Introduction

Introduction 1 Ṭodros Ṭodrosi and the Hebrew Translation Movement Little is known of Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s biography beyond a few basic facts. From a comment made in his translation of extracts from commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics that he completed at the age of twenty,1 it is known that Ṭodrosi—or, as he called himself, “Ṭodros Ṭodrosi of the seed of the Jews” (Ṭodros Ṭodrosi mi-zeraʿ ha-yehudim)2—was born in 1313 in Arles, Provence.3 It is also known that he was active around 1330–1340 in Trinquetaille, a suburb of Arles that was home to many Jewish scholars during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was there that he translated Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics.4 With regard to family members or contemporaries, a few other facts can be stated with varying degrees of certainty. Ṭodrosi was apparently related to Qalonymus ben David Ṭodros, an Arabic-to-Hebrew translator of the first half of the fourteenth century who translated Averroes’s Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). In addition, a remark in one of Ṭodrosi’s translations suggests that he may have been in contact with Judah ben Solomon Nathan, a fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish physician and scholar who was among the Hebrew translators of al-Ghazālī’s Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa (Intentions of the Philosophers), a concise account of Aristotelian science and philosophy, as explicated by al-Fārābī and mainly Avicenna: 1 See the second entry in the list of Ṭodrosi’s works, below. 2 It is not clear why Ṭodrosi added the words “mi-zeraʿ ha-yehudim” to his name in many of his translations; one theory is that he feared confusion with a relative of the same name who had embraced Christianity. See Broydé, “Ṭodros ben Meshullam ben David,” 173. This expression appears for the first time in Esther 6:13; for its meaning, see the commentaries on this verse by Abraham ibn Ezra and Gersonides. The habit of mentioning one’s family pedigree was common among Jews in Provence and was the subject of satirical criticism in Qalonymus ben Qalonymus’s Even Boḥan, see Schirmann, ed., Ha-Shirah ha-ʿIvrit bi-Sefarad u-vi-Provans, book two, part two, 508–510. For the sake of brevity, the translator will usually be referred to as Ṭodrosi. 3 For the borders of Provence and its leading cities, see Gross, Gallia Judaica, 489–492; Haber- man, “Mishut be-Ereẓ Provans,” 17–31. On Provence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 10, 82–91. 4 For the intellectual activity in Trinquetaille, see Gross, Gallia Judaica, 246–248. It is worth noting that in ca. 1331, the Hebrew translator Samuel ben Judah of Marseille visited Trinque- taille in search of Arabic manuscripts. See Berman, “Greek into Hebrew: Samuel ben Judah of Marseille, Fourteenth-Century Philosopher and Translator,” 296–298. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/9789004281974_002 2 introduction I am Ṭodros Ṭodrosi of the seed of the Jews … I have in front of me the book of the Intentions of the Philosophers by Abū Ḥāmid (al-Ghazālī) (in) the (Hebrew) translation by my noble friend … En Bongodas Salomon Natan.5 What can be definitely stated, however, is that Ṭodrosi was a contributor to one of the major developments in the history of Jewish scholarship: the great Hebrew translation movement of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, in which Jewish scholars from southern France, Christian Spain, and Italy col- lected, copied, and translated a significant portion of the scientific and philosophical literature that existed in Arabic. This massive enterprise resulted in making texts in a broad range of fields—logic, physics, psychology, medicine, metaphysics, and the natural and mathematical sciences—accessible to intellectual Hebrew readers.6 In addition to Ṭodrosi and the above-cited Judah ben Solomon Nathan and Qalonymus ben David Ṭodros, others involved in this effort included Qalonymus ben Qalonymus, Samuel ibn Tibbon, Moses ibn Tibbon, Jacob Anatoli, Hillel ben Samuel, Moses ben Joshua of Narbonne (Nar- boni), Shem Ṭov ibn Falaquera, Jacob ben Makhir, Abraham ben Ḥasdai, Zer- aḥyah ben Isaac, Samuel ben Judah, and Moses of Beaucaire. The translation movement began in earnest following the emigration of Judah ibn Tibbon (1120–after 1190) and Joseph Kimḥi (1105–ca. 1170) to Nar- bonne and Lunel in the aftermath of the Almohad invasion of Spain.7 Their scholarly successors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries translated a substantial number of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic philosophical works into Hebrew, introducing Arabic scholarship to Provençal Jewry and promoting its 5 Judah ben Solomon Nathan, whose Provençal names were En Bongodas and Bonjues, was probably a native of Avignon, where many other members of the Nathan family lived. For his biography and bibliography, see Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mit- telalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher, 307; Renan, Les écrivains, 228–234. For the quotation, see Ṭodrosi’s translation of The Fountain of Questions (the third entry in the list of his works, הנה אנכי טודרוס בן משלם בן דוד טודרוס מזרע היהודים נצב על עין נכבד מים חיים מפיו אנו חיין :(below והלבש אותו מחלצות לשוננו תשורה אל משכילי דתנו. ומנגד לעיני ספר כוונות הפילוסופים חברו אבו חמד Part of the English translation is taken .העתקת החבר המעולה מימיו נאמנים לחמו נתן אין בונגודאש fron Zonta, “The Role of Avicenna,” 655. 6 Many of the original versions of these works have been lost. For the scope of the translation movement, see Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen; Renan, Les écrivains; Halkin, “Translation and Translators,” 1318–1329; Zonta, La filosofia antica; Freudenthal, “Les sciences dans les communautés juives médiévales de Provence,” 29–136. 7 See Twersky, “Aspects of the Social and Cultural History of Provençal Jewry,” 195–198. For relevant historical developments in Spain around this time, see Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 46–54..

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