar with knowledge of several philosophical texts and a clear philosophical agenda, which is heavily affected by Maimonides’s notion of the limitations of metaphysics. Further scrutiny of the codex reveals that the scholar was critically involved with other texts as well, enabling us to reconstruct his intellectual persona and perhaps even speculate about where and when to situate him historically.

Lucas Oro Hershtein
A Unique Blend: Merging two Hebrew Versions of al-Baṭalyawsī's "Book of Imaginary Circles"

Al-Baṭalyawsī’s metaphysical treatise "The Book of Imaginary Circles” enjoyed a wide medieval Hebrew readership, mostly through Moses ibn Tibbon’s popular mid-thirteenth-century translation, which is extant in several manuscripts. Characteristically, Moses’s translation is highly literal and employs consolidated philosophical terminology. But thirty years before Moses, a little-known Solomon ibn Daud produced the first translation of this work, using a completely different style and idiosyncratic terminology. Three manuscripts of this translation survive. One of these, Vatican ebr. 270, is actually a hybrid version which preserves a copyist’s attempt to come to terms with ibn Daud’s unfamiliar style with the aid of Moses ibn Tibbon’s translation by glossing, recording variants, and sometimes silently revising. In my presentation, I will first introduce some salient features of Solomon ibn Daud’s translation and then analyze the philosophical priorities of the copyist of Vat. ebr. 270 when creating his hybrid version of the text.

Ioana Curut (Babes-Bolyai University)
Aristotelizing Pseudo-Aristotle: Abraham ibn Hasdai's Hebrew Translation of “The Book of the Apple” and its Manuscript Tradition

Abraham ibn Ḥasdai translated the pseudo-Aristotelian "Book of the Apple" from Arabic into Hebrew in 1235, conveying a fictitious yet influential image of Aristotle as a supporter of the immortality of the soul and creation 'ex nihilo'. In his translation, ibn Ḥasdai dared to go further than Maimonides (whom he much admired) in bridging the gap between Aristotelianism and central tenets of the Jewish faith, despite Maimonides’s rejection of the book’s Aristotelian paternity, calling it “entirely valueless.” Based on an investigation of the manuscript tradition of “Sefer ha-Tapuaḥ,” I will reconstruct the relationship between textual witnesses and showcase a few examples of how scribes and readers engaged with the text. In particular, I will discuss attempts to restore the Aristotelian authorship of this text, either by modifying its title or by modifying its terminology, in spite of ibn Ḥasdai’s own claim that the work was composed by the “sages of Greece.”

Yonatan Shemesh (Yale University)
A Forgotten Prolegomenon to the Study of Divine Science

The proposed paper introduces an enigmatic medieval Hebrew philosophical composition that has gone almost completely unnoticed. This work, which survives in three versions and twelve manuscripts, under different titles and credited to different authors, is a reworking and repurposing of several passages from Averroes’s "Incoherence of the Incoherence,” incorporating additional materials and featuring several interpolations. Its arrangement challenges the distinction between “translation” and “original,” and it seems to be earlier and independent from the other known translations of Averroes’s "Incoherence.” The paper’s first part will describe the manuscript tradition and the different versions of the text, suggesting some possibilities regarding its production and transmission. The second part will examine the work’s inner logic: How does it rework material from Averroes’s "Incoherence,” and why? The conclusion will consider the apparent purpose of the work and what its transmission can teach us about the place of metaphysics in medieval Hebrew philosophy.

Further information
Link to EAJS congress website and book of abstracts (PDF)