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Abraham Ibn Ezra's journal of jewish studies, vol. lv, no. 2, autumn 2004 A Case of Twelfth-Century Plagiarism? Abraham Ibn Ezra’s ‘H. ay Ben Meqitz’ and Avicenna’s ‘H. ayy Ibn Yaqz. ân’ * Aaron Hughes University of Calgary hat follows examines an important aspect of the intimate relationship W between Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages.1 It presents what, at least on the surface, amounts to a case of Hebrew-Jewish plagiarism of an earlier Arabo-Islamic text. In particular, it focuses on a Hebrew treatise by the name of H. ay ben Meqitz2 written by Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) that follows closely on the heels of an Arabic text by the same name (H. ayy ibn Yaqz. ân) penned by Avicenna (980–1037).3 Although ibn Ezra’s treatise is usu- ally brushed aside in secondary treatments of his work,4 I present it here as a case study, not of his contribution to medieval Neoplatonism, but as an important chapter in the elucidation of the poetics and cultural ambiguity of Jews living in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). These Andalusi Jews, accord- ing to Brann, were engaged in a complex ‘rereading and rewriting of their tradition in Arabic according to the literary and cultural conventions of that language’.5 It is precisely within this context of rereading and rewriting that * This study was supported by the generosity of SSHRC (Canada Council), the Maurice Amado Research Fund in Sephardic Studies, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. I would also like to acknowledge the following individuals for reading and commenting on vari- ous incarnations of this study: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, and Lisa Hughes. I am equally grateful to the anonymous reviewers for JJS, who provided extremely help- ful suggestions. All remaining mistakes are solely my own. 1 There exists a wealth of studies, many polemical, devoted to this topic. For an excellent historiographic survey, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994), pp. 3–14. For a good discussion that problematises this relationship, especially the trope of ‘symbiosis’, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995), pp. 3–14. 2 I have consulted the critical edition found in Iggeret H. ay ben Meqitz, ed. Israel Levin (Tel Aviv University Press, Tel Aviv, 1983). The line numbers that follow correspond to Levin’s num- bering. A full English translation of H. ay ben Meqitz may be found in Aaron W. Hughes, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004), pp. 189–207. 3 For the Arabic text of this work, I have consulted H. ayy ibn Yaqz. ân li ibn sînâ wa ibn. tufayl wa al-suhrawardî,ed.Ah. mad Amîn (Dâr al-maarîf, Cairo, 1959). 4 Notable exceptions are Hermann Greive, Studien zum jüdischen Neuplatonismus: Die Reli- gionsphilosophie des Abraham Ibn Ezra (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1973); Levin, Iggeret H. ay ben Meqitz (as in n. 2); idem, Abraham ibn Ezra: His Life and Poetry (in Hebrew) (Ha-kibbutz ha- meuchad, Tel Aviv, 1969), pp. 181–227; Raphael Loewe, ‘The Influence of Solomon ibn Gabirol on Abraham ibn Ezra’, in Abraham Ibn Ezra y su Tiempo, ed. F. Diaz Esteban Asosiación Es- pañola de Orientalistas, Madrid, 1990), pp. 199–207; and, in the same volume, Zvi Malachi, ‘Astronomical and Astrological Data in Four Literary Works (Keter Malchut, Hai ben Mekitz, and Two Maqamas)’, pp. 211–16. 5 Ross Brann, ‘The Arabized Jews’, in The Literature of al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, acaseoftwelfth-century plagiarism? 307 we need to situate ibn Ezra’s H. ay ben Meqitz. Ibn Ezra’s goal, I hope to show, was not only to create a Jewish and Hebrew version of Avicenna’s work, but also, in the process, to compete with the Arabic original. Both H. ay ben Meqitz and H. ayy ibn Yaqz. ân, the former title being a sim- ple Hebrew translation of the latter, belong to a distinct literary genre called the initiatory tale.6 The goal of these texts, as I have argued elsewhere,7 is to provide a narrative documenting in allegorical fashion the career and ad- ventures of the human soul and its relationship to the structure of the uni- verse. Although these texts need to be contextualised within medieval Neo- platonism,8 we must not lose sight of the fact that they are also important poetic and literary creations. Ibn Ezra’s H. ay ben Meqitz tells the story of an unnamed protagonist’s encounter with an enigmatic individual by the name of H. ay ben Meqitz. The two are often taken to be allegories of the individ- ual soul and the Active Intellect respectively. Upon meeting, the two journey throughout the universe, which ibn Ezra divides into three parts: the lower world (ha- olam ha-shafal), the intermediate worlds (ha- olam ha- ems.a i ), and the upper world (ha- olam ha- eliyon).9 As they journey through these ascending cosmological levels, the protagonist learns the requisite science or sciences necessary for progressing on the journey. At the thresholds separat- ing the various worlds, he must undergo a rite of passage (e.g. immersion in water, encounter with a celestial fire). The tale culminates when the protag- onist reaches the highest level of the universe and is afforded an imaginative gaze into the Divine presence. Ibn Ezra’s narrative differs, philosophically, from Avicenna’s in a number of ways. Although both are written in a literary style, the most obvious difference Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), p. 443. Within this context, also see Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991), pp. 23–39. For more specific examples of this tension between Jews and Muslims and the ways in which each used the other to construct identity, see Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002). 6 For requisite secondary literature on this genre, see Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Vision- ary Recital, trans. Willard Trask (Bollingen, Princeton, 1960); Anne-Marie Goichon, Le Récite de Hayy ibn Yaqzân commenté par des texts d’Avicenne (Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1959); Her- mann Landolt, ‘Suhrawardî’s “Tales of Initiation” ’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987), pp. 475–86; Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Read- ing Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Brill, Leiden, 1988), esp. pp. 299–307; Peter Heath, Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna: With a Translation of the Book of the Prophet Muhammad’s Ascent to Heaven (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1992); Sarah Stroumsa, ‘Avicenna’s Philosophical Stories: Aristotle’s Poetics Reconsidered’, Arabica 9 (1992), pp. 183–206. For a survey of this literature, see Hughes, The Texture of the Divine (as in n. 2), esp. pp. 13–47. 7 See Aaron Hughes, ‘The Three Worlds of ibn Ezra’s H. ay ben Meqitz’, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 12.2 (2002), pp. 1–24. 8 Other texts that make up this genre include the likes of Avicenna’s Risâla Sâlâmân wa- Absâl, Mantiq al-T. ayr;ibnT. ufayl, H. ayy ibn Yaqz. ân. See the discussion in Alfred L. Ivry, ‘The Utilization of Allegory in Islamic Philosophy’, in Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman (Brill, Leiden, 2000), pp. 154–80. 9 See Aaron Hughes, ‘Two Approaches to the Love of God in Medieval Jewish Thought: The Concept of devequt in the Works of ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi’, Studies in Religion 28.2 (1999), esp. pp. 141–44. 308 journal of jewish studies is that whereas ibn Ezra is interested in the vertical structure of the universe, Avicenna deals primarily with the horizontal structure of the universe.10 Ibn Ezra is also extremely interested in the role of astrology in the noetic devel- opment of the individual, which is evident by the amount of time he spends describing the anthropomorphic attributes of the planets. Avicenna, on the contrary, was indifferent towards astrology and devotes very little space to describing the planets. Another important difference between the two works is that whereas ibn Ezra’s protagonist actually undertakes the journey through the cosmos with H. ay, in Avicenna’s text, H. ayy only describes to the protag- onist the structure of the universe. Despite such important philosophical dif- ferences, ibn Ezra has, on a literary level, essentially adopted and adapted Avicenna’s narrative to the concerns of his Jewish audience. Although he bor- rowed the basic plot, structure, and characters from Avicenna’s text, he did so in such a manner that the new creation derived its vocabulary, terms of refer- ence and, ultimately, its potency from the Biblical narrative. By doing this, ibn Ezra attempted to show to his Jewish audience, on a religious level, that his own version was better than that of Avicenna’s. For explicit in the ‘judaisa- tion’ of this work is the notion that Jews no longer needed to read the original Arabic version of the narrative.11 It is well known that ibn Ezra was an important conduit in the transmis- sion of Arabic scientific works into Hebrew through his translation activity and, thus he was a central figure in the development of medieval Hebrew sci- ence.12 Interestingly, though, ibn Ezra did not feel compelled to make a simple Hebrew translation of H.
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