Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean

Texts in Transit in the medieval mediterranean

Edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean

Edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison

Th e Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania This book has been funded in part by the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University and the Bowdoin College Faculty Development Committee.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Langermann, Y. Tzvi, editor. | Morrison, Robert G., 1969– , editor. Title: Texts in transit in the medieval Mediterranean / edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays using historical and philological approaches to study the transit of texts in the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period. Examines the nature of texts themselves and how they travel, and reveals the details behind the transit of texts across cultures, languages, and epochs”— Provided by Publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2016012461 | isbn 9780271071091 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Transmission of texts—Mediterranean Region—History— To 1500. | Manuscripts, Medieval—Mediterranean Region. | Civilization, Medieval. Classification: lcc z106.5.m43 t49 2016 | ddc 091/.0937—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012461

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Acknowledgments vi

Introduction 1 Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison one The Role of Oral Transmission for Astronomy Among Romaniot Jews 10 Robert G. Morrison two Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh on Ezekiel’s “I Heard”: A Case Study in Byzantine Jews’ Reception of Spanish-Provençal Jewish Philosophical-Scientific Culture 29 Ofer Elior three Gradations of Light and Pairs of Opposites: Two Theories and Their Role in Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s Scroll of the Revealer 47 Y. Tzvi Langermann four Cryptography in the Late Medieval Middle East: From Mosul to Venice? 67 Leigh Chipman five Remembering, Knowing, Imagining: Approaches to the Topic of Memory in Medieval Islamic Culture 85 Leonardo Capezzone six Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Epistolae V commentatoriae de perditione Acconis, 1291 as Evidence of Multifaceted Textual Movement in the Eastern Mediterranean 101 Brian N. Becker seven The Wheat and the Barley: Feminine (in)Fertility in Eve and Adam Narratives in Islam 116 Zohar Hadromi-Allouche eight Shiite Underground Literature Between Iraq and Syria: The Book of Shadows and the History of the Early Ghulat 128 Mushegh Asatryan nine Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts: The Reception of Greek Uroscopic Texts in the Hebrew Book of Remedies Attributed to Asaf 162 Tamás Visi

ten The Transmission of Sephardic Scientific Works in Italy 198 Israel M. Sandman

eleven New Medicine and the Ḥikmet-i Ṭabīʿiyye Problematic in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul 222 B. Harun Küçük

List of Contributors 243 Index of Manuscripts cited 245 Index 247

Contents Acknowledgments

Our deepest gratitude is extended to the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, where Tzvi Langermann led a group on “Migrating Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin During the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods” under the aegis of Professor Rivka Feldhay’s project, Migrating Knowledge. Ofer Elior and Leigh Chipman participated in this group. The Minerva Center’s generous grant helped make the publication of this book possible. Our thanks as well go out to Bowdoin College for its support of Robert Morrison’s manuscript research and for its financial contribution to this volume’s publication.

Introduction

Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison

The present volume originated in conversations between us as we had both been working, individually, for several years on the exchange of knowledge in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean. Because these intellectual exchanges crossed borders, languages, and modern academic specialties, we realized that teamwork and international col- laborations might yield insights that would otherwise escape our own specialized fields of interest. We assembled the contents of the volume from a call for papers; the volume’s focus on the history of science and its intersection with religious thought is the result of our own research interests and networks. In our earlier research, we have done much to bring to light previously unknown texts that add depth and dimension to our understanding of the exchange of knowledge along the Mediterranean rim. Still, we know all too well that there remains a wealth of texts that are unstudied—or at best inadequately integrated into general appraisals. While there have been other studies of the intellectual history of the medieval Mediterranean, there is plenty of room for the contents of the studies contained in the present volume.1 We have chosen to describe the location of these intellectual exchanges as the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, but we recognize that the presentation of the Mediterranean as a unified region that facilitated commercial activity—this is Goitein’s portrayal—has been questioned.2 The present volume presumes neither that the Mediter- ranean (or Eastern Mediterranean) was a unified cultural space nor that intellectual exchanges always went smoothly. After all, the Med- iterranean has proven harder and harder to define for recent scholars,3 and political instabilities in parts of the Mediterranean have been found to shift merchant networks to other parts of the region.4 Still, “Mediterranean” is an apt descriptor, because the intellectual exchanges found in this volume—exchanges that include elements of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures—are characteristic of the Mediterranean region. Our choice of the term “Mediterranean” does not imply that other regions of the premodern world were less cosmopolitan, but it suggests that the (Eastern) Mediterranean appears to be cosmopolitan in a particular way.5 Our knowledge of the ideas developed, discussed, and debated in times past comes principally from writings that have reached us. These writings may be long books or short treatises, comprehensive volumes or highly focused monographs. They may still be accessible to us because generation after generation saw in them substance and value and continued to copy and, later, to print them; alternatively, they may by chance have survived in some obscure collection. At times only segments of a text have endured, often embedded in other, more appreciated texts, as quotations or allusions. The text may survive in its original language, or in a translation, or in a translation from a translation; it may be extant in both original and in translation, or in translation alone. At one or more stages in its journey, the text may have been transmitted, in part or in whole, orally. That is to say, a human became a text on legs, and a text with a mouth, whose reporting (and interpretation) was heard by a pair of ears and set down again in writing. Then again, we may have nothing but a translation embedded as a quotation, or as a paraphrase, in a different text. Some- times, only the memory of a text remains. Texts, the repositories and mouthpieces for the entire spectrum of human culture, have transited the centuries, the oceans and continents, and the variety of human languages, in all of these modalities. Texts, then, play a critical role in the preservation of human cultures, most especially their intellectual achievements. In addition, we can learn from them about communication between different cultures—their efforts to learn from, or to impose ideas on, one another. Texts are also the key instruments for communicating a shared heritage among scattered communities belonging to the same faith or ethnos; texts are the medium for preserving knowledge for future generations. The study of all of these themes in the production, preservation, and communication of knowledge begs for theoretical formulations, models that apply to a wide variety of historical instances. As in the natural and exact sciences, theory must be grounded in close observations of a sufficient number of cases. We are conscious of how, in the social 2 sciences and humanities, theory sometimes must be reined in by the evidence, and influential theoretical models can cause scholars to overlook important evidence. Texts in Hence, as historians, we prefer weak versions of theories. We approach the data with Transit theoretical considerations in mind, but do not allow existing theories to assert full hegemony over all of the data. Above all, we aim for insights about the nature of the texts themselves and of their transits. History is not an exact science; the available evidence must be read not only with philological rigor but also with imagination. Judiciously applying creative historical interpretation to new or forgotten texts, we hope to make a significant contribution to the history of texts, their contents, and their transits. The present collection aims principally to carry out philological and historical studies on the transit of texts in the Mediterranean basin, but theoretical considerations are not ignored. The various ways in which these transits occur do call to mind models that are now very much in vogue. For example, having an earlier text embedded as a quotation or paraphrase in a later text is a form of intertextuality. When texts transit, they are read with new subtexts and contexts. The transits of texts give rise to new texts linked to the prototext through metatexts. Perhaps some may detect paratexts in some of the case studies we present. However, it remains to be seen just how much new and useful knowledge is created or revealed by adding more Greek and Latin prefixes to the term “text.” No less important is the risk that these terms may elide very significant questions about textual transit. By delving deeply into the storehouse of unstudied texts, focusing mainly on content and context, this collection presents new evidence that broadens how we think about texts and their transits. Because this volume does not aim to define the Mediterranean rigidly, the region’s nuances and complexities provide an ideal locus for investigating this volume’s central concern, the understandings, movements, and exchanges of texts. The numerous case studies in the volume show that the texts themselves were more fluid and had complex sources. As bifurcations between Christian and Islamic societies as well as Western and non-Western science are otherwise tempting, the volume’s focus on the Mediterranean forces the reader to resist such facile classifications. In the Mediterranean, the paths of texts’ transits were neither the most direct nor unidi- rectional. Older conceptions of textual transmission implied a telos or directionality that is, really, the result of hindsight; the concept of transmission also suggested a fixed, discrete text. The contributions presented in this volume reject the naïve presumption that texts simply travel, easily detected, without transforming in transit. As Brian Becker has found, reports of texts’ transit themselves had metaphysical import. And even when written texts played the dominant role (Tamás Visi, Israel Sandman), separating out the strands of the prototexts in the transited text has required impressive work. Some contributions (Robert Morrison) note the distinct role of oral texts, and the related valorization of memory (Leonardo Capezzone), in oral exchange. Mushegh Asatryan reminds us of the importance of the piecemeal transit of early 3 texts, embedded as quotations or paraphrases in later ones. Others (Brian Becker, Ofer Elior) have found correspondence to be the only extant record of texts’ tran- Introduction sits. If communications were encrypted (Leigh Chipman), then the correspondence would transmit the contents of a text on encryption. Finally, Harun Küçük has found that the transit of Paracelsian medicine from Europe to the Ottoman Empire was heavily determined by human and contextual factors. A similar point is made by Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, in her study of Qurʾanic passages, and Tzvi Langermann, in his investigations into the theories of light and paired opposites. But there is far more to each contribution than the abovementioned way(s) in which each author disrupts easy assumptions about texts’ transits. Robert Morrison’s contribution describes and analyzes the understudied Hebrew version, produced during the reign of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (1432–1481), of an important Arabic astronomy text composed in the first half of the thirteenth century. The author of the Hebrew version, Moses ben Elijah Galeano, explained that the text was transmitted to him orally, predominantly in Turkish. The result was a text that corresponded neither to the Arabic original nor to one of the commentaries on the original. In fact, neither the author’s name nor the title (al-Mulakhkha ṣ fī al-ha yʾa by Jaghmīnī) is reproduced accurately in the Hebrew version. Moreover, Galeano included in his Hebrew book a list of planetary apogees that is not to be found at all in Jaghmīnī, and transited to Galeano from some other source. Citing an old Hebrew proverb, Galeano indicates that he held oral testimony in higher regard than written testimony. Thus, even in this case where excellent written evidence exists, the historical actors themselves looked beyond the written record to oral accounts, which, in turn, shaped the surviving written record. Another contribution on an exchange of texts for which the extant written record is excellent is Ofer Elior’s study of the correspondence of Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh, a figure associated with the island of Rhodes, with Rabbi Michael Balbo of Candia, then capital of Crete. Their correspondence concerns Maimonides’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s visions. In effect, Rakh reopens the question of whether the heavenly spheres emit sounds. Maimonides, relying ultimately on Aristotle, rejected that notion in his Guide for the Perplexed (2.8). While Rakh appreciated Maimonides’s Aristotelian interpretation, he ultimately rejected it, preferring instead to offer an explanation for how sounds could be produced in the heavens. From Rakh’s correspondence, we learn more about how Byzantine Jews received material from coreligionists in the Iberian Peninsula and Provence, which, as Elior observes, are the points of origin of the sources to which Rakh refers. Measured against the science arriving in the Byzantine zone from Iberian and Provençal Jews, Rakh’s account was not that sophisticated. Nonetheless, his correspondence is an important source for the intellectual history of Byzantine Jewry, more specifically the Jewish community on Rhodes during the fifteenth century. Here the original versions of the texts are known; it is their transit that is complicated by the intellectual milieu into which they were received. Elior has shown how important individuals are to the transit of texts, an insight confirmed in the studies of Harun Küçük, Tzvi Langermann, and 4 several others in this volume. Tzvi Langermann’s essay studies the presence and combination of two arcane Texts in theories in Scroll of the Revealer (Megillat ha-Megalleh ), an eschatological work by Transit Abraham Bar Ḥiyya (Barcelona and environs, eleventh century). One theory posits gradations of light, from near-divine metaphysical light down to the visible light sensed here on earth. The other views all of reality grouped into pairs of opposites. Both of these theories have their pedigrees in Greek philosophy, and both have known various instantiations and occasional combination in early medieval texts. Langermann finds much in common between Bar Ḥiyya’s theory of light and a statement in Philo of Alexandria, or some obscure but unmistakable allusions to theories of light in Maimonides. Similarly, Bar Ḥiyya’s theory of paired opposites bears striking resemblance to an early (and perhaps sectarian) Jewish text, Midrash Temurah, as well as a text by the earliest writer of the Ismailiyya, a Shia sect. Solid lines of transmission cannot be drawn, but this is not necessarily a fault of the historical record. Rather, the ways in which these theories took shape in Bar Ḥiyya’s book reflect the ways in which texts, or certain ideas contained within texts, transited in Late Antiquity and the early medieval period. Bar Ḥiyya, like many or most writers of his time, took the texts that transited his way, in whatever form they may have reached him (as a written book, a passage in a book, or simply an idea passed on orally) as belonging to the inventory of ideas, to be drawn upon and adapted as needed. A creative writer working before the basically Aristotelian outlook of Jewish philosophy had been fixed by Moses Maimonides, he produced his own combination of the two abovementioned theories.

The texts, even when extant, can be cryptic. Leigh Chipman traces migrations of cryptographic techniques through the Middle East into Europe. First, Chip- man examines how theories about cryptography found in twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Mamluk cryptography treatises in a Süleymaniye codex appeared in encryptions of poetry and prose. In a way, the encryption of poetry, though lacking in practical applications, was no surprise, as premodern cryptography required a great sensitivity to language. One cryptologist studied by Chipman discussed encipherment in languages besides Arabic, including Mongolian, Armenian, Latin, French, Turkish, and Hebrew. More generally, cryptography was a means by which texts could transit undetected, and Chipman speculates that cryptography served diplomatic purposes, particularly in multilingual Mosul. Chipman proposes a number of ways in which this knowledge could have spread west, where identical cryptographic techniques emerged later. These techniques would not have to travel via a text on cryptography, but only through an enciphered text, just as science and technology could be transmitted through instruments and diagrams (in addition to scientific texts). Memory, the subject of Leonardo Capezzone’s chapter, played an integral role in conceptions of what a text had been in the past. Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s text on memory from al-Adab al-ṣaghīr shows how the emergence of a culture of the 5 written text affected the valorization of memory. Intellectual histories produced within premodern Islamic societies depended on memories of what earlier civili- Introduction zations had contributed, and, as such, these histories could be vehicles for political vindication. As memory was a topic of medical investigation, passages from Rufus of Ephesus’s work on memory were quoted by Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī in Kitāb al-Ḥāwī; subsequently, a source for the activities of the mind was Nemesius of Emesa’s De natura hominis, and these ideas were developed within the circle of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. Post-Antique debates about memory effected the inclusion of memory within the activities of the soul. But some of these changes were also a result of choices of terminology as Late Antique texts transited into new languages. Thus the re-presentation of ancient texts on memory informed the Jabirian corpus’s view about how one came to know. It is not surprising, then, that memory became a virtue. In addition, Capezzone shows how remnants of texts’ transits can take centuries to emerge; a similar point is made by Mushegh Asatryan. Capezzone’s point about the mediating role of memory is relevant as well to Moses ben Elijah Galeano and his comment about the superiority of oral testimony, discussed by Morrison. Brian Becker’s study of textual transit in Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Epistolae investigates not only how these letters are an important source for cultural exchanges in the medieval Mediterranean but also what these letters tell us about the movement of books around the Mediterranean. Thirteenth-century Italy saw a flowering of interest in Arabic and Islamic culture; Riccoldo’s mission was shaped by Arabic and Islamic knowledge that had already traveled west. He was able to consult the Qurʾan in the original Arabic. Becker argues that the study of texts is a pilgrimage in itself. Thus, it was all the more tragic when Christian texts fell into non-Christian hands, something Riccoldo observed particularly amid the loot taken by Muslims to Nineveh after the fall of Acre. Getting the texts back was akin to ransoming slaves. The loss of the texts paralleled the loss of territory. The physical text, its integrity, and its possession took on religious significance.

Many themes and narratives in the Qurʾan and its satellite literature bear unmistakable resemblances to parallel themes in Jewish and Christian texts, and it has long been—and, after all is said, still remains—a basic working assumption of academic scholarship that texts, at the very least oral versions of them, transited from the heartlands of the older “Abrahamic” traditions to the Hijaz, where they then found their way into the Islamic tradition. However, some glaring differences between the traditions call for a different explanation. Zohar Hadromi-Allouche homes in on a few significant points, found in Shia literature in particular, where no convincing parallels are evident. These are (1) the identification of the “forbidden fruit” as wheat; (2) barley as a degenerate form of wheat, its baseness due to its origin in the very place of the “tree” from which the wheat was taken; and (3) a very gendered account of authority and transgression, with Eve’s sin consisting in disobeying Adam (rather than God) and trespassing in the male-dominated spheres of fertility and nurturing. These three themes are by and large absent from ancient Jewish and Christian 6 sources. It is most plausible that the themes found in the Islamic sources are polemical responses to Greek or Zoroastrian traditions, or both. In Greek myths associated Texts in with Demeter, wheat and nurturing are governed by female goddesses; the Islamic Transit traditions, which connect them to the Fall, seem thus to be a polemic repudiation of the Demeter myths. Demeter rituals were common enough into the sixth century to make this interaction a historical possibility. In the Dēnkard, barley is a divine gift—a blessing, not a punishment. However, the gender element is not found in the Zoroastrian sources. Still, the Islamic tradition may be responding in part to Zoro- astrianism as well. The wheat/barley motif appears (in different forms) in a Jewish text from the Tosafists of northern France as well as in a Welsh poem; both date approximately to the thirteenth century. This odd case may just possibly indicate a transit northward and westward of the theme that appears in Shia traditions. Older texts—or the pieces which, at times, are all that remains of them—transit within other, later texts, which have been fortunate enough to survive in their entirety. Such was the fate of The Book of Shadows (Kitāb al-A ẓilla), one of the earliest writings appertaining to the subgroup within the Shia known as the Ghulat (“extremists,” so called because of their “extreme” views on the divine nature of the imams). The Book of Shadows, along with the rest of the foundational corpus of the Ghulat, was written in Iraq sometime around the turn of the ninth century, but perhaps even earlier. The carriers of its textual remains were writings of the Nusayris, another Shia splinter group that settled (and remain to this day under the name ʿAlawi) in northern Syria. In the first part of his study, Mushegh Asatryan painstakingly identifies the fragments of this text embedded within other texts and establishes the relationship between The Book of Shadows and other early Ghulat texts. Asatryan then identifies a number of themes in The Book of Shadows that are useful for connecting these early texts with other traditions, within the Shia and beyond: the shadow, which is actually a luminous body and first created being; Muhammad as a near-divine being; and a dialogue between the deity and “intellect,” the first hypostasis. Taking another step backward, Asatryan observes a large-scale movement of texts from Iraq to Syria, as well as a nonpolemical relationship with Christianity. Some of these texts have resurfaced only recently, in nonacademic editions prepared mostly by Leba- nese scholars, some of whom belong to the Ismailis; others take pains to conceal their identity. Texts transit, fragment, are embedded in other texts, are swallowed up within closed communities; their vestiges resurface after a millennium, allowing modern scholars to piece them together—the texts themselves as well as the histories of their transmission, and their interactions with texts from other traditions, too. Tamás Visi studies the formation of a specialized literature by the transit of texts. The specialization is uroscopy, an important diagnostic tool in premodern medicine; the texts are early Greek and perhaps ancient Semitic ones as well. Portions of different texts that all deal with the same subject transit into new texts that are entirely devoted to the topic. These new texts in turn engender further research and theoretical formulations—for example, in the theory of colors. They then transit into other languages and cultures. 7 Visi’s very erudite study has much to say on the micro level as well. Select passages from the medical writings, especially from the Hippocratic corpus, are exam- Introduction ined closely. Significantly, some of the passages transmit variant versions that were rejected by Galen in his authoritative commentary to Hippocrates’s Aphorisms. Moreover, Visi offers strong evidence, the first of its kind, for the direct translation of scientific texts from Greek into Hebrew; the dating is uncertain but the movement certainly occurs before the ninth-century mass translation movement from Greek to Arabic. Syriac sources, so important yet so neglected, are also scrutinized. What happens after a text transits into a particular locale and gains an audience there? In a painstaking study of the Italian copies of a Hebrew calendrical text, Israel Sandman adduces weighty evidence for “community coordinated” production. Although there is no institution, such as a scriptorium, responsible for the manuscripts, close inspection of the extant manuscripts belonging to the Italian family, especially analytical and editorial glosses, reveals a conscientious effort at producing texts of the highest quality. Sandman’s study offers a bold corrective to accepted models of transmission, which grouped those responsible for writing manuscripts into “copyists,” that is, scholars interested in personal study of the text, and “scribes,” hired hands who had no interest in the content of the text. The former would have felt free to intervene in one way or another, thus producing copies that are markedly different from one another. The latter had no cause to interact deliberately with the text, but may have unwittingly introduced or perpetuated errors. Sandman introduces now a third category, “communally organized” copying: copying not done by scholars, but which nonetheless produced standardized texts of a very high quality. Much more painstaking work remains to be done in order to see how common or rare this model was and whether different genres (say, speculative religious texts, touched upon by Sandman in a brief section) tell different stories. The spread of Paracelsian medicine, or, as it was called in Ottoman realms, “the new medicine” or “chemical medicine,” has attracted much scholarly attention of late. However, there is much more to this story than the transit of some European books to Istanbul and points beyond and their translation and subsequent incor- poration into Turkish and Arabic literature. Harun Küçük serves up a panoramic account, dealing with the transit of people (Europeans who knew how to prepare the new chemical compounds, and who relocated to Istanbul), the transit of medicine within the curriculum (moving upward to the highest ranks, concomitant with the valorization of the new medicine), the falling in and out of favor at court of the new treatments, and the makeup and financial rewards of the medical profession. The processes are interrelated and nonlinear. Hence Küçük’s study, for all of the wealth of detail and new hypotheses it offers, remains an exploration in the problematics of this story, rather than the final word—if there is such a thing.

This is a collection of pathbreaking research. The authors feel obliged to reveal the full details behind the transit of texts from one language, geographical locale, cultural or religious group, or epoch to another. The studies do not presuppose knowledge 8 of any language other than English, and they provide translations of texts in other languages (yet another transit, from the sphere of working knowledge to that of his- Texts in torical inspection and reflection). But the close analysis of the texts, without which Transit no firm grasp on the transits is possible, takes the reader at times into philology as well.6 This necessary complexity makes this collection no easy read, but it rewards the reader with findings about the depths at which the transit of texts could take place. Explanations and, where appropriate, theoretical justification for a certain explanation are provided, but they are all rooted in the texts under study. Conclu- sions of wider import are offered with all the caution necessary. Notes

1. See, e.g., Words, Texts, and Concepts Cruising the Mediterranean Sea, ed. R. Arnzen and J. Thiel- mann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Thomas Burman,Reading the Qurʿan in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Exchange and Transmission Across Cultural Boundaries: Philosophy, Mysticism, and Science in the Mediterranean World, ed. Haggai Ben-Shammai, Shaul Shaked, and Sarah Stroumsa (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sci- ences and Humanities, 2013). 2. Jessica L. Goldberg, “On Reading Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society: A View from Economic History,” Mediterranean Historical Review 24, no. 2 (2011): 171–86, at 176. 3. See Nicholas Purcell, “The Boundless Sea of Unlikeness? On Defining the Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 18, no. 2 (2003): 9–29. 4. Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and the Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 324. 5. Cf. David Nirenberg, “Double Game,” review of Maimonides in His World by Sarah Stroumsa, London Review of Books, September 23, 2010, 31–32. 6. We have simplified the transcriptions of Hebrew words (no long or semi-vowels); full transcriptions are given for Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac. However, a fuller transcription of non- indexed Hebrew words has been given in the contribution by Israel Sandman, as this is needed for fine points in his analysis.

Introduction One

The Role of Oral Transmission for Astronomy Among Romaniot Jews

Robert G. Morrison

Both the National Library of Israel (8°3167, fols. 1–36)1 in Jerusalem and the Bibliothèque nationale (BnF Hébreu 1061, fols. 106a–137b) in Paris contain manuscripts of a curious text entitled Sefer Mezuqqaq (The purified book). The author’s name is given as Moses ben Elijah the Greek (ha-yewwani ), and the author of the Arabic original was reported to be ʿUmar ibn Maḥmūd mi-Ṣagmān. This text was the subject of a brief but informative article by Georges Vajda in 1959, but Sefer Mezuqqaq deserves additional attention not just for its contents but also for its mode of passage.2 Moses ben Elijah explains that he has produced a Hebrew copy (zeh ha-sefer heʿtaqti oto) of an originally Arabic text on astronomy (tekunah = Ar. hayʾa). In this chapter, I aim to point out some notable features of Sefer Mezuqqaq’s contents, origins, and technical terminology and to use these observations to formulate some tentative conclusions about the oral character of the exchange and its ramifications. Recognizing that the Arabic original passed into Hebrew orally lends insight into the intellectual life of the court of the Ottoman sultan and the Jewish community in Istanbul at the time of Sefer Mezuqqaq’s production. Thus, the text’s mode of transit is as significant as its contents.

Introduction

Moses ben Elijah reported that he produced Sefer Mezuqqaq with the assistance of a certain Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ, a figure who Vajda suggested was associated with the court of Mehmed the Conqueror (d. 1481). Aḥmeṭ was the judge of Verria who translated Gennadios Scholarios’s (d. ca. 1473) attack on Western Christianity from Greek into Turk- ish.3 According to Adıvar, Aḥmeṭ was the father of the better-known Maḥmūd Çelebi.4 Before the Ottomans recognized a chief rabbi, sometime between 1453 and 1455, Gennadios Scholarios was probably the administrative intermediary between the sultan and the Jewish community in Istanbul.5 Details about Moses ben Elijah’s motivation for producing Sefer Mezuqqaq emerge from the text’s introductory paragraphs:

אמר משה היווני בן כֹרֹ אליא נֹעֹ

זה הספר העתקתי אותו מפי חכם ישמעאל ששמו ]מולאנא[6 אחמט. אחרי הודיע השם אותי את כל זאת ]הואלתי[7 להעתיק אותו ]מפני[8 גודל חשיבותו ]ומפי סופרים ולא מפי ספרים[.9 ואף כי באמת שמעתי ]שזה הספר מועתק בלשונינו מפי שקדמני אכן הצורך הביאני לעשות כן מפני שההעתק לא היה נמצא אצלנו. ולו הנחתי אותו מלהעתיקו הייתי מפסידו כי השכחה מצוייה וכוונתי לתועלתי ובתועלת מי שיחפץ בתועלתו. ואפשר גם כן כי בחלוף ההעתקות יודעו דברים מה שלא יובט מהעתק אחד וזה ממה שיש בו תועלת למתלמדים למלך. הוכן העמיק הרחיב. ואם היות שיהיה ההעתק ההוא יותר מבואר ויותר רחב לא הפסדנו דבר ונחשוב שלא עשינו כלום[.10 ומהשם אשאל העזר.

אמר עומר בן מחמוד מצגמאן.

אחרי השבח והתהלה לאל יתֹ וההודאה לנביאיו עֹהֹ אשר נתן להם מחכמתו. הואלתי לעשות קצור מחכמת התכונה אודיע בו כללים רבים עד שלא יהיה חסר מאומה מן החכמה הזאת. וקראתי שם הספר הזה מזוקק לפי שהוא מזוקק ]שבעתים[. 11 וחלקתיו אל הקדמה ואל שני חלקים. ההקדמה ידבר בכללות הגשם המוחלט והשני חלקים חלקתי החלק האחד שהוא מדבר בגבוהים אל חמשה שערים.

Moses ben Elijah the Greek said: This book I translated from the mouth of a Muslim scholar named Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ. After God caused me to know all this, I undertook to translate it, due to its great importance, from the mouths of scholars, but not from the mouth of books.12 Even though I heard, in truth, that this book had been translated into our language before by someone who preceded me, the need has come to me to do it because that translation is not to be found with us. Had I desisted from translating it, I would have caused 11 it to be lost, since forgetfulness is commonplace. I intended [it] for my own benefit and for whomever desired. It is possible, as well, that with the differ- Oral ences between the translations there might be made known things that are Transmission not observed in one translation, these being from among the things that it Among would behoove students to possess; they are prepared deeply and broadly. Romaniot Jews If that [earlier] translation be clearer and more encompassing, we still have not lost a thing. So let it be [lit. let us think that] as if we have done nothing at all. From God we ask for help. ʿUmar ben Maḥmūd mi-Ṣagmān said, after praise and adoration to God and thanks to his prophet, upon him be peace,13 who has given them of his wisdom. And I have agreed to make an abridgment [qiṣṣur] of astronomy, in which I make known many basic rules so that it will not lack anything from this science. I have called the name of this book Mezuqqaq, since it is purified many times over. I have divided it into an introduction and two sections. The introduction speaks about the generalities of complete bodies. And of the two parts, I have divided the part that talks about the upper world14 into five chapters.

Moses ben Elijah’s introduction notes the complex and diffuse history ofSe per Mezuqqaq, and he indicates that no similar text was available at the time. Another translation of toʿelet la-mitlammedim limlok (behoove students to possess) is “of use to those students studying at the sultan’s court.” That there were Jews present at the sultan’s court is well known, but the implication of Moses ben Elijah’s comment, that these Jews knew Turkish and Arabic, affirms that they participated in the court’s multilingual cultural milieu.15 There is direct evidence withinSefer Mezuqqaq that places the composition of the text within the reign of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. This evidence comes from chapter 5 of the first section (23b) and is clearly an insertion by Moses ben Elijah:

ואולם בערך אפדת המזלות הוא בתאריך אסכנדאר שהוא היום אלף ותֹשֹעֹ שנה. בשנה ההיא ]היה[16 הגובה של שמש במזל תאומים יֹחֹ מעלות ושבר אֹ שניים נֹהֹ. ושל שבתי בקשת יֹ מעלֹו כֹטֹשברים כֹאֹשניים. ושל צדק בבתולה כֹטֹמעלות יֹֹו שברים נֹהֹ שניים. ושל מאדים באריה יֹֹומעלות ֹו שברים כֹהֹשניים. ושל נֹגה בתאומים יֹטֹמעלות יֹֹו שברים כֹבֹ שניים. ושל כוכב במאזניים בֹ מעלות נֹאֹ שברים כֹבֹ שניים. וכל גובה מהגֹבהים המהלך של כל אחד מהם כפי משך המזלות אם תוסיף נֹהֹ שניים בכל שנה על מקומו תמצא מהלכו עד זה היום ועד העולם. ובאותו התאריך היה הגוזהר של שבתי בסרטן יֹטֹ מעלות ][17 כֹטֹ שברים יֹאֹ שניים ושל צדק גם כן ]היה[18 הגוזהר שלו בסרטן יֹטֹ מעלות יֹֹו שברים נֹהֹ שניים. ושל מאדים היה בשור יֹֹו מעלות ֹו שברים כֹבֹ שניים. ושל נֹגה היה בדגים יֹטֹמעלות יֹֹו שברים כֹבֹ שניים. ושל כוכב היה בגדי בֹ מעלות מֹאֹ שברים כֹבֹ שניים. ועתה תחשוב מהתאריך ההוא ועד זה היום כמה הלך גלגל הכוכבים הקיימים מאז ועד עתה ותוסיף אותו כי חשבונו הוא בכל שנה )א24( נֹהֹ שניים. ותמצא היום הראש והזנב של כל אחד מהכוכבים הקיימים היכן הוא כי מהלך גלגל הכוכבים הקיימים שוה למהלך הראשים כאשר אמרנו למעלה.

12 Indeed, with respect to the ecliptic, it is on today’s date, the year of Alexan- der, which is year 1770. In that year, the apogee of the Sun was in 18°; 1' 55" of Texts in Gemini. Saturn’s was in 10°; 29' 21" of Sagittarius. Jupiter’s was in 29°; 16' 55" Transit of Virgo. Mars’s was in 16°; 6' 25" of Leo. Venus’s was at 19°; 16' 22" of Gemini. Mercury was at 2°; 51' 22" of Libra. For each apogee, its position [mahlak], in the direction of the signs, is that you add 5519 seconds each year to its position, you will find its position on that day and forever. On the same date, the nodes of Saturn were in 19°; 29' 11" of Cancer, and Jupiter’s nodes, as well, were in 19°; 16' 55" of Cancer. Mars’s were in 16°; 6' 22" of Taurus. Venus’s were in 19°; 16' 22" of Pisces. Mercury’s were in 2°; 41' 22" of Capricorn. Now you may calculate, from that day until this day, how much the orb of the fixed stars has moved from then until now, and you add it because it is calculated that each year (24a) [it moves] 55 seconds, so that today you find the head and the tail of each of the fixed stars to be thus, for the speed of the orb of the fixed stars is equal to the speed of the heads as we said above.

The importance of this passage comes from Moses ben Elijah’s mention of the date on which he composed this portion of the text, 1770 of the epoch of Alexander the Great (-311). That date converts to about 1459 c.e., and, taken together with the mention of Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ and the presence of Ottoman terminology, strongly supports placing the composition of Sefer Mezuqqaq during the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. The parameter for precession, 55 seconds per year, is a rounded value for the figure given in Ḥabash al-Ḥāsib’s zīj.20 Just before the translated passage (on 23b) from Sefer Mezuqqaq, Moses ben Elijah explains that Saturn’s apogee was 50 degrees beyond the midpoint between the two nodes. Since the parameters given for Saturn in the text do not meet that criterion, it is likely that the parameters were corrupted. Additional research will be necessary to find the source of these parameters.21

Sefer Mezuqqaq and Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ

The central conclusion of Vajda’s article was thatSefer Mezuqqaq was a Hebrew version of Maḥmūd b. Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Jaghmīnī’s (fl. 1206)22 al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa (Epitome of plain hayʾa).23 Although Vajda’s article and its results have escaped the notice of more recent scholarship,24 Vajda’s conclusion was correct, and the parallels go well beyond those he found. They begin withSefer Mezuqqaq’s organization. One is struck by how Sefer Mezuqqaq includes five chapters on the heavens and three chapters on the earth, an arrangement that mirrors that of Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ.25 Moreover, of the five chapters on the heavens in both texts, the first is about the configuration of orbs for each planet, the second is about the motions of the particular orbs, the third is about the circles imagined on the surface of the orbs, the fourth is about the arcs, and the fifth is about the anomalies. Within the second section on the cosmography of the earth in both texts, the first chapter is about the seven climes, the second chapter is about the equator and its properties, 13 and the third is about special properties of the particular inclinations. There are, too, overwhelming parallels in the specifics, all of which support Vajda’s 1959 conclusion Oral that Sefer Mezuqqaq represented a Hebrew version of Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ. Transmission Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ was perhaps the most widely studied text in the history Among of Islamic astronomy—and certainly in the Ottoman madrasas of Moses ben Elijah’s Romaniot Jews time.26 It presented a summary of the Almagest that resembled Kharaqī’s Tabṣira, though unlike the Tabṣira and Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) later Tadhkira, there was no section on the sizes and distances of the planets in the Mulakhkhaṣ. Like the Tadhkira, the Mulakhkhaṣ spawned numerous commentaries and supercommentaries; the most voluminous of the latter was Birjandī’s (on Qāḍī Zādah’s Sharḥ al-Mulakhkhaṣ). An important distinction between the commentaries on the Mulakhkhaṣ and those on the Tadhkira was that the commentaries and supercommentaries on the Mulakh- khaṣ did not analyze the non-Ptolemaic models developed by the astronomers associated with the Marāgha observatory who worked after Jaghmīnī wrote. In contrast, innovative original models appeared in commentaries on the later Tadhkira.27 More advanced texts, such as Shīrāzī’s (d. 1311) Nihāyat al-idrāk and al-Tuḥfa al-shāhiyya , adopted the format of the Tadhkira, though they were not organized as commentaries.28 Still, the Mulakhkhaṣ was part of this hayʾa tradition—and some commentaries and supercommentaries on the Mulakhkhaṣ, though not the Mulakhkhaṣ itself, pointed out the problems with Ptolemaic astronomy that led to the production of new models. At the beginning of Sefer Mezuqqaq, Moses ben Elijah comments that similar hayʾa texts were not available to his community at the time.29 The works of Elijah Miz- raḥi (d. 1526) and Mordekhai Khomṭiano (d. 1459) on the Almagest, which include some interesting reflections on the physical nature of the heavens, show that some Jews of Istanbul did study astronomy at a fairly high level.30 But Mizraḥi’s Almagest commentary ended after book 5 on the second lunar model, so there may have been little available about planetary theory, as well as a paucity of introductory summaries of astronomy suitable for teaching.31 Because manuscripts of the Mulakhkhaṣ pro- liferated (and because there were many commentaries on it), this chapter presumes that a commentary on the Mulakhkhaṣ such as Qāḍī Zādah’s (d. after 1440) would have been the most likely means by which Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ and Moses ben Elijah encountered the Mulakhkhaṣ. As Vajda pointed out,32 one of the more lengthy word-for- word parallels between Sefer Mezuqqaq and the Mulakhkhaṣ is the definition of theqibla (samt-i qīblā in the text’s transcription). Not only is this passage evidence for the connection between Sefer Mezuqqaq and the Mulakhkhaṣ, but it also reflects the history of the qibla’s being a topic of discussion between Jews and Muslims. Moses ben Elijah writes (19b),

ומהקשתות קשת נקרא סמת קיבלא וקיבלא קורים [!] הישמעאלים את בית אברהם אבינו יראה לי שהוא בית אל. סמת קיבלא הוא קשת מעגלת האופק בין עגלת חצי היום במקום חתוך האופק ובין עגלה שתעבר נכח ראשנו והעוברת נכח ראשי היושבים בקיבלא ותחתך האופק לשנים. הנה הקשת אשר בין חתוך זאת העגלה וחתוך עגלת חצי היום יקרא סמת קיבלא. 14

Texts in And from among the arcs is that called samt-i qīblā and the qibla is what the Transit Muslims call the house of our father Abraham; in my opinion it is the house of God [Bet El]. Theqibla direction is an arc from the circle of the horizon between the meridian arc, where it intersects the horizon, and between a circle that passes through the local zenith and the zenith of the inhabitants of the qibla, bisecting the horizon. Indeed, the arc that is between the intersection of this circle and the intersection of the meridian [with the horizon] is called samt-i qīblā. The corresponding portion of theMulakhkha ṣ quoted in Qāḍī Zādah’s Sharḥ reads, “samt al-qibla li-ʾl-balda qaws min al-ufq mā bayn dāʾirat niṣf nahār al-balda wa-ʾl-d āʾira al-mārra bi-samt ruʾūs ahlih wa-samt ruʾūs ahl Makka.”33 With the exception of not translating “ahl Makka” as “inhabitants of the qibla” (Heb. ha-yosh bim ba- qīblā), the language is the same.34 Moses ben Elijah’s equation of the qibla (the Kaʿba for Muslims) with the house of God (Bet El) is fascinating and reflects his position as a transmitter, even if he was just reporting Islamic belief. It may also be that Moses ben Elijah had in mind the biblical toponym from Genesis 28:19. Shimon Shtober has written on Jewish-Islamic debates over the qibla, which was, for a time, identified with Bet El.35 Other evidence that Vajda cited for the relationship between Sefer Mezuqqaq and the Mulakhkhaṣ included the similarity between Jaghmīnī’s name and the Hebrew transcription of the name of the author of the Arabic original, specifically that Ṣagmān was a Hebrew rendering of Jaghmīn or Čagmīn,36 and what he held were broad similarities between the incipits of Sefer Mezuqqaq and the Mulakhkhaṣ, particularly how the incipit of Sefer Mezuqqaq bore an Islamic influence (e.g., aḥarei ha-she baḥ).

Technical Terms

Glosses on the Mulakhkhaṣ were translated into Persian and Turkish,37 and the transcriptions of the technical terms suggest that they were conveyed to Moses ben Elijah in Turkish, though Moses ben Elijah constantly refers to the language of the original as lashon Yishmaʿʾel (the language of Ishmael).38 These Turkish versions of Arabic words are excellent evidence for the orality of the transmission (and the complexity of the textual history of the Mulakhkhaṣ), as the transcriptions indicate both that Moses ben Elijah’s oral informant pronounced them in Turkish and that Moses ben Elijah barely knew Arabic, if at all. For example, the tāʾ and dal at the end of Arabic words are transformed into a ṭet (e.g., Aḥmeṭ, athīriyyāṭ), reflecting Turkish pronunciation. Likewise, the kāf at the end of falak is transformed into a qāf. Vajda noticed a yod at the end of the first word in many of the technical terms, reflecting the Ottoman/Persiani ẓāfet.39 Sometimes the Arabic wāw is transcribed with a Hebrew b, reflecting how thewāw was pronounced as a v, as in Turkish. There are a few places where Moses ben Elijah’s transcription of even the Turkish 15 version of a term is imprecise (e.g., the transcription of al-dhirwa al-ma rʾiyya), which indicates that Moses ben Elijah was not completely familiar with Turkish and/or Oral that he wrote down the words as he heard them. In at least one case, Moses ben Transmission Elijah provides an equivalent in Greek, suggesting that that language remained a Among medium of scientific communication for the Jewish community and, perhaps, that Romaniot Jews Greek was also a medium of communication between Moses ben Elijah and Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ.40 While some Jews must have become fluent (or proficient) in Turkish in order to engage with the Muslim community, Romaniot Jews of Moses ben Elijah’s era did not speak Turkish among themselves, and there is evidence of prominent Sephardic Jews (e.g., Almosnino) never learning Turkish.41 A detailed list of some of the technical terms follows. Having restricted the list to those terms with a nonstandard orthography, I have provided both the literal transcription and a transcription corrected for standard Arabic orthography.42

2א: אתירייט athīriyyāt (lit. athīriyyaṭ) = the celestial bodies ענצרייט ʿunṣuriyyāt (lit. ʿunṣuriyyaṭ) = elemental bodies 2ב: 43פלקי אטלש -falak-i aṭlas (Ar. al-falak al-a ṭlas) = the upper ובלשון יון אנשטרוש (most orb (without stars ]אורנוש[44 3א: מומתל mumaththal (lit. mūmaththal) = the parecliptic 3ב: ]מחדד[45 האצטוונא, -meḥadded ha-i ṣṭiwana, meḥuddad (lit. meḥūd מחודד האצטוונא dad) ha-i ṣṭiwana = the thinnest point of a complementary body 5א: מודיר mudīr (lit. mūdīr) = dirigent 8א: מומתאלט mumaththalāt (lit. mūmaththālaṭ) = parecliptics 8ב:חמיללה ḥāmila (lit. ḥamīlla) = deferent 16ב: ]נטק[niṭāq (lit. neiṭaq)46 = sector 47 19א: משריק איעתידל (mashriq-i iʿtidāl (lit. mashrīq-i īʿtīdal שעות המזרח calque for siʿat al-mashriq (combined with a transcription error)48 = ortive amplitude 19ב: סמת קיבלא samt al-qibla (lit. samt-i qībla) = qibla direction 21א: מועדיל אלמשיר muʿaddil al-masīr (lit. mūʿadīl al-masīr ) = equant 21ב: דידברי אושטא al-dhirwa al-wus ṭā (from a mistranscription of the Turkish zirve-i vusṭā)49 = mean apogee 22א: דידבירי מראיא al-dhirwa al-ma rʾiyya (from a mistranscription of the Turkish zirve-i marʾiyya) = visible apogee 22ב: ]קוטרי מר בלבועדין -al-qu ṭr al-mārr bi-ʾl-b uʿdayn al-awsa ṭayn (lit. qūṭr אבשיטין[i marr bi-ʾl-b ūʿdayn absīṭayn) = the diameter 50 passing through the mean distances ]ערדי אלטיבא[ʿarḍ al-iltiwā 51 (lit. ʿard-i ilṭeibā) = the twist 52 מידרי ביבכיאעal-madār bi-ʾl-wāq iʿ53 (lit. meidar-i bī-b akiyāʿ) = 54 real path 27ב: קובט אלערד qūbaṭ al-ʿarḍ (for quṭb al-arḍ) = pole of the earth 33א: מיקייס miqyās (lit. mīqiyyās) = measure 16 אזזא ajzāʾ (lit. azzā) = degrees Texts in Transit On 3b, Moses ben Elijah introduces the term meḥuddad/meḥadded ha-i ṣṭiwana, initially in the midst of his description of the orbs of the sun. This term does not appear in the corresponding section of Qāḍī Zādah’s Sharḥ.55 This point is the thinnest point of a complementary circle (ʿiggulat ha-matmim) or body. The fact that this term is not found in the manuscripts of Qāḍī Zādah’s Sharḥ available to me (Michigan 1611 and Tunis 7145) illustrates the extent to which the transmission was oral and depended on what Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ deemed worthy of inclusion. Another distinctive technical term that also points to the pronounced role of oral exchange in the commentary tradition on the Mulakhkhaṣ is al-madār bi-ʾl-wāq iʿ. Again, this is not a term that appears in the Mulakhkhaṣ or frequently in Arabic literature on ʿilm al-ha yʾa, the common terms being al-taqwīm or al-madār al-ma rʾī. Thus it may have entered Sefer Mezuqqaq either as a result of Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ’s trying to explain something to Moses ben Elijah, an explanation perhaps informed by a Turkish translation of the Mulakhkhaṣ. The latter possibility would, in itself, tell us much about the diffusion of theMulakhkha ṣ.

The Identity of the Author

Moses ben Elijah’s family name is not mentioned in either manuscript of Sefer Mezuqqaq, but there is reason to identify Moses ben Elijah the Greek (ha-yewwani) with Moses ben Elijah Galeano. Moses ben Elijah Galeano produced a Hebrew translation, entitled Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim (The judgments of the aspects) from an Ara- bic original, and one copy of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim is in the same Jerusalem codex as Sefer Mezuqqaq.56 Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim focuses on the implications of conjunctions of the planets for the terrestrial realm, including for the fate of non-Jews. The text considers conjunctions of pairs of the planets at the critical aspects (but not in the various zodiacal signs or houses). Historical astrology also does not arise. Like Sefer Mezuqqaq, the Hebrew translation of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim was prepared with the assistance of a Muslim scholar, who remains unnamed.57 A passage from the והעתקתיו אני הנזֹ משה מספר :Bodleian manuscript of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim reads אחד כתֹו בלשון ישמעאל. ותוגר אחד חכם בזאת החכמה מהם היה מלמד אותי וקורא בלשונם I, the aforementioned Moses, copied it from one) ואני הייתי מעתיק מפיו בלשון קדש book written in the tongue of the Muslims. A Turkish scholar of this science was teaching me and read it in their language, while I was copying from his mouth into the holy tongue). Moses ben Elijah Galeano adds that he could not find an equivalent book among the books of his predecessors. He knows that Abraham Ibn Ezra had written about conjunctional astrology, but remarks that Ibn Ezra’s work was too difficult.58 This comment recalls the one at the beginning ofSefer Mezuqqaq that a similar work on astronomy was not to be found. We do know that Abraham Ibn Ezra’s work had been the subject of serious study by Jewish scholars in Istanbul 17 such as Khomṭiano, who commented on Ibn Ezra’s Yesod Mora, so Moses ben Eli- jah Galeano’s interest had a context. Evidence from Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim, such as Oral Moses ben Elijah Galeano’s transcriptions of terms like muqārina (lit. mūqārīna) and Transmission muqābil (lit. mūqābīl), suggests, again, a lack of familiarity with Arabic. It is the simi- Among larity of the introductions of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim and Sefer Mezuqqaq, describing Romaniot Jews their oral transit, that has led Vajda and Steinschneider to posit the identity of Moses ben Elijah the Greek of Sefer Mezuqqaq with Moses ben Elijah Galeano of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim.59 If Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim and Sefer Mezuqqaq are indeed the work of the same scholar, then Sefer Mezuqqaq’s concern with computing planetary positions would also suit the applications found in Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim. Moses ben Elijah Galeano also produced a book on physiognomy, Toledot Adam, which became his best-known work and was printed in Istanbul in 1515. There is a 1546 edition from Cremona.60 Therein he cites,inter alia, the tenth-century physician ʿAlī ibn ʿAbbās, whose work on medicine does not survive in Hebrew translation, though such a translation may have existed at one point.61 Another likely source for Toledot Adam was the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum.62 A discrete text, Ḥokmat ha-yad , has also been attributed to Moses ben Elijah Galeano, but Bodleian Neubauer 1603 presents Ḥokmat ha-yad within Toledot Adam.63

Intersections of Mathematical and Physical Astronomy

There is a long passage inSefer Mezuqqaq containing some interesting intersections of mathematical and physical approaches to astronomy. This chapter breaks the passage down into three sections. The first section describes lines as the movers of orbs. The second section describes the centers of orbs’ mean motion as points of the lines’ alignments, observing similarities between the equant and alignment points. The third section notes that the number of centers in the Mercury model has changed.

20a ואחר שבארנו החלוף ]הנקרה[64 לשמש נאמר כי שאר הכוכבים זולתי השמש יש להם חלוף באֹרך וברחב וזה מפני הקו הסובב את גלגל ההקפה כי כאשר יהיה הכוכב בקדקד גלגל ההקפה או בשפלותו השני קוים היוצאים )20ב( ממרכז העולם נעשים אחד ואין שם חלוף בין הוסט לתקוים כאשר בארנו בנטק. ואולם כאשר יצא הכוכב ]מגבהותו[65 או משפלותו השני קוים היוצאים ממרכז העולם אינם נעשים אחד אבל יתחייב שיחתך זה את זה. ויתחייב מפני זה שיעשה תקון בין וסט לתקוים והוא החלוף שלו. והיותר גדול שימצא בחלוף הוא שיהיה חצי קוטר גלגל ההקפה של ][66 כוכב וכוכב מגלגלי ההקפה ובתנאי שגלגל ההקפה לא יהיה לא בגבהותו ולא בשפלותו לפי שאז יראה גדול וקטן אבל שיהיה במרחקו השוה. והחלוף של שבתי היותר גדול ֹו מעלות ולֹ שברים. ושל צדק יֹאֹ ]לֹ[ 67ושל מאדים ֹלטֹלֹ. ושל נגה מֹגֹהֹ. ושל כוכב כֹבֹלֹ. ושל ירח ֹו כֹ. הנה ]זה[68 יקרא החלוף הראשון והוא התקון הראשון שבתקוים. ואולם החלוף השני הוא כשיהיה גלגל ההקפה בגבהותו והוא נראה מאד קטן או בשפלותו והוא נראה יותר גדול ]וגם[69 לשני עשו תקון והוא החלוף השני. והנה אז אינו שוה החצי קטר של גלגל כי בגבהותו קטן ובשפלותו גדול. והנה היותר גדול שבחלוף אשר ]יקרה[70 לו כפי מקומו הוא כחצי קטר גלגל ההקפה כפי מקומו. וזה יקרא לו החלוף השני. 18

Texts in After we have explained the anomaly that occurs for the sun, we say that the Transit rest of the planets, besides the sun, have an anomaly in longitude and latitude, and this is due to the line that rotates the epicyclic orb, because when the planet is at the apex of the orb of the epicycle or at its perigee, the two lines extending (20b) from the center of the world become one, and there is no difference between the mean and true positions as we showed with regard to the sectors.71 When the planet leaves its apex or perigee, the two lines extending from the center of the world are not one; rather they necessarily intersect. On account of that it is necessary that an equation be made between the mean and true positions and that is its anomaly. The largest value found for this anomaly is the radius of the orb of each epicyclic orb for each planet on the condition that the epicyclic orb is neither at its apex nor at its perigee, since at that time it is observed to be either larger or smaller; rather [it is when it is] at its mean distance. Saturn’s largest anomaly is 6; 30°, and Jupiter’s is 11; 30°. Mars’ is 39; 30°. Venus’ is 43; 5° and Mercury’s is 22; 30°. The Moon’s is 6; 20°. This is called the first anomaly; it is the first equationtiqqun [ ] for the true position [taqwīm]. The second anomaly is when the epicyclic orb is at its apex, and there it appears very small or at its perigee it appears larger, and for the second they made an equation, the second anomaly. At that time it is not equal to the radius of an [epicyclic] orb because at its apex it is small and at its perigee it is large. The largest that this anomaly can be at any position is like the radius of the epicycle for that position. And this is called the second anomaly.

The first notable point is that Moses ben Elijah’s description of the models blends physical and geometric descriptions, beyond using circles as placeholders for orbs, such as when he writes, “this is due to the line that rotates the epicyclic orb.”72 There are a couple of other cases of astronomers in Istanbul combining physical and geometric approaches to astronomy. ʿAlī Qushjī’s (d. 1474) al-Risāla al-Fat ḥiyya, a text Qushjī presented to Sultan Mehmed in 1473, recognized the need to presume the orbs’ uniform motions as a foundation for calculation.73 Subsequently, Elijah Miz- raḥi, in his commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest, described one of the problems with the Ptolemaic lunar model in terms of variations in the length of the line that rotated the epicycle.74 This passage fromSefer Mezuqqaq also cites parameters, which are closer to those of Farghānī’s Jawāmiʿ than to the parameters found in the Mulakhkhaṣ, for the maximum of the first anomaly.75 Moses ben Elijah describes the second anomaly as an additional correction (i.e., equation) of the planet’s position in longitude related to the planet’s size.76 The next section takes up the third anomaly:

ויש חלוף שלישי והוא כשיהיה גלגל ההקפה בגבהותו או בשפלותו אז קטרי גלגל 19 ההקפה הם אחד עם הקו העובר ]במרכזים[77 לפי שהקו ההוא חותך את גלגל ההקפה באמצע. והקו ההוא נעשה להם קטר אבל כשאינם בגבהות או בשפלות אז לא יהיה אחד Oral Transmission עם הקו )21א( העובר במרכזים. אבל הוא נעשה נכחי עם קו של נקדה אחת שהנקדה Among ההיא נקראת בצורת גלגל הירח הנקדה הנכחית. ואולם בחמשת הכוכבים הנבוכים Romaniot Jews עוד נעשה ]נכחית[78 עם קו של נקדה אחת שהנקדה ההיא נקראת נקדת מרכז משוה התנועה ובלשון ישמעאל מועדיל אלמשיר. והנקדה הנכחית בצורת גלגל הירח הנה מקומה בין מרכז העולם ובין מרכז הסובל ]שיהיה מרכז הסובל[79 לצד הגובה למעלה ממרכז העולם. והנקדה הנכחית לצד הש�פ לות למטה ממרכז העולם ]ברוחק[80 מרכז הסובל ממרכז העולם. והעגולה המתחדשת בפנים מאלו השני מרכזים והנקדה הנכחית תקרא סובל מרכז הסובל וכאשר יתנועע גלגל הנוטה הוא מניע את הגלגל הסובל עמו. וכאשר יתנועע גם גלגל הסובל הוא מניע את ]מרכז[81 גלגל הסובל סביב מרכז העולם.

There is a third anomaly and it is when the epicyclic orb is at its apex or perigee; at that time the diameters of the epicyclic orbs will be one with the line passing through the centers because that line cuts the epicyclic orb in the middle. That line becomes a diameter for them, but when they are not at the apogee or perigee they will not be one with the line (21a) passing through the centers. Rather it will become aligned with a single point on a line, that point which is called, in the configuration of the orb of the moon, the alignment point. With the five planets, however, it is aligned with a single point on a line, this point being called the equant point, and in the language of the Muslims: mūʿadīl al-masīr [i.e., muʿaddil al-masīr ]. The position of the alignment point in the configuration of the orb of the moon is between the center of the world and between the center of the defer- ent82 in the direction of the apogee, above the center of the world. The alignment point [when it] is toward the perigee is beneath the center of the world on the distance of the center of the deferent from the center of the world. The circle created internally from these two centers and the alignment point is called the deferent for the center of the deferent and when the inclined orb moves it moves the orb of the deferent with it. And when the orb of the deferent moves as well, it moves the center of the orb of the deferent about the center of the world.

This passage explains the relationship between the alignment point in the lunar model, namely, that it is the reference point for measuring the epicycle’s mean motion, and the equant point in the planetary models, as well as the reference point for measuring the epicycle’s mean motion. Sefer Mezuqqaq notes, too, that the alignment point moves, but not specifically that the motion of the alignment point is a problem to be solved. The passage hews closely to Jaghmīnī’sMulakhkha ṣ, but the existence of this passage in Hebrew does indicate that readers of Hebrew in Moses ben Elijah’s milieu could have read about these difficulties of Ptolemaic astronomy.83 In the following passage, Moses ben Elijah points to the similarities between the 20 Ptolemaic Mercury model and those for the four other planets and the moon.

ואולם בצורת גלגל כוכב חמה נקראת נקדת משוה התנועה ומקומה הוא בין מרכז העולם Texts in ובין מרכז מקיף הסובל הנקרא מודיר בלשון ישמעאל ומרחקו ממרכז העולם כמרחק Transit משוה התנועה ממרכז הסובל וכפי מרחק מרכז מקיף הסובל ממרכז הסובל. הנה אלו ]הגֹ[84 מרכזים עם מרכז משוה התנועה מרחקם זה מזה מרחק שוה. וכאשר יתנועע גלגל המקיף הסובל הנה הוא יניע את גלגל הסובל ויניע את מרכזו. ולכן כאשר יהיה מרכז הסובל לצד )21ב( הגובה הנה יש בכאן ארבעה מרכזים: מרכז הסובל ומרכז מקיף הסובל ומרכז משוה התנועה ומרכז העולם. ואולם כאשר יניע המודיר את הסובל לצד ]השפלות[85 הנה אז מרכז הסובל יתנועע סביב ][86 המודיר ויתחבר עם מרכז משוה התנועה ויהיה עמו אחד. ואז לא יהיה כי אם שלשה מרכזים והם מרכז המודיר ומרכז משוה התנועה ומשוה העולם. ואולם בארבעת הכוכבים הנשארים בשבתי צדק מאדים ונגה הנה הנקדה ההיא היא שכתבתי בצורתם מרכז קו המניע והיא בין נקדת מרכז הסובל שיהיה מרכז הסובל לצד הגובה ובין מרכז העולם שהוא לצד השפלות ומרחקה משני המרכזים מרחק שוה.

In the configuration of the orb of Mercury, however, it [the alignment point] is called the equant point and its position is between the center of the world and the center of the [orb] encompassing the deferent which is called mūdīr [dirigent] in the Muslims’ language. Its distance from the center of the world is equal to the distance of the equant from the center of the deferent and according to the distance of the center of the circumference of the deferent from the center of the deferent. These three centers, along with the center of the equant, their distance from one another is an equal distance. When the orb that encompasses the deferent moves, it moves the deferent orb and its [the deferent’s] center. Thus, when the center of the deferent is in the direction of (21b) the apogee, then there are four centers here: the center of the deferent, the center of the [orb] encompassing the deferent, the equant center, and the center of the world. When the dirigent moves the deferent, however, in the direction of the perigee, then the center of the deferent moves about the dirigent and combines with the equant center and is one with it. Then there will be but three centers, they being the dirigent center, and the equant center, and the center87 of the world. With the four remaining planets, however, with Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, that point is what I wrote in their configurations; it is the center of the mover line that is between the point of the center of the deferent, which is the center of the deferent in the direction of the apogee, and between the center of the world which is in the direction of the perigee. Its [the point’s] distance from the two centers is an equal distance.

In this passage, Sefer Mezuqqaq again describes the equant as the center of a line that moves the epicycle center. Jaghmīnī had written, “the imagined circle that is traced through the rotation of this line by the epicycle center is called the equant 21 orb.” 88 A line was a geometrical abstraction that could not play a physical role. Although Sefer Mezuqqaq’s description of the location of the equant point is convo- Oral luted at best, the equant point, which was mathematically derived, takes on a more Transmission physical role. This combination of mathematical and physical approaches makes Among sense in the context of the history of astronomy in the Ottoman Empire in the fif- Romaniot Jews teenth century. İhsan Fazlıoğlu has commented that the Mulakhkhaṣ itself presented both the mathematical and physical approaches, whereas Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary seemed to favor a mathematical approach.89 Fazlıoğlu saw in Qāḍī Zādah’s statements of regret for the passing of true mathematical schools the seeds of ʿAlī Qushjī’s agenda of moving astronomy away from falsafa. At the end of the third chapter of the first part of his commentary, Qāḍī Zādah explained that limiting oneself to circles (al- iqtiṣār ʿalā al-daw āʾir) was sufficient for someone interested only in the mathematical proofs.90 Because the introduction to Sefer Mezuqqaq explains that there are no other available works in the same vein, and Sefer Mezuqqaq does pay attention to solid orbs (what Qāḍī Zādah called hayʾa mujassama), Sefer Mezuqqaq’s own position on how the models might be physicalized is worth investigating. In Sefer Mezuqqaq, Moses ben Elijah writes that only two circles could not stand in place of the cincture of a solid orb.91 One is in the lunar model, and it causes the center of the eccentric to rotate; Moses ben Elijah calls it ha-sobeil et meirkaz ha-sobeil. The second such circle rotates about the center of the circumference of the deferent: naʿaseh sabib meirkaz meiqip ha-so beil. Corresponding sentences are not found in the manuscripts of Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary available to me (Michigan 1611 and Tunis 7145). The text reads (13b–14a):

והבן זה. העגלה שני מינים. האחת העגלה הסובבת בחוץ שדברנו גדרה והשנית המ�ת חדשת )14א( בפנים מהכדור. והנה בהתנועע כדור ]העגלה[92 העגולה שבאפדה ההיא רֹלֹ אפדת הכדור ההוא יקרא בשם הכדור כי בהיות העגולה יוצאת המרכז נקראת גם האפדה ההיא יוצאת המרכז וכך לכל גלגל וגלגל. כי בהיות בו גלגל הקפה יקרא בשמו יאמר שהוא גלגל ההקפה. וככה נקרא גלגל הסובל והסוף כי האפדה נקראת בשם הגלגל ההוא. והעגולה שאיננה מחוץ הן שתים. האחת היא בכוכב חמה והשנית היא בלבנה אותה שהיא מתחדשת בלבנה היא סביב מרכז העולם והיא ]נעשת לסבב את מרכז גלגל הסובל ואותה העגלה קוראים אותה הסובל את מרכז הסובל[93. ואולם העגלה השנית שבכוכב הוא ]נעשת[94 סביב מרכז מקיף הסובל.

And understand this. The circle is of two kinds. The first is the circle that rotates on the outside [of the sphere], of whose definition we have spoken,95 and the second is that created internally (14a) from the sphere. Indeed, in the motion of the sphere, the circle that is in that cincture, that is to say the cincture of that sphere, is called by the name of the sphere. For as the circle is eccentric, then that cincture is also called eccentric, and thus for every orb. For with there being an epicyclic orb in it, it [the circle] is called by its name [the epicycle]; it is said that there is an epicyclic orb. And likewise it [the cincture of the deferent] is called the orb of the deferent and so on; 22 the cincture is called by the name of that orb. And the circle(s) that are not [found] externally, they are two. The first is that which is in Mercury and the Texts in second is that which is in the moon. That which is created in the moon is that Transit rotating about the center of the world and it is there to rotate the center of the orb of the deferent. That circle we call the deferent for the center of the deferent. The second circle which is in Mercury, however, is produced about the center of the [orb] encompassing the deferent.

That there are mathematical constructs that could not exist as orbs would be a problem worth investigating for a scholar interested in solid-sphere astronomy. Still, he does not describe these disjunctures as difficultiesishkālāt ( ) or imaginary, as had the Mulakhkhaṣ and Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary upon it. Whatever the motivation for the inclusion of this information, the existence of Sefer Mezuqqaq is evidence that a number of Jewish scholars would have had access to a version of the Mulakhkhaṣ, the gateway to a deeper study of theoretical astronomy. There is evidence that some Jews in the Ottoman Empire knew about theoretical astronomy, namely, texts by ʿUrḍī and Ibn al-Shāṭir, and the existence of Sefer Mezuqqaq explains how these Jews might have come to more advanced texts.96 In the explicit of the text, Moses ben Elijah recommends that anyone interested in knowing more should consult the Almagest as well as the other longer books that were available. This could be a reference to Khomṭiano’s Almagest commentary. Presuming that the reference to longer books is not to azyāj or to texts about instrumentation, this remark indicates that Moses ben Elijah had become aware of works on astronomy that were as sophisticated as the Almagest and the accompanying commentaries. This was all before the Expulsion.

Conclusion

Several conclusions are possible, three of which are beyond doubt. Of those, the first is that Vajda’s description ofSefer Mezuqqaq as a “version” of the Mulakhkhaṣ is correct; Sefer Mezuqqaq is not a translation of the Mulakhkhaṣ, even while taking into consideration the complexities of establishing the text of the Mulakhkhaṣ.97 The second clear conclusion is that the author ofSefer Mezuqqaq, Moses ben Eli- jah, did not know Arabic; thus, Moses ben Elijah’s statements about the orality of the translation process and the role of Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ should be accepted. Third, Sefer Mezuqqaq is evidence for the importance of oral exchange. Moses ben Elijah’s reliance on Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ meant that his informant could modify the contents of the text and that Moses ben Elijah could ask questions and receive clarifications. It is because of these modifications thatSefer Mezuqqaq is an early indication of curiosity about the disjunctures between the physical and mathematical approaches to astronomy. Two more tentative conclusions about the state of astronomy in the Jewish community are also possible. These conclusions follow from ascertaining, as Vajda did 23 on the basis of references to Greek technical terms, that Sefer Mezuqqaq dates from the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. First, we see a Jewish scholar becoming aware Oral of the issues involved with a solid-sphere approach to astronomy, an approach that Transmission differed from the mathematical approach (i.e., Almagest, tables) that prevailed under Among Byzantine rule. Second, Sefer Mezuqqaq provides some context for the activities of Romaniot Jews Moses ben Elijah’s younger contemporary, Moses ben Judah Galeano (a.k.a. Mūsā Jālīnūs). Since Moses ben Judah Galeano mentioned in Puzzles of Wisdom that he had a grandfather named Elijah Galeano, Moses ben Elijah Galeano was probably a relative.98 Another Jewish scholar who was not a leading rabbi (e.g., Mordekhai Khomṭiano, Elijah Mizraḥi) managed to have extensive contact with a Muslim scholar. The interests thatSefer Mezuqqaq reflects help explain why Moses ben Judah Galeano became interested in other astronomers, such as Ibn Naḥmias, Ibn al-Shā ṭir, and Levi ben Gerson.99 As much as this chapter has focused on why Moses ben Elijah sought out Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ, another relevant question is why Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ decided to help Moses ben Elijah. Though Moses ben Elijah did not provide specific information, the broader context suggests that the Ottomans felt they had something to learn from Jewish scholars. The court physicians themselves were members of the Hamon family.100 We know, too, that Mordekhai Khomṭiano donated an astronomical instrument to the chief military judge.101 But Jews who did not necessarily occupy fixed positions also mattered. Under Bayezid II, a later chief physician, Ahi Çelebi, commanded Mūsā Jālīnūs to write a treatise on the degrees of heat, cold, dryness, and moistness of various medical cures.102 One of Jālīnūs’s sources was the medieval European scholar Arnaldo da Villanova, whose works were translated into Hebrew, but not into Arabic.103 He also cited a Jewish physician, Isaac Israeli. Thus medical practice at the sultan’s court was not confined to texts available in Arabic; Jālīnūs’s command of Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin made him a valuable mediator of knowledge unavailable in Arabic and Turkish. The level of astronomy at the Ottoman court under Mehmed II and Bayezid II outshone that in the Romaniot Jewish community, but when the context is broadened beyond astronomy, the Jews’ position as scholarly intermediaries appears even more valuable.

Notes

1. All of the folio references in this article are to the Jerusalem ms unless otherwise noted. The process of editing portions of Sefer Mezuqqaq showed the Jerusalem ms to be more reliable, as 111b in the Paris ms skips from 7b in the Jerusalem ms to partway through 9b. 2. Georges Vajda, “Une version hébräique du Mulaḫḫaṣ fī l-hayʾa de Maḥmūd b. Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Čaġmīnī,” Journal Asiatique 237 (1959): 471–78. Vajda relied on the Paris ms. 3. Ibid., 474. On Qāḍī Aḥmad as the translator of Gennadios Scholarios’s polemic, see Gyula Moravcsik, Byzantinoturcica: Die byzantinischen Quellen der Geschichte der Türkvölker (Budapest: Görög Filológiai Intezet, 1942), 1:156. The text by Gennadios Scholarios was entitledAkāid- i hıristiyaniye. 4. On Aḥmad’s son, see Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar, Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1943), 26–27. 5. Steven B. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 1204–1453 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 187. Bowman approximated the date of this appointment as 1453–55, but it is also possible 24 that it was under Bayezid II. On the latter possibility, see Aryeh Shmuelevitz,The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 18–19. This latter possibility makes the role of Gennadios Scholarios and Mevlānā Aḥmeṭ more significant. ירושלים: מבלונא. .6 Texts in פריס: והואלתי. .7 Transit פריס: ל. .8 פריס: -. .9 פריס: שיש מי שקדמני בהעתקתו לא ראיתיו עד הנה וכונתי להועיל לי ולמי שחפץ בתועלת אף שלחלוף .10 ההעתקות מהמעתיקים יודעו איזה דברים יותר ויהיה כזה מה שאין כזה. ואם יהיה העתק זולתינו יותר מבואר ורחב אחשוב למצאו שלא הזקתי אם לא הועלתי ומהֹ אשאל העזר. For a French translation of this variant, see Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 473. פריס: שבעתיים. .11 12. Judah Halevi, The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. H. Hartwig, intro. H. Slonimsky (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 126. 13. We see Moses ben Elijah translating the reference to Muhammad, preserving the Islamic overtones in the original. . בגבוהיםThe Hebrew word that I have rendered “upper world” is .14 15. Julian Raby, “East and West in Mehmed the Conqueror’s Library,” Bulletin du Bibliophile 3 (1987): 297–321. פריס: היא. .16 פריס: שברים. .17 פריס: -. .18 19. This works out to one degree every 65.46 years. Jaghmīnī’s own value was one degree every 66 years. See Sally P. Ragep, “Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-ha yʾa al-basī ṭa: An Edition, Translation, and Study” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 2014), 387. 20. E. S. Kennedy, “A Survey of Islamic Astronomical Tables,” Transactions of the American Philo- sophical Society, n.s., 46, no. 2 (1956): 123–77, at 153. 21. For possible sources for the parameters, see José Chabás and Bernard Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print (Philadelphia: Ameri- can Philosophical Society, 2000), 82–83. 22. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 33. 23. For scholarship on Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ, see the references listed in Sally P. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī: Sharaf al-Dīn Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Jaghmīnī al-Khwārizmī,” in The Biographical Ency- clopedia of Astronomers, ed. Thomas Hockey et al. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2007), 1:584–85. See also S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ.” 24. Mauro Zonta, “Medieval Hebrew Translations of Philosophical and Scientific Texts: A Chronological Table,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freudenthal (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2011), 17–73, at 72. 25. For an outline of the contents of the Mulakhkhaṣ, see S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī.” On the place of the Mulakhkhaṣ in the curriculum of Ottoman madrasas, see Cevat İzgi,Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim (Istanbul: İz yayıncılık, 1997), 1:370–92. 26. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī,” 584–85. See also S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ.” 27. For an argument about how the presence of innovative models in Tadhkira commentaries means that the commentaries played the role of modern scientific literature, see George Saliba, “Writ- ing the History of Arabic Astronomy: Problems and Differing Perspectives,”Journal of the American Oriental Society 116 (1996): 709–18, at 714. 28. F. Jamil Ragep, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s “Memoir on Astronomy (al-Tadhkira fī ʿilm al-ha yʾa),” with introduction, translation, and commentary (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 59. 29. On the genre of hayʾa basīṭa, see ibid., 29–46. 30. For an interesting discussion of theoretical astronomy in Elijah Mizraḥi’s Almagest commentary, see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit: New Perspectives,” in Freudenthal, Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, 438–53, esp. 446–49. 31. On the pedagogic function and value of Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ, see S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 119–37. 25 32. Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 477. 33. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 223. With the exception of al-balad for al-balda, Jaghmīnī’s text was the same. Oral 34. As a point of comparison, one should note how another Jewish scholar, working a few decades Transmission later, known as Moses Galeano/Mūsā Jālīnūs, was commissioned by the chief Ottoman military judge Among to translate the canons of the Almanach Perpetuum from Latin into Arabic. A significant difference Romaniot Jews between the Latin original and the Arabic translation is that Galeano/Jālīnūs added a section on qibla computation where none had previously existed. On this translation, see Julio Samsó, “Abraham Zacut and José Vizinho’s Almanach Perpetuum in Arabic (16th–19th C.),” Centaurus 46 (2004): 82–97, at 83. See also Chabás and Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula, 163 and 170. 35. On Bet El as a Jewish qibla, see Shimon Shtober, “Lā Yajūz an yakūn fī al-ʿālam li-llāhi qiblatayn: Judaeo-Islamic Polemics Concerning the Qibla,” Medieval Encounters 5 (1999): 85–98, at 95. I thank Tzvi Langermann for bringing this article to my attention. See also Shtober, “Judaeo-Islamic Polemics,” 93, for the possibility of the stories of disputations between Jews and Muslims about the qibla direction actually reflected in in-person debates between Jews and Muslims. 36. I would add that mezuqqaq is a translation of mukhallaṣ, a transposition of mulakhkhaṣ. 37. Sally P. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī, Sharaf Al-Dīn Mahmūd Ibn Muḥammād Ibn ʾUmar Al,” in New Dic- tionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Noretta Koertge, vol. 4 (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons/Thomson Gale, 2008), 20–22, Gale Virtual Reference Library, accessed 13 September 2013. 38. And if Sefer Mezuqqaq is a faithful translation of a Turkish translation of the Mulakhkhaṣ, then the variants from the Arabic original would indicate the prominence of this material in Ottoman madrasas. Vajda noted (“Une version hébraïque,” 475) the overwhelming likelihood of a Turkish intermediary. 39. Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 476. 40. On the use of Greek by Romaniot Jews, see Cyril Aslanov, “Judeo-Greek or Greek Spoken by Jews,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 385–98, at 394–95. Hebrew was the language of Jewish culture, but Greek was the spoken medium. Indeed, Langermann’s survey article on science in Byzantine Jewish communities makes no mention of scientific texts being composed in Greek. But Elijah Mizraḥi’s commentary on the Almagest (to which Langermann draws our attention) occasionally referred to Greek mss of the Almagest in order to clarify obscurities in the Hebrew translation. Langermann has also found examples of a reader of Qalonymos’s translation of Nicomachus’s Introduction to Arithmetic. See his “Studies in Medieval Hebrew Pythagoreanism: Translations and Notes to Nicomachus’ Arithmological Texts,” Micrologus 9 (2001): 219–36, at 228. See also Bowman, Jews of Byzantium, 164–68, for how Greek had been incorporated into Jewish texts, particularly during the Paleologan Renaissance. 41. Minna Rozen, A History of the Jewish Community in Istanbul: The Formative Years, 1453–1566 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 281–83. 42. In the list, the numbers indicate the manuscript page; if no number appears, then the term falls on the page listed above it. 43. See Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 478. In Greek, the term is ἅναστρος ουρανος. פריס: אורונוש. .44 פריס: -. .45 פריס: ניטק. .46 47. Thems includes the short vowels. 48. Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 476. 49. Ibid. פריס: קוטרימרי בלבועדין אלאבסינטין. .50 51. Cf. F. Ragep, Tadhkira, 194–95. Iltiwāʾ is a form of latitude particular to the lower planets. פריס: ערדי אילטבא. .52 53. Moses ben Elijah defined this term as the path that the planet takes. 54. I could not find a corresponding term in the mss of Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary available to me (Michigan 1611 and Tunis 7145). 55. Qāḍī Zādah, Sharḥ Jaghmīnī, ms Michigan 1611, 18–20. 56. Steinschneider’s Hebräischen Übersetzungen attributedMishpe ṭei ha-mabba ṭim to Moses ben 26 Elijah Galeano. See Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1956), 595. There are four complete mss of Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim: Bodleian 2518 (Neubauer), Moscow Günzburg 414/3, Jerusalem NLI Texts in 8°3167, and Jerusalem Benayahu O 131. Although the translation in the Jerusalem mss is attributed to/ Transit claimed by Ibn Ṣahl, it matches the text contained in the Bodleian ms, which is attributed to Moses ben Elijah Galeano. Jerusalem NLI 8°3167 contains other texts translated into Hebrew, perhaps from Arabic (given the Judeo-Arabic jottings on the flyleaves). 57. Jerusalem NLI 8°3167, 43b. 58. Ibid. 59. Vajda, “Une version hébraïque,” 472. 60. Steinschneider, Hebräischen Übersetzungen, 578. See also Marvin Heller, The Seventeenth Cen- tury Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 61. For more information, see Steinschneider, Hebräischen Übersetzungen. 62. On the first page of text (aleph) of the 1546 printed edition ofToledot Adam, Galeano cited Sefer ha-shalem ba-malʾakah, a Hebrew translation of ʿAlī ibn ʿAbbās’s Kitāb al-Kāmil fī al-ṣināʿa. Galeano also mentioned (Pseudo-) Aristotle’s work on physiognomy, probably Kitāb Sirr al-asrār . 63. See also ms Moscow Günzburg 162/4 of Ḥokmat ha-yad , where Moses ben Elijah said that he was choosing excerpts from Toledot Adam. ירושלים: הנקרא. .64 פריס: שגבהותו. .65 פריס: כל. .66 פריס: -. .67 פריס: -. .68 פריס: גם. .69 ירושלים: יקרא. .70 71. For Sefer Mezuqqaq’s explanations of a sector (niṭāq), see National Library of Israel ms 8°3167, 17a. See a full definition of sectors in Kennedy, “A Survey,” 143. The sectors are defined by four points, the first and third of which are the apogee and perigee. The second and fourth points are where the planet or its epicycle center is at its mean distance from the center of the cosmos. 72. Jaghmīnī’s own description of the first anomaly did not use lines to move the orbs. See S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 335–36. In ms Michigan 1611 (p. 64) of Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary, there was also no discussion of a line moving the center of the epicycle. 73. Qushjī, al-Risāla al-Fat ḥiyya, ms Aya Sofya 2733, 20a. 74. See Robert Morrison, “A Scholarly Intermediary Between the Ottoman Empire and Renais- sance Europe,” Isis 105 (2014): 43. 75. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 378. 76. Jaghmīnī (see S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkha ṣ,” 336) identified the same second anomaly, which Ṭūsī (see F. Ragep, Tadhkira, 172) called the anomaly of the nearest and farthest distances. פריס: במרכים. .77 פריס: נכחי. .78 פריס: -. .79 ירושלים: בריח כך. .80 פריס: המרכז. .81 82. I have translated this phrase following the Paris ms, but I do not understand how the alignment point can be between the center of the world and the center of the deferent. 83. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 336. פריס: השלשה. .84 פריס: שפלות. .85 פריס: מרכז. .86 87. The text readsmeshawweh , but this does not make sense. 88. S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 337. Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary (ms Michigan 1611, 66–67) held, as had the Mulakhkhaṣ, that the line, though it moved the epicycle center, was conjec- tural/imaginary (li-tawahhumihim idāratah markaz al-tadwīr). 89. İhsan Fazlıoğlu, “The Samarqand Mathematical-Astronomical School: A Basis for Ottoman 27 Philosophy and Science,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 14 (2008): 3–68, at 30–34. 90. See Qāḍī Zādah, Sharḥ Jaghmīnī, ms Michigan 1611, 44. 91. Sefer Mezuqqaq, National Library of Israel ms 8°3167, 14a. This statement is not found in the Oral parallel section of Qāḍī Zādah’s commentary. Transmission Among פריס: -. .92 Romaniot Jews פריס: נעשית לסבב את מרכז העולם והיא נעשית לסבב גלגל הסובל. .93 פריס: נעשית. .94 95. That is, great circles. 96. Sefer Mezuqqaq, 36b. “He whose heart is full to come closer to the work of astronomy should look into the book of the Almagest and in the rest of the long books.” On Jews’ knowledge of the work of Ibn al-Shā ṭir, see Morrison, “A Scholarly Intermediary.” On Jews’ knowledge of the work of Muʾayyad al-Dīn al-ʿUrḍī, see the Hebrew notations on the flyleaf of the Konya ms of ʿUrḍī’s Kitāb al-Ha yʾa. George Saliba, ed. and intro., The Astronomical Work of Muʾayyad al-Dīn al-ʿUrḍī: A Thirteenth Century Reform of Ptolemaic Astronomy, “Kitāb al-Hayʾah” (Beirut: The Center for Arab World Unity Studies, 1990), 11–13. 97. On these complexities, see S. Ragep, “Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ,” 156. 98. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “A Compendium of Renaissance Science: Ta‘alumot ḥokmah by Moshe Galeano,” Aleph 7 (2007): 283–318, at 287. 99. For more on Moses ben Judah Galeano’s interests in astronomy, see ibid. and Morrison, “A Scholarly Intermediary.” 100. Elli Kohen, History of the Turkish Jews and Sephardim: Memories of a Past Golden Age (Lanham: University Press of America, 2007), 27. Kohen writes, “A rumor, perhaps originating in the apocryphal stories about Mehmed II’s Galenus, Hekim Yakub, attributed to the Elder Hamon a leading role in the poisoning of Bayezit II, masterminded by his son Selim.” On the Hamons’ provenance, see also S. Rozanes, Dibrei yemei Yisraʾel be-Togarmah (Husiatyn: Kawalek, 1907–14), 1:59–60. Yakub converted to Islam, but some future court physicians were Jewish. See Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, “Some Remarks on Ottoman Science,” in Science, Technology, and Learning in the Ottoman Empire: Western Influence, Local Institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 45–73, at 64–65. See also Rozanes, Dibrei, 61. Note that Abraham De Balmes’s grandfather was the personal physician of Ferdi- nand of Aragon. Joseph Hamon’s father, Isaac, had been the physician of King ʿAbdallāh of Granada. See Simon Marcus and Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, “Hamon,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 8 (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 311–12, Gale Virtual Reference Library, accessed 13 December 2012. 101. Mordekhai Khomṭiano, Sefer Tiqqun kli ha-neḥoshet, Munich Hebrew ms 36 (IMHM 1166), fols. 195b–203b. See also Paris, BnF, ms Hébreu 1085, fols. 34a–48a. Khomṭiano explained that he was driven to write a text describing a particular instrument because he had given his own example of that instrument to the Ottoman chief military judge. 102. Adıvar, Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim, 53–54. I am preparing a translation of this brief treatise. 103. Arnaldo da Villanova was cited in Puzzles of Wisdom, indicating that the author of the brief medical treatise was also the author of Puzzles. The translator of one of Arnaldo’s books on astrology noted that the book would attract those interested in medicine. See Arnaldo da Villanova, “Panim ba-mishpaṭ,” trans. Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor, Bodleian Neubauer 2028 (IMHM F19313), fols. 77a–82b, at fol. 77a. I am exploring Mūsā Jālīnūs’s wider intellectual world in a book in progress.

Texts in Transit Two

Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh on Ezekiel’s “I Heard”

A Case Study in Byzantine Jews’ Reception of Spanish-Provençal Jewish Philosophical-Scientific Culture

Ofer Elior

Introduction

From the thirteenth century up to the fifteenth century, Hebrew philosophical and scientific texts produced in the Spanish and Provençal Jewish cultures were continuously transmitted to the Byzantine zone. These texts comprised original treatises as well as translations, mostly from the Arabic into Hebrew. Once transmitted into the Byzantine Jewish sphere, they were disseminated and copied among local readers.1 During the past three decades, considerable light has been thrown onto this process of transmission and reception.2 Here, I seek to contribute to this growing body of research. I will analyze some parts of letters authored by a fifteenth-century Byzantine (probably Rhodian) Jewish scholar, Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh. By means of this examination, I will demonstrate and give further evidence to conclusions already reached by scholars concerning two themes. The first theme is the influence of the Spanish-Provençal tradition on philosophical-scientific reading and discourse in the Byzantine

I wish to thank Haim Kreisel, Gad Freudenthal, and Robert Morrison for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The research on which the paper is based was carried out as part of my work with the research group “Migrating Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin During the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel-Aviv University. I am grateful to my fellows in this group, Y. Tzvi Langermann (group leader), Leigh Chipman, and Roni Weinstein, as well as to the members of other research groups that constitute the Migrating Knowledge project at the center, headed by Rivka Feldhay. The joint meetings of these groups during the past years and especially comments at a presentation of preliminary results of the research, given in The Migration of Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin seminar held at the center (September 2010), have been most influential in shaping my views on the migration of knowledge in general and in the Jewish world in particular. Jewish context. From the work done so far it appears that the latter was based to a large extent on philosophical and scientific literature produced in the Spanish and Provençal cultural orbits. In addition, current scholarship shows that Byzantine intellectuals inherited, discussed, and sometimes debated many of the philosophical and scientific issues raised by their coreligionists in Spain and Provence.3 The second theme is Byzantine Jews’ appropriation of a central current in Spanish- Provençal Jewish thought, namely, philosophical rationalism, specifically that promoted by Maimonides and his Provençal disciples. As noted by Dov Schwartz, “most Byzantine-Jewish thinkers . . . recognized the achievements of rationalism and vener- ated Maimonides.”4 Many of them wholeheartedly and unreservedly accepted Mai- monides’s rationalistic approach. Nevertheless, in Jewish Byzantium “the ‘average’ rationalist held moderate views and shunned the philosophical and antinomian rad- icalism found in much of the writing of Spanish and Provençal scholars of the time.”5 As I will show, the portions of Rakh’s letters at the center of this chapter are devoted to an investigation of a famous radical biblical interpretation introduced in the thirteenth century in circles of Maimonides’s Provençal students. According to this interpretation, a testimony given by the prophet Ezekiel about hearing celestial sounds is false, because Aristotle rejected the possibility that sounds are produced in the heavens.6 Both Rakh’s acquaintance with this interpretation as well as his analysis of it relied solely on texts produced in the Jewish philosophical and scientific traditions of Spain and Provence. In his discussion, this Byzantine scholar defended the philosophical soundness of (what he considered to be) Maimonides’s interpretation. However, preferring to endorse a conservative reading, Rakh in essence rejected this interpretation by suggesting that Ezekiel’s testimony was not false after all.

The Context: Rakh’s Correspondence with Michael Balbo

All (or almost all; see below) the information we have about Yedidyah Rakh stems from the correspondence he had with Rabbi Michael ben Shabbetai ha-Cohen, alias Balbo (1411–after 1480),7 the well-known leader of the Jewish community in Can- adds to this 9,(ידידיה רך) ”dia.8 Balbo names his correspondent as “Yedidyah Rakh and also provides the name 10,(מרודוס) ”name the geographical area “from Rhodes of Yedidyah Rakh’s father: “Joseph Rakh.”11 The latter may very well be a person by 30 the same name who is known to have copied, in Rhodes, sometime in the fifteenth century, a codex containing ten of Averroes’s commentaries (in their Hebrew transla- Texts in tions).12 It should also be noted that the colophon indicates the name of the copyist’s ,If indeed the copyist was Rakh’s father 13.(שמואל ספרדי) ”Transit father as “Samuel Sefardi then it may be speculated that Rakh belonged to a family that immigrated to Rhodes from the Iberian Peninsula. At any rate, it should be noted that if Yedidyah Rakh corresponded with Balbo while residing in “The Island of the Knights,” the correspondence assumes a special importance, as very few sources about the intellectual life of the Rhodian Jewish community during the fifteenth century and prior to the Turkish siege of 1480 are extant.14 According to Rakh’s testimony, one day he was studying in a place he calls the Rakh does not elaborate upon the nature of .(מקום החכמה) ”place of the wisdom“ this place. From the sources to which he resorts in his letters to Balbo, it is clear that this place contained a library with a philosophical-scientific bookshelf. On the day in question, Rakh was reading texts that deal with Maimonides’s interpretation of the story of the conversation between Moses and God at the Cleft of the Rock. Several objections to this interpretation occurred to him. He decided to share these objections with Balbo. Rakh had not previously communicated with Balbo. Nonetheless, having heard of the latter’s stature as a “man of true beliefs and true opinions,” Rakh outlined his objections in a letter and sent it to Balbo, asking for his views on the matter.15 This letter sparked a rather long correspondence, which included at least two more letters from Rakh and three replies from Balbo.16 In the framework of this correspondence, Rakh presented to Balbo his views on a host of philosophical and exegetical issues, most of which relate to the phenomenon of prophecy.17 Rakh’s deliberations on those issues are made primarily in the context of discussions about Maimonides’s interpretation of the Cleft of the Rock story and about another interpretation Maimonides appears to have advanced. According to the latter interpretation, verses in Ezekiel in which the prophet testifies to having heard celestial sounds demonstrate his false belief that sounds are produced in the heavens (discussed in more detail below). It was Balbo who, in his first letter to Rakh, pointed to this interpretation, while raising several objections to it. Closing the letter, he asked for Rakh’s advice as to the correct path he should pursue in order to resolve these objections.18 Rakh acceded to Balbo’s request and analyzed the interpretation in detail. He presented his conclusions in his second letter, and in part again in his third.

Maimonides’s Interpretation

At the heart of the investigation that Rakh carried out following Balbo’s request lies an interpretation that Rakh (and Balbo) ascribed to Maimonides. Apparently, Rakh’s knowledge of this interpretation and of its ascription to Maimonides was based mainly on two sources. The first source is the eighth chapter of the second part of Moses Maimonides’s 31 The Guide of the Perplexed. This chapter was known to Rakh through a Hebrew translation of the Guide, which was completed in Arles in 1204 (revised 1210) by the Jewish 19 Rabbi Provençal philosopher and translator Samuel Ibn Tibbon (d. ca. 1232). Reading Yedidyah Rakh ”on “I Heard (דעת) ”the chapter, Rakh discovered that Maimonides there discusses an “opinion according to which sounds are produced in the heavens.20 Maimonides presents two different versions of this opinion and indicates its sources and supporters. According to him, the latter include the Sages of Israel, who “describe the might of the sound produced by the sun when it every day proceeds on its way in the orb.”21 Maimonides also notes that those who adhere to the opinion provided a “proof for this belief.” consisted in their saying that when the small bodies that . . . [ ]ראיתם Their proof“ are with us move with a rapid motion, a great clatter and disturbing boom are heard to proceed from them. In consequence this should be all the more the case with respect to the bodies of the sun, the moon and the stars, having regard to their size and velocity.” In addition, Maimonides refers in Guide 2.8 to the question of the opinion’s valid- ity. He reports that Aristotle, in his On the Heavens, denied that opinion. In addition, he informs his readers (or, to be more precise, opens the door to an understanding of his remarks as arguing) that the opinion should be rejected, since it is based on a .that the celestial orbs are fixed and the stars revolve in their orbs (האמנה) ”belief“ This belief is false, because it was demonstratively proven (by Aristotle) that the orbs revolve and the stars are fixed in their orbs. Therefore, the opinion that the heavens produce sounds is also false. Rakh’s second primary source of knowledge of this interpretation was a commentary on the Guide authored by the fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish philosopher Moses Narboni (d. after 1362).22 Specifically, Rakh relied on passages found toward the end of Narboni’s commentary on Guide 3.7. Narboni there presents the following interpretation of Guide 2.8:

wrote [in] chapter eight of the second [המורה] The divine sage the Master part that “one of the ancient opinions that are widespread among the philosophers and the general run of people is that the motions of the orbs produce very fearful and mighty sounds,” and that “this opinion also is generally known in our religious community,” and that “this opinion is consequent upon the belief in a fixed orb and in stars that return.” And all that the Master, may his memory be blessed, wrote in those chapters is intended for the interpretation of The Account of the Chariot. And the Master implied in this that the Sages of Israel [including the most] ancient believed this opinion, and that what Ezekiel said in his account about the sound is indeed consequent upon this opinion, as when he said: “And the sound of the cherubim’s wings was heard even to the outer court, as the voice of the Almighty God when he speaketh” [Ezekiel 10:5].23

According to Narboni, Maimonides’s concern in Guide 2.8 does not lie in scien- 32 tific issues. Rather, Maimonides meant this chapter to be an interpretation of verses in the Account of the Chariot, where Ezekiel reports that he heard sounds. Narboni Texts in argues that Maimonides was of the opinion that Ezekiel’s testimonies were but decla- Transit rations of his belief in the opinion rejected by Aristotle in his On the Heavens. Ezekiel, like the Sages of Israel, held this mistaken opinion because he falsely believed that the orbs are fixed and the stars revolve in their orbs. Rakh accepted Narboni’s ascription of this interpretation to Maimonides (accordingly, I will henceforth refer to it as “Maimonides’s interpretation”). It served Rakh as the necessary background for understanding and investigating Balbo’s objections. Balbo’s Objections

In his first letter to Rakh, Balbo presented three objections to “the sayings of Maimonides of blessed memory in what he wrote in chapter eight of the second part of the book The Guide of the Perplexed, . . . that the prophets and those who spoke through the Holy Spirit said [things] whose contrary was demonstratively proven.” 24 All these objections aim to show that Maimonides’s interpretation should be rejected, since it contradicts his theory of prophecy.

Objection M1 According to Maimonides’s interpretation, the false knowledge on which Ezekiel testified could have two possible origins. The first is “received Assuming that the latter .(המקבל והנחת דעת) ”knowledge and hypothesis was the source for Ezekiel’s belief, then Maimonides’s interpretation argues in effect that prophecy, unlike intellectual investigation, follows received and hypothesized knowledge, even when the latter is false. The result of this is that prophecy is inferior to intellectual investigation. This is impossible. More- over, it contradicts “the sayings of Maimonides” himself.25 Objection M2 Let us assume instead that the false knowledge about which Ezekiel testified originated solely in his revelation. This is also impossible, of a prophet consists in his (הבדל )עצמי ”because the “substantial differentia attainment of true and perfect intelligibles. In addition, future events foretold by a prophet originate in true intelligibles, and his revealing of such events is dependent on his attainment of true intelligibles, either from God or acciden- tally. But “if the root from which he [the prophet] derives his predictions of -and has no reality” (namely, if false knowl (דבר בדוי) the future is invented edge was intimated to the prophet from prophecy), “then how can that which follows thereupon, namely information regarding future events, be true?”26 Objection M3 Balbo formulates this objection in his first letter as follows: “I would like to know the difference between Ezekiel, peace be on him, and the people of the third group, discussed by Maimonides in Guide 2:38.”27 The “third group” to which Balbo refers is described in Guide 2.37–38 as consisting of diviners and rulers, who are non-prophets and non-philosophers, have a weak rational faculty, and receive an overflow of the divine emanation only 33 to their imaginative faculty.28 In his second letter Balbo specifies the nature of the similarity between Ezekiel, as portrayed in Maimonides’s interpretation, Rabbi and the people of the third group, as discussed in the Guide. He argues that Yedidyah Rakh Ezekiel, just like those who belong to the third group, erroneously considered on “I Heard” knowledge to originate from “outside” when in fact it did not. Furthermore, in this regard Ezekiel is inferior to the people of the third group, because in contrast to the latter, he had a perfect rational intellect.29

To his attack on Maimonides’s interpretation Balbo appended another attack, directed against a thesis which presumably solves one of his objections. He focuses on a version of this thesis advanced by Narboni in his commentary on the Guide 3.7 (henceforth called “Narboni’s thesis”).30 Narboni, following his presentation of Maimonides’s interpretation, turns his attention to a problem stemming from this interpretation: in his revelation, Ezekiel presumably reported knowledge that he gained by means of his vision. Now such knowledge must be true. How can the false knowledge that he reported be accounted for? Narboni proposes the following thesis:

Know that the prophet is Truth, and his teachings are Truth, and what he receives is true, and not mixed with falsehood at all. . . . The prophet does not perceive [in his visions] anything but Truth. However, revelation does not shed light on that about which the prophet does not enquire. For that which the prophet seeks and about which he received prophecy is true. . . . However, if the prophet’s belief concerning a thing is at variance with what [the thing] really is, and his mind rests content regarding it, [and] he does not think about it and does not enquire about it, . . . [then in this case] we are not obliged to say that . . . [revelation] solved that about which he had no doubts, and let him know that about which he did not enquire. To my mind, if Ezekiel was in doubt whether the orb is fixed and the star revolves or [whether] the opposite [is true], then he would have been informed [lit. would have seen] in his prophetic visions that the orb revolves and the star is fixed. But since he believed that the orb is fixed and the star revolves and did not enquire about it he heard the sounds of the wings of the cherubim.31

According to Narboni’s thesis, it is only when a prophet has doubts in respect to a certain issue, or does not have any opinion whatsoever regarding it, that true knowledge concerning that issue is communicated to him through prophecy. This was not the case with Ezekiel’s belief that the orbs are fixed and the stars revolve. Ezekiel had this belief prior to his revelation. More importantly, he did not doubt this belief. Therefore, revelation did not transmit to Ezekiel any knowledge, be it true or false, concerning this belief. Consequently, Ezekiel believed in the production of celestial sounds and testified about hearing such sounds. It appears that Balbo took Narboni’s thesis as a basis for settling his second 34 objection, most probably because this objection is based upon the premise that the knowledge of the sounds was communicated to Ezekiel in his visions. In rejecting Texts in this premise, Narboni’s thesis presumably solves objection M2. Balbo, however, was Transit of the opinion that Narboni’s thesis was unacceptable and therefore could not be used in solving his objections. To support this stance, he advanced two objections to the thesis.

Objection N1 Narboni maintains that prophecy does not communicate to a prophet knowledge about which he did not enquire. Therefore, revelation in fact follows received knowledge and hypothesis. This, as already explained (see objection M1), has the impossible result that prophecy is inferior to intellectual investigation.32 Objection N2 Several considerations contradict Narboni’s claim that prophecy did not emanate to Ezekiel his false knowledge. In his first letter Balbo introduces two such considerations:

A. It cannot be adequately explained why Ezekiel would testify during revelation about hearing sounds, given that he attained his knowledge about the sounds from received knowledge and hypothesis. Indeed, one could argue that the hearing of which Ezekiel testified should be interpreted according to the third sense ascribed to the word “hear” in Guide 1:45, namely, as “the apprehension of science.”33 But such interpretation is very doubtful.34 B. According to the thesis, Ezekiel’s false belief that sounds are produced in the heavens was not corrected in revelation since he had no doubts in this belief. But why shouldn’t we assume instead that Ezekiel in fact had doubts concerning that about which he enquired, and that revelation showed Ezekiel the truth of the matter, by making him hear sounds?35

In his second letter, Balbo repeats the first consideration and presents a third one:

C. The prophet Isaiah also testified about hearing celestial sounds: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying: ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for Us?’ ” (Is. 6:8). Why then should his “I heard” be considered as reflecting knowledge transmitted in revelation, whereas Ezekiel’s “I heard” should be interpreted as referring to knowledge whose source was different from revelation?36

These objections, Balbo submits, made him “very much perplexed intellectually” In his view, they are “great and unavoidable in any way.”37 In his .(נבוך הרעיונים מאד) -that Maimonides chose to pro (תמיהה) ”second letter he expresses his “amazement 35 mote such a problematic interpretation, instead of one which “saves” Ezekiel from erring.38 Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh Rakh’s Defense of Maimonides’s Interpretation on “I Heard”

We may now turn to examine the fruits of Rakh’s investigation of Maimonides’s interpretation and of Balbo’s objections. As already indicated, these are presented in his second and third letters. At the end of his third letter, Rakh answers, somewhat vaguely, Balbo’s surprise at Maimonides’s choice to advance his problematic interpretation. According to Rakh, Maimonides, aside from the positive considerations which led him to advance this interpretation, also wished to avoid difficulties which an interpretation of Ezekiel’s testimony not according to its literal meaning would have raised.39 In respect to Balbo’s objections, Rakh states in his second letter that he -and difficult to solve.40 Rakh strived to show, how (נפלא) ”found them “wonderful ever, that all three objections can be settled and that Maimonides’s interpretation is therefore philosophically sound. Rakh employed one set of arguments in his solutions to objections M1 and M2, and a different set in his solution to objection M3.

Solutions to Objections M1 and M2

Despite Balbo’s objections to Narboni’s thesis, Rakh chose to put the latter at the core of his solutions to objections M1 and M2. Objection M1,41 he points out, is based on the premise that in the case of Ezekiel’s testimony on hearing sounds, revelation followed a false knowledge that originated in received knowledge and hypothesis. Yet since Ezekiel possessed this knowledge prior to his revelation, one cannot conclude from his testimony about it that prophecy is inferior to intellectual investigation. As for objection M2, the premise on which it is based, namely, that Ezekiel’s false knowledge originated in revelation, is groundless too, because that knowledge in fact was not communicated to Ezekiel during his visions.42 Rakh did not rest content with that, but rather took care to answer Balbo’s attack on Narboni’s thesis attentively. First, he justified his reliance on the thesis, arguing that it conforms to a view that Maimonides outlines in Guide 2.38. Rakh points to a passage found toward the end of that chapter, where Maimonides explains that what the people of the third group apprehend are, “perhaps,” “merely opinions that they once had and of which traces have remained impressed upon their imaginings together with everything else that subsists in their imaginative faculty. Accordingly, when they void and annul many of their imaginings, the traces of these opinions remain alone and become apparent to them, whereupon they think that these are things that have unexpectedly occurred to them and have come from outside.” To clarify this argument Maimonides presents the following parable: “To my mind they may be compared to a man who had with him in his house thousands of individual animals. Then all of them except one individual, which was one of those that were there, went out of that house. When the man remained alone with that indi- 36 vidual, he thought that it had just now entered the house and joined him, whereas that was not the case, that individual being the one among that multitude that did Texts in not go out.”43 According to Rakh, the lesson of this parable also holds true for a Transit prophet who is confident regarding a certain false belief he has (and is therefore not informed in revelation about this opinion being false), and thinks that he received it “from outside.”44 Rakh also answered Balbo’s objections to Narboni’s thesis. His reply to objection N1 is essentially the same as that he gave to objection M1: Ezekiel did not receive the false knowledge during his revelation, and therefore prophecy does not follow received knowledge and hypothesis, nor is it inferior to intellectual investigation.45 In order to reject considerations A and B adumbrated in objection N2, Rakh developed an account which to his mind satisfactorily explains why Ezekiel’s testimony about the sounds, despite being made during his prophesizing, was not transmitted to him in his visions. Rakh grounds this explanation in two premises. The first premise concerns the imagination’s role in prophecy. Rakh drew this premise from the following passages, which he found in Guide 2.36:46

You know, too, the actions of the imaginative faculty that are in its nature, such as retaining things perceived by the senses, combining these things, and imitating them. And you know that its greatest and noblest action takes place only when the senses rest and do not perform their actions. It is then that a certain overflow overflows to this faculty according to its disposition, and it is the cause of the veridical dreams. This same overflow is the cause of the prophecy. . . . [T]he imaginative faculty achieves so great a perfection of action that it sees the thing as it were outside, and that the thing whose origin is due to it appears to have come to it by the way of external sensation. . . . It is known that a matter that occupies a man greatly . . . while he is awake and while his senses function, is the one with regard to which the imaginative faculty acts while he is asleep when receiving an overflow of the intellect corresponding to its disposition.47

In Rakh’s reading of these statements, Maimonides argues that the imagination of knowledge that he had attained (לצייר) a prophet can, during revelation, conceive prior to his revelation, much the same way as it can conceive such knowledge during a dream.48 According to the second premise, nonexisting accidents can be perceived in the imagination, but not in the intellect. Rakh extracted this premise from several passages which appeared originally in Ruaḥ Ḥen, an anonymous Hebrew introduction to science, composed in the Tibbonid Jewish milieu of the first half of the thirteenth century. According to Ruaḥ Ḥen, between the apprehension of the imagination and the apprehension of the intellect there is a great difference.Inter alia, the intellect apprehends only ideas which are real in their existence. By contrast, the imagination sometimes errs and conceives things which do not exist at all, or it conceives 37 the apprehension of things that do exist in a manner that is contrary to their true characteristics. Another difference consists in that the intellect does not conceive Rabbi accidents at all, but rather constructs proofs required to demonstrate the truth of Yedidyah Rakh those ideas. Subsequently, the imagination conceives and stores them.49 on “I Heard” Building on these two premises, Rakh puts forward the following explanation for Ezekiel’s “I heard.” When Ezekiel began prophesizing, he already believed that “the motion of the orbs produces very fearful and mighty sounds,”50 and this belief was conceived and stored in his imagination. More precisely: prior to revelation, the sounds of the orbs, which are accidents of the latter, were conceived in his imaginative faculty. As perceptions which are conceived in imagination, they can be, and were, false. Nevertheless, Ezekiel was convinced of his belief in the sounds. During revelation he received, by means of the divine overflow, first to his “rational faculty” and then to his imagination, both information about future events (הכח הדברי) and true knowledge concerning the supra-lunar world. Simultaneously, his imag- imagined, and conceived the knowledge ,(התחזק) inative faculty became stronger stored in it regarding celestial sounds. Ezekiel then imagined that he heard celestial sounds as if he had received them by his external senses, “from outside.” In addition to reporting the new knowledge concerning the orbs which was communicated to him, he therefore also reported his pre-revelation, false knowledge on celestial sounds.51 In Rakh’s view, this accounts for Ezekiel’s testimony about the knowledge he attained from received knowledge and hypothesis, and he dismisses Balbo’s suggestion, in consideration B of objection N2, that Ezekiel’s “I heard” was a result of his doubts in the belief about which he enquired. Finally, Rakh addressed consideration C outlined in objection N2. For the purpose of rejecting it, he accounts for the difference between Ezekiel’s “I heard” and that of Isaiah. According to Rakh, Isaiah must have attained his knowledge of the sounds during his revelation, because he explicitly stated that the voice he heard was “the voice of the Lord.” By contrast, Ezekiel did not provide any information about אין) ”the origin of the sounds that he allegedly heard. Therefore, “it is not proper to assume that the knowledge of the sounds is a “communication” that Ezekiel (ראוי received in his vision.52

Solution to Objection M3

As indicated above, Balbo does not explain in his first letter what he means in arguing that Maimonides’s interpretation implies that Ezekiel is not different from the people of the third group. Reading that letter, Rakh, it would seem, understood objection M3 in light of a description of those belonging to the group, which he found in Guide 2.37: “they bring great confusion into speculative matters of great import, true notions being strangely mixed up in their minds with imaginary ones.”53 Balbo, Rakh most likely assumed, claimed that according to Maimonides’s interpretation, in Ezekiel’s perception—as in the case of the perception of the people of the third group—false knowledge is intermingled with true knowledge. Relying on a notion 38 and terminology borrowed from Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, in its Hebrew translation made by the Provençal Jewish scholar Jacob Anatoli (com- Texts in pleted in Naples in 1232), Rakh replies that there is a “specific differentia in the most between Ezekiel and the people of the third (הבדל מיחד מן המיחד) ”Transit proper sense namely, it effectively ,(המין מחדש) ”group. This difference “produces a new species makes Ezekiel of a different species than that of the people of the third group.54 Rakh found corroboration of this argument in Maimonides’s statements concerning the differences between prophets and people of the third group, presented in theGuide, as well as in Maimonides’s The Book of Knowledge and in his Introduction to the Com- mentary on the Mishnah (Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s translation, completed ca. 1202).55 Rakh summarizes these statements and also points to the following difference, which is not explicitly indicated by Maimonides: as a rule, the intellectual knowledge of a prophet is true. In the event that he has false knowledge, this knowledge constitutes only a small fraction of his entire knowledge. On the other hand, most of the knowledge of the people of the third group is false.56

Rakh’s Objection to Maimonides’s Interpretation

In his second letter, while discussing Balbo’s objections to Maimonides’s interpretation, Rakh refers to one of the premises of that interpretation. According to this premise, the “opinion” discussed in Guide 2.8, namely, that sounds are produced by the motions of heavenly bodies, was demonstratively proven as false on the basis of its reliance on a false belief in fixed orbs and revolving stars. Turning to his corre- if this opinion [והאמת אתך] spondent, Rakh remarks in passing, “truth is on your side [about celestial sounds] indeed follows the opinion about fixed orb and revolving stars.”57 The meaning of this statement remains unclear throughout most of Rakh’s discussion. However, the last few paragraphs of the letter reveal that it was a preview to a presentation of an objection to Maimonides’s interpretation, different from those suggested by Balbo. Opening that section of his letter, Rakh writes as follows:

I do not understand how the subject of the sounds of the orbs follows from that of fixed orbs and revolving stars. For one might argue that even on the [assumption that] the star is fixed and the orb revolves [it follows that] sounds [are produced], namely on account of the might of the orb and its velocity. [But] even then [i.e., if this is true] it is not the case that the contrary of [Ezekiel’s prophecy] was demonstratively proven. I do not understand what necessity compelled Maimonides to assert that this view [i.e., that sounds are produced] is consequent upon [the opinion] that the orb is fixed [and the planets revolve]. And indeed many and great [scholars] have explained how the sounds of the orbs are consequent upon [the hypothesis of] a revolving orb. [This way] the visions of Ezekiel are reinstated [i.e., shown not to be at variance with science].58

39 Rakh’s objection is directed against Maimonides’s premise that Ezekiel’s statement “I heard” is false. According to Rakh, “many and great” scholars have shown Rabbi that sounds are produced in heavens, as a result of rotations of orbs. Therefore, the Yedidyah Rakh fact that the belief in revolving stars and fixed orbs is false is not in itself sufficient on “I Heard” for attributing error to Ezekiel. The rest of Rakh’s presentation of his objection is primarily aimed to argue, against Aristotle and Maimonides, that the production of celestial sounds is possible according to science.59 Rakh presents what he considers to be, as he puts it, for this argument. Rakh established this evidence on his readings (ראיה) ”evidence“ in a discussion of the hearing faculty of the sensitive soul, which he found in Moses Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation of Averroes’s Compendium of Aristotle’s De Anima (Provence, 1244). Averroes there argues that sound is produced when a hard body strikes another hard body and causes the intermediary air to forcibly escape. 60 Spe- cifically, he claims that the motion of hollow bodies causes air to escape and the production of sounds. Furthermore, according to the Commentator, the volume of the body. On the basis of these (מוקש) sound is proportional to the width of the striker arguments, Rakh puts forward the following “evidence”: the heavenly orbs, as hollow bodies, can be involved in the production of sounds. In fact, in the heavens there are (at least) two hard orbs, one of which revolves around the other in fast motion that creates friction, and, consequently, causes air to escape and the production of sounds. Following Averroes and Guide 2.8, Rakh also argued that being produced by large bodies, these celestial sounds must be “great.”61 I have examined this evidence in detail elsewhere.62 Here, I wish to summarize briefly two of my conclusions, which are significant for the present discussion. First, Rakh does not provide adequate scientific evidence for most of the conditions for the alleged production of celestial sounds, and primarily for the friction between celestial orbs and the existence of empty space between orbs (implied by the inflation of air in the celestial realm)—both rejected in contemporary Aristo- telian science.63 Indeed, in his discussion he tries to validate his arguments that fast rotation of orbs produces sound and that friction exists between celestial orbs, and there too he does not rely on scientific arguments. To support the first argument, Rakh refers to the a fortiori evidence, based on analogy, given in Guide 2.8 as proof for production of sounds by the rotation of stars. The second argument Rakh “proves” on the basis of religious authority: since the Sages of Israel argued that friction is possible between rotating stars, then there can also be friction between rotating orbs. Moreover, in an attempt to further justify his claim that friction between celestial orbs is possible, Rakh misinterprets the fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish philosopher, scientist, and biblical commentator Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344). According to Rakh, Gersonides assumed that such friction is indeed possible. This, he affirms, is why Gersonides argued in hisWars of the Lord in favor of the existence of the quasi-body, different from the ordinary bodies in the supra- and sublunar worlds, which prevents contact between orbs. Gersonides, however, clearly rejected the possibility of friction between orbs.64 40 The second conclusion concerns the question of the sources of Rakh’s evidence. As we saw, in endorsing the thesis that the motions of celestial orbs produce sounds, Texts in Rakh relied on “many and great” scholars. I cannot determine with certainty who Transit these scholars are. Still, it may very well be that Rakh refers to texts authored by earlier Jewish scholars who employed similar arguments in their attempt to show that Ezekiel’s testimony was true; some of these texts were produced in or influenced by the Spanish-Provençal culture. From these sources, Rakh could have also borrowed some parts of his evidence, as well as the implicit view upon which it is based, namely, that scientific principles and arguments which hold in the sublunar world apply also in the supra-lunar world.65 Summary and Conclusions

The preceding discussion presented a case study in Byzantine Jewish readers’ reception of the Spanish-Provençal philosophical-scientific culture. The reader under discussion was a fifteenth-century Byzantine, and very probably Rhodian, Jew. As I noted, Yedidyah Rakh may have been a descendant of a family that immigrated to the island from Spain. If this was the case, then it can be speculated that Rakh’s identity as a scholar was hybrid: on the one hand, it was established on the intellectual and cultural baggage imported by his family from Spain. On the other, it was molded by ideas and theories with which Rakh became acquainted as a learned man active (and perhaps growing up) in the Byzantine Jewish culture. With this hybrid identity, Rakh approached and analyzed in detail a philosophical problem that emerged and advanced in the circles of Maimonides’s Provençal students. All (or almost all) of the philosophical and scientific sources used by Rakh in his discussion of Ezekiel’s “I heard” were produced in Spain or Provence. These included Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s translations of Maimonides’s Guide and Introduction to the Commentary on the Mishnah, Narboni’s commentary on the Guide, Jacob Ana- toli’s translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Moses Ibn Tibbon’s translation of Averroes’s Compendium of Aristotle’s De Anima, Gersonides’s Wars of the Lord, and Ruaḥ Ḥen (or Gershom ben Solomon’s The Gate of Heaven). It is possible that he also had access to Ibn Kaspi’s commentary on the Guide and to Moses Ibn Tibbon’s translation of Averroes’s Compendium of Aristotle’s Parva Nat- uralia. Copies of at least some of these were found in the place where he studied. If this “place of the wisdom” was attended by other readers in his intellectual milieu, then it is possible that the latter, too, had access to these texts. As we saw, some of Rakh’s discussions attest to a limited understanding of his sources. This impression concerns primarily those parts of his letters where he rejects Maimonides’s interpretation, and especially his comprehension—or, better, incomprehension—of fundamental principles of Aristotelian science. His misunder- standing of Gersonides’s position regarding the possibility of friction between orbs is also illuminating in this respect. One may argue that we have here a demonstration of Dov Schwartz’s general observation regarding Byzantine Jewish thought, namely, that it “was frequently detached, lacking in philosophical precision and real scientific 41 depth.”66 In his discussions of Ezekiel’s “I heard,” Rakh shows himself to be an adherent of a Rabbi moderate approach to rationalistic biblical interpretation. As we saw, Rakh endorsed Yedidyah Rakh a twofold approach to Maimonides’s interpretation. On the one hand, he presented on “I Heard” in his letters arguments that, to his mind, resolve all of Balbo’s objections. In essence, Rakh defended Maimonides’s philosophical coherence in advancing his interpretation, at least in respect to Maimonides’s statements regarding prophecy. On the other hand, Rakh was not willing to accept the interpretation. In utilizing and com- plementing Narboni’s thesis, Rakh partially took the radical sting out of the interpretation, claiming that the source for Ezekiel’s false belief in the sounds was not divine emanation. This modified thesis he considered to be still too radical, because it per- mitted the possibility that the words of a prophet given during revelation might be false. Rakh therefore advanced an argument to the effect that Ezekiel was not wrong after all, because scientifically, sounds can be produced in the heavens. Although it cannot be ruled out, it is difficult to assume that Rakh was not aware of the weakness of his scientific “evidence” for the production of celestial sounds. The fact that he nevertheless chose to use it attests—somewhat paradoxically—to his conservative views regarding the question of which authority should prevail in the case of a contradiction between Torah and science. Further appreciation of Rakh’s reception of Maimonidean rationalism and of Spanish-Provençal philosophical and scientific thought in general will benefit from an examination of other parts of his correspondence with Balbo, especially those where he deals with Maimonides’s interpretation of the story of the Cleft of the Rock. This must be left for a future study.67

Notes

1. On Byzantium as a center for Jewish transmission of knowledge, see the illuminating article by Micha Perry, “Byzantium’s Role in the Transmission of Jewish Knowledge in the Middle Ages: The Attitude Toward Circumcision,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 643–57. 2. A complete bibliography of these studies cannot be given here. Many are referred to in Dov Schwartz, “Conceptions of Astral Magic Within Jewish Rationalism in the Byzantine Empire,” Aleph 3 (2003): 165–211; Eric Lawee, “Maimonides in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Case of Rashi’s Resist- ing Readers,” in Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 2007), 183–206; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. Gad Freudenthal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 438–53; and Ofer Elior, “Rabbi Shalom Anabi’s Pri ha-Gan, ” Kovetz al-Yad 21 (2012): 206–8 [Hebrew]. See also Dov Schwartz, “Understanding in Context: R. Mordekhai Comtiano’s Commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed,” Peʾamim 133–34 (2013): 127–83 [Hebrew]. On the influence of Spanish and Provençal thought on Byz- antine Karaite thought, see Daniel J. Lasker, “Byzantine Karaite Thought,” in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to Its History and Literary Sources, ed. Meira Polliack (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 505–28; idem, From Judah Hadassi to Elijah Bashyatchi: Studies in Late Medieval Karaite Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 3. See the studies mentioned in the previous note. 4. See Schwartz, “Conceptions,” 172 and 178. 5. See ibid., 184. Schwartz also notes, “none of the material I have examined reveals the existence of . . . a continuous radical tradition.” Cf. ibid., 172–74, 180, 182. Schwartz’s conclusions were reaffirmed 42 by Eric Lawee. Comparing the attitudes of Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin to those of Mai- monides and Rashi, Lawee noted that “in the east,” as in Spain, “there were Maimonidean admirers . . . who . . . accepted philosophy but rejected its more radical incarnations.” See Lawee, “Maimonides in Texts in the Eastern Mediterranean,” 204. Transit 6. For discussions of the interpretation and its reception, see Charles Touati, “Le problème de l’inerrance prophétique dans la théologie juive du moyen âge,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 174 (1968): 169–87; Shalom Rosenberg, “On Biblical Interpretation in the Guide of the Perplexed,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 1 (1981): 143–51 [Hebrew]; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Hebrew Astronomy: Deep Soundings from a Rich Tradition,” in Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, ed. Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 555–84, esp. 558–66; Dov Schwartz, “Maimonides’ Philosophical Methodology: A Reappraisal,” in Maimonides: Conservatism, Originality, Revolution, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2008), 413–36 [Hebrew]; idem, Music in Jewish Thought (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2013), 61–62, 172–77 [Hebrew]; Howard T. Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 163–64, 290–91; idem, “From Esotericism to Science: The Account of the Chariot in Maimoni- dean Philosophy till the End of the Thirteenth Century,” in The Cultures of Maimonideanism, ed. James T. Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 21–56, esp. 48–49; Ofer Elior, “ ‘The Conclusion Whose Demonstra- tion Is Correct Is Believed’: Maimonides on the Possibility of Celestial Sounds, According to Three Medieval Commentators,” Revue des études juives 172, nos. 3–4 (2013): 283–303; idem, “Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Mühlhausen Investigates the Sounds of the Spheres,” Jewish Studies 49 (2013): 131–55 [Hebrew]; idem, “Ezekiel Is Preferable to Aristotle: Torah and Science in Four Medieval Interpretations of Ezekiel’s ‘I Heard,’ ” Peʾamim 139–40 (2015): 55–80 [Hebrew]. 7. On Balbo, his family, and his writings, see A. Ch. Freiman, “Palestine Emissaries and Pil- grims: 15th Century Documents from Candia,” Zion 1, no. 2 (1936): 185–207 [Hebrew]; Zvi Malachi, “The Balbo Family—Scholars of Hebrew Literature in Candia (15th Century),” Michael 7 (1981): 255–70 [Hebrew], repr. in idem, Pleasant Words: Chapters from the History of Hebrew Literature (Lod: The Habermann Institute for Literary Research, 1983), 249–66; Ephraim Kupfer, “Concerning the Cultural Image of German Jewry and Its Rabbis in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,”Tarbiz 42 (1973): 113–47, 126 [Hebrew]. Balbo is notorious for his role in the controversy that raged in Candia during the 1460s regarding the doctrine of metempsychosis. See Efraim Gottlieb, “The Transmigration Debate in 15th Century Candia,” Tzfunot 11 (1969): 45–66 [Hebrew], repr. in idem, Studies in the Literature of Kabbala, ed. Joseph Hacker (Tel Aviv: The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1976), 370–96; Aviezer Ravitzky, “The God of the Philosophers and the God of the Kab- balists: A Controversy in Fifteenth Century Crete,” in History and Faith: Studies in Jewish Philosophy (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1996), 115–53; Brian Ogren, Renaissance and Rebirth: Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 41–101. 8. A copy of the correspondence, probably written by Balbo, is extant in a single manuscript. See ms Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, ebr. 105, 116b–143b (henceforth referred to as “Correspondence”). An edition of the entire correspondence is forthcoming in a paper by Dov Schwartz (to be published in Alei Sefer 24). In it Schwartz explores Balbo’s and Rakh’s views regarding various philosophical issues as well as their general attitudes toward philosophical rationalism, as presented in parts of the correspondence not examined here. I wish to thank Professor Schwartz, who generously shared his work with me. 9. See Correspondence, 116b (in the heading to Rakh’s first letter), 129a, 130a, 143a. In scholarly literature the name is sometimes transliterated as “Rak” or “Rach.” 10. See ibid., 116b. 11. See ibid., 129a (the heading to Balbo’s third letter), 130a, 143a (the heading to Anabi’s letter to Balbo; see below, note 18). 12. See ms St. Petersburg, IOS B 390 (= IMHM F 53600), 361b. 13. See ibid. 14. As far as I can see, these sources include, besides Rakh’s letters and the manuscript copied by r Ezra of Rhodes on his journey״Joseph Rakh, a poem authored by Balbo, which he sent “to the Sage k .See 165a in the manuscript of the Correspondence .(לחכם כ״ר עזרא מרודוס כשהלך בונזיא) ”to Venice In addition, a few manuscripts copied in Rhodes are extant. See Michael Rigler, “The Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean as Suppliers of Books: Colophons Found in Thirteenth–Fifteenth-Century Hebrew 43 Manuscripts,” Alei Sefer 21 (2010): 75–90, 82–83 [Hebrew]. For the history of Rhodian Jewry, see Joshua Starr, Romania: The Jewries of the Levant After the Fourth Crusade (Paris: Éditions du Centre, 1949), 85–91; Marc D. Angel, The Jews of Rhodes: The History of a Sephardic Community (New York: Sepher- Rabbi Hermon Press and the Union of Sephardic Congregations, 1980); Isaac J. Levy, Jewish Rhodes: A Lost Yedidyah Rakh Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1989); Esther F. Menascé, Gli ebrei a Rodi: Storia on “I Heard” di un’antica comunità annientata dai nazisti (Milano: Guerini, 1996). 15. See Correspondence, 116b. 16. See ibid. (Rakh’s first letter), 116b–118a (Balbo’s first letter), 118a–123a (Rakh’s second letter), 123a–129a (Balbo’s second letter), 129a–143a (Balbo’s third letter). In his third letter, Balbo cites parts of Rakh’s third letter. We have no evidence to suggest that Rakh received Balbo’s third letter. 17. Inter alia, Rakh referred to the questions of the substantial differentia of a prophet, the differences between a prophet and a sage and between knowledge attained in revelation and knowledge attained by rational investigation, Mosaic prophecy, and the possibility of errors in prophecy. In addition, Rakh debated with Balbo concerning certain linguistic-exegetical issues, some of which have philosophical import. See Correspondence, 128a, and 140b–141a. 18. See ibid., 117b–118a. Balbo transmitted the same request to another of his contemporaries, Rabbi Shalom Anabi of Constantinople. The latter’s response was copied in the same manuscript which documents the correspondence between Balbo and Rakh. See in the leaves following Balbo’s third letter, 143a–146b. On Anabi, see Elior, “Rabbi Shalom Anabi.” 19. On Samuel Ibn Tibbon, see The Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Samuel Ibn Tibbon” (by James T. Robinson), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tibbon/ (accessed 30 January 2015). On Ibn Tibbon’s translation of the Guide, see Carlos F. Fraenkel, From Maimonides to Samuel ibn Tibbon: The Transformation of the Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn into the Moreh ha-Nevukhim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2007) [Hebrew]. 20. For more detailed discussions of Guide 2.8, see Langermann, “Hebrew Astronomy,” 557–63; Elior, “The Conclusion”; idem, “Rabbi Yom Tov,” 136–40. 21. See Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. from the Arabic, with intro. and notes, by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 267. All English quotations from the Guide are from Pines’s translation, occasionally modified according to Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation, as published in Moses Maimonides, Moreh ha-Nevukhim, ed. Yehuda Ibn Shmuel (Jerusa- lem: Rabbi Kook Institute, 2000), 272–73. 22. On this commentary, see Gitit Holzman, “R. Moshe Narboni’s Commentary to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed,” Daat 73 (2013): 197–236 [Hebrew]. It may be that Rakh had in front of him further sources about the interpretation. These include Gersonides’sCommentary on Job. See note 30 below. Two other possible sources are Joseph Ibn Kaspi’s Candelabra of Silver (Menorat Kesef), a commentary on the Account of the Chariot (Provence, first half of the fourteenth century), and Hanoch ben Solomon al-Konstantini’s Visions of God (Marʾot Elohim) (Spain?, end of the fourteenth century). See Joseph Kaspi, Amudey Kesef u-Maskiyot Kesef, ed. Salomon E. Werbluner (Frankfurt a. M.: J. F. Bach, 1848), 93–95; Colette Sirat, “The Marʾot Elohim of Hanokh b. Solomon al-Constantini,” Eshel Beer-Sheva 1 (1976): 187–89 [Hebrew]. Passages from the two latter works, which do not directly refer to Maimon- ides’s interpretation of Ezekiel’s “I heard,” are cited by Balbo in his second letter. See Correspondence, 124b–125a, 126a–b. In his third letter, Rakh discusses these citations (see ibid., 138a–b). It is not clear, however, whether he had access to the works from which the citations are taken. 23. See Moses Narboni, Commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Jacob Goldenthal (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1852), 49a. See also 28a for Narboni’s interpretation of the Guide 2.8. For discussions, see Rosenberg, “On Biblical Interpretation,” 148–49; David Ben-Zazon, “The Com- mentary of Don Isaac Abravanel to the Guide of the Perplexed” (Ph.D. diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2009), 220–21 [Hebrew]; Tamás Visi, “On the Peripheries of Ashkenaz: Medieval Jewish Philosophers in Normandy and in the Czech Lands from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Century” (habilita- tion thesis, Palacky University Olomouc, 2011), 212–17; Holzman, “R. Moshe Narboni’s Commentary,” 211–13. For other verses in which Ezekiel testifies about hearing sounds, see Ezekiel 1:24–25, 3:13. 24. See Correspondence, 117b. 25. See ibid., 118a. Balbo does not cite statements by Maimonides to the effect that a prophet is superior to a sage. He may have relied on passages scattered throughout theGuide, and especially in 44 chapter 38 of the second part. See Howard T. Kreisel, “Sage and Prophet in the Thought of Maimonides and His Followers,” Eshel Beer-Sheva 3 (1986): 149–69 [Hebrew]; idem, Prophecy, 250–57. is of the (סעיף) ”See Correspondence, 118a. In his second letter, Balbo adds that a “branch .26 Texts in same species as its root, unless it is accidental. Balbo conceives this statement to be “a first intelligible, Transit whose truth does not need to be demonstrated.” See ibid., 127a. 27. See ibid., 118a. 28. See Maimonides, Guide, 374, 377–78. 29. See Correspondence, 127b. -interpretation, given in Gersonides’s Com (כמו זה) ”Balbo alludes in passing to a “similar .30 mentary on Job. See Correspondence, 118a. Specifically, his reference is to Gersonides’s interpretation of Job 29:18–21. Gersonides there remarks, “[I]t happens . . . that prophets . . . perceive a thing falsely during a prophetic vision; . . . this comes not because of the prophecy, but because of their previous opinions on the matter. Thus, Ezekiel perceived that the wheels of the Merkabah emit sounds in their movements, because he really believed that in regard to the Merkabah, as mentioned by Maimonides.” English translation quoted with slight changes from Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), The Commen- tary of Levi ben Gersom (Gersonides) on the Book of Job, trans. from the Hebrew, with intro. and notes, by Abraham L. Lassen (New York: Bloch, 1999), 244. 31. See Narboni, Commentary on the Guide, 49a. Narboni briefly refers to the sources of Ezekiel’s and the Sages of Israel’s false belief in his commentary on Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. See Moses Narboni, Commentary on Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, Paris, BnF, ms héb. 916 (= IMHM F 26871), 35a–b. 32. See Correspondence, 118a. 33. See Maimonides, Guide, 96. 34. See Correspondence, 118a. See also in the third letter, ibid., 137b. 35. See ibid., 118a. See also in the third letter, ibid., 137b. 36. See ibid., 127b. See also in the third letter, ibid., 137b, and inGuide 3.6, which may have served as an inspiration for this objection. 37. See Correspondence, 117b–118a. 38. See ibid., 127b. Cf. Balbo’s third letter, ibid., 137b. 39. See ibid., 139b. It is possible that Rakh is referring here to Maimonides’s interpretation of the ofanim in Guide 2.9. Balbo, in his second letter, suggested that Maimonides may have had this interpretation in mind when he advanced his controversial interpretation of Ezekiel’s “I heard.” See Correspondence, 127b, and cf. Balbo’s third letter, 137b. 40. See Correspondence, 119b. 41. See ibid., 122b. Rakh addresses this objection indirectly, while replying to one of Balbo’s objections to Narboni’s thesis (objection N1). See below. 42. See Correspondence, 120b–121b. 43. See Maimonides, Guide, 377–78. 44. See Correspondence, 120a, and cf. 120b. 45. See ibid., 122b. 46. Rakh may have implicitly relied here also on the fourth chapter of Ruaḥ Ḥen, which could have been his direct source for the second premise (see below). See Ruaḥ Ḥen (Warsaw: Baumritter, 1865), 12–14; for a scientific edition, see Ofer Elior, Rua“ ḥ Ḥen as a Looking Glass: The Study of Science in Different Jewish Cultures as Reflected in a Medieval Introduction to Aristotelian Science and in Its Later History” (Ph.D. diss., Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2010), 243–44 [Hebrew]. 47. See Maimonides, Guide, 370. 48. See Correspondence, 120a. According to Rakh, most dreams convey knowledge conceived ספר )החוש during wakefulness. “This,” Rakh relates, “was explained in the Book on Sense and Sensibilia He might be referring to Moses Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation of Averroes’s Compendium ”.(והמוחש of Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia (Montpellier, 1254). See Averroes, Compendia librorum Aristotelis qui Parva naturalia vocantur, Hebrew trans. from the Arabic by Moses Ibn Tibbon, ed. Harry Blumberg (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1954), 43–44. 49. See Correspondence, 120a; Ruaḥ Ḥen, 14–17 (Elior, “Ruaḥ Ḥen,” 243). On Ruaḥ Ḥen’s dissemination among Byzantine Jews, see Elior, ibid., 173–90. Besides Ruaḥ Ḥen, Rakh’s source for this passage could have been its citation in Gershom ben Solomon of Arles’s The Gate of Heaven (Shaʾar 45 ha-Shamayim; completed in Provence between 1275 and 1300). See Gershom ben Solomon, Shaʾar ha- Shamayim (Warsaw: Isaac Goldman, 1875), 77a (74). 50. Rakh explains Ezekiel’s acceptance of this belief as a result of the “imperfection of the specu- Rabbi lative matters in those times.” See Correspondence, 120a. Yedidyah Rakh 51. See ibid., 120a–b; cf. 121b, 122b, 137a. on “I Heard” 52. See ibid., 139b. 53. See Maimonides, Guide, 374. 54. See Averroes, Commentarium medium in Porphyrii Isagogen et Aristotelis Categorias, Hebrew trans. from the Arabic by Jacob Anatoli, ed. Herbert A. Davidson (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Acad- emy of America, 1969), 12; English trans. in idem, Middle Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, trans. from the Hebrew and Latin versions by Herbert A. Davidson (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1969), 13. 55. See Correspondence, 121b–122b. 56. See ibid., 120b, 122a. 57. See ibid., 121b. 58. See ibid., 122b. 59. In Rakh’s view, if sounds are indeed produced in the heavens, then the source of the sounds heard by Ezekiel is the rotation of the “ninth orb,” that which “has no star.” See ibid. On the history of this orb, see Shlomo Sela, “Maimonides and Māshāʾallāh on the Ninth Orb of the Signs and Astrology,” Aleph 12, no. 1 (2012): 315–53. 60. See Correspondence, 122b; Averroes, Epitome of Aristotle’s De Anima, Hebrew trans. from the Arabic by Moses Ibn Tibbon, Paris, BnF, ms héb. 918 (= IMHM F 31960), 490b. For medieval discussions of the production of sound, see Charles Burnett, “Sound and Its Perception in the Middle Ages,” in The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk (London: Warburg Institute, 1991), 43–70, esp. 52–54. 61. See Correspondence, 122b–123a. 62. See Elior, “Ezekiel Is Preferable to Aristotle.” 63. On the other hand, the question of whether the orbs are hard was debated in medieval astronomy. See Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1996), 324–70. And see, for example, Elijah Mizraḥi’s discussion of sponge-like orbs, pointed to in Langermann, “Science in the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Cultural Orbit,” 448. On the medieval rejection of celestial friction, see Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, 591–95, and cf. 549–50. 64. See Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), The Wars of the Lord (Leipzig: Carl B. Lorck, 1866), 193–94 (V.2.2), 362–68 (VI.1.17), 424–27 (VI.2.7). For a discussion, see Ruth Glasner, “The Early Stages in the Evolution of Gersonides’ The Wars of the Lord,” JQR 87, nos. 1–2 (1996): 35–39. 65. See Elior, “Ezekiel Is Preferable to Aristotle,” where I presented inconclusive considerations in support of the possibility that Rakh relied on a discussion of Maimonides’s interpretation found in Sefer ha-Eshkol (completed in 1413?), a treatise by Rabbi Yomtov Lipmann Mühlhausen, an important scholar and leader of Ashkenazi Jewry at the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century. To these considerations I wish to add here the following. It may be that a copy or copies of Sefer ha-Eshkol were brought to Byzantium by Ashkenazi immigrants who had arrived there during the fifteenth century. One such agent who had carried Mühlhausen’s works to the region may have been Moses ha-Kohen Ashkenazi, a rabbi of Ashkenazi origin who played a prominent role in the controversy about metempsychosis that erupted in Crete in the 1460s. In his study of this controversy, Aviezer Ravitzky discovered that Ashkenazi may have been familiar with one of Mühlhausen’s works (not the Sefer ha-Eshkol ). See Ravitzky, “God of the Philosophers,” 136. Robert Morrison kindly suggested to me the possibility that in presenting his evidence for the existence of celestial sounds, Rakh was influenced, either directly or through secondary sources, by Muslim discussions. For example, he may have been aware of Islamic astronomical research and theorizing that were not based on Aristotelian physics. See F. Jamil Ragep and Alī al-Qūshjī, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Philosophy,” Osiris 16 (2001): 49–71. The question of Islamic parallels to and/or sources of Rakh’s discussion deserves further study. 46 66. See Schwartz, “Conceptions,” 166. 67. As noted above, such an examination is carried out in Schwartz’s forthcoming paper on the correspondence between Balbo and Rakh. Texts in Transit Three

Gradations of Light and Pairs of Opposites

Two Theories and Their Role in Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s “Scroll of the Revealer”

Y. Tzvi Langermann

Introduction

In this chapter I propose to investigate two ideas that figure prominently in Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s eschatological treatise, Megillat ha-Megalleh, or The Scroll of the Revealer.1 Abraham Bar Ḥiyya (ca. 1065–ca. 1136) is one of the earliest writers in Hebrew on science and philosophy—two interlocking fields of knowledge that are both covered by the Hebrew term ḥokhma.2 Grosso modo, Bar Ḥiyya is wrestling with the same bundle of beliefs that occupied Jewish thinkers throughout the medieval period and beyond: creation, the end of days, the authority and elasticity of the biblical text. These and other notions have to be understood properly, and a credible Jewish stance must be formulated—and, if need be, defended— in light of the available offering of scientific literature. But science is not necessarily a foe to overcome; more often than not, it is seen to be a useful tool. Some science promises to be of help in fleshing out the deeper layers of meaning in the Hebrew Bible and assisting the Jewish exegete to uncover the ingenuity of the biblical text in all its details: choice of words, repetition of words, ordering of words, cross-references, and more. But it is not just the elasticity of the Bible that is tested. Just how malleable were the scientific doctrines, or the texts in which they were expounded and with which they were often identified? Bar Ḥiyya, like those mostly anonymous writers who preceded him in producing Hebrew texts of a scientific bent, allowed himself a great deal of leeway in adapting non-Jewish source material to his own purposes.3 His work stands in stark contrast to that of Maimonides and the Maimonideans, the school that dominated Jewish philosophy from the thirteenth century on. For Maimonides, Aristotle—one should add, what Maimonides avers to be the true, pristine Aristotelian teaching, rather than the incorrect reading of Aristotle given by some of his later commentators—set forth a true doctrine that must be reckoned with. Thus, for example, Plato may be a convenient alternative for the knotty issue of creation, but Maimonides will not avail himself of this alternative, since the scientific community has rejected the Platonic account. Bar Ḥiyya, for his part, recognizes no towering authority akin to Maimonides’s Aristotle. As it seems to me, he views the entire corpus of scientific literature as one pool of ideas from which he can draw whatever notion or theory may suit a particular need, modifying it if necessary, and combining it with other ideas. Moreover, scientific texts are not sources whose identity must be disclosed to the reader and whose integrity must be preserved. They are instead reservoirs or warehouses of information whose contents are at the disposal of any author, to be tapped, transformed, and amalgamated as the author sees fit, in line with his goals of the moment and his composition as a whole. In this chapter I will look at two ideas that Bar Ḥiyya drew upon, modified, and connected to each other: the notion of gradations of light (in particular, a quasi- divine “metaphysical” light and a weakened, degraded, sensible celestial and atmo- spheric light) and the idea that the fundamental constituents of the universe group themselves into pairs of opposites. Though Bar Ḥiyya will be the main focus of my discussion, I will cast my net beyond his Scroll for further evidence for the transit of these ideas in the early medieval period, especially among Jewish thinkers. Bar Ḥiyya was likely not the first to put together these two ideas, but that is of no concern to me. Texts transited through the Mediterranean constantly, crossing temporal, cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries. But, more than that, their contents, in the form of ideas, theories, concepts, and even raw data, were continually transformed: by translation, which always entails a reinterpretation; by their relo- cation in different social settings, because knowledge may be in some sense socially constructed; and by their mixing with other ideas, as the case may be. In my view, the social factor is a weak variable. The strong variable in their transformation is the creative force of authors like Bar Ḥiyya, who put ideas to work, and it is this originality that attracts me to theScroll .

48 Zohar and the Theory of Light

Texts in The Scroll makes use of some interesting theories of light—most famously, a dis- Transit cussion of five worlds or gradations of light described in chapter 2, in a passage not overlooked in the scholarly literature.4 Some of the names that Bar Ḥiyya gives to these worlds are clearly homonyms for Arabic terms; in table 3.1, I suggest Arabic correlates for all of them. Moreover, Bar Ḥiyya gives alternate Hebrew names for these worlds. It should be noticed that only three of these alternates are called “light.” It is clear enough that Bar Ḥiyya has drawn upon at least two sources for his scheme: a philosophical source for the five worlds, and a rabbinic or Jewish source Table 3.1 Bar Ḥiyya’s five worlds Hebrew name Suggested Arabic Alternative name Translation Translation of alternative for “world” correlate in Bar Ḥiyya ʿOlam nurani Nūrānī Luminous world Or ha-nifla Marvelous light ʿOlam ha-ravravanut Rabbānī Numinous world Qol Voice (or echo) ʿOlam ha-madaʾ ʿAql, or perhaps World of intellect Or ha-ḥokhma, Light of wisdom, light ʿilm (or knowledge) or ha-sekhel of intellect ʿOlam ha-nefesh Nafs World of soul Ha-nefesh Soul ʿOlam ha-yesira Khalq World of creation Or ha-ganuz la-ṣadiqim Light hidden away for the la-ʿatid la-vo righteous, for the future

for the alternative name. However, Bar Ḥiyya’s exposition is not simply reproducing whatever he found in the sources at his disposal. Instead, the exegesis of the biblical text demanded by the eschatological theme of the Scroll directs Bar Ḥiyya’s teaching here. The five occurrences of the Hebrew wordor , “light,” in the Genesis story of Day One (Genesis 1:1–5) motivate Bar Ḥiyya’s quest for pentads that can serve as helpful analogues. In addition, the eschatological tug of the book leads Bar Ḥiyya to rearrange the worlds or grades from a simple hypobasis, which he is likely to have found in whatever philosophical literature was at his disposal, into a scheme ending with the final reward of the righteous. Therefore, the five worlds listed in the first column—those which, I suggest, derive from a source outside rabbinic tradition— display a descent, whereas the Hebrew alternative correlates have both a descent and a return. The alternative names, especially the last, paradoxically call to mind notions of the “return” that were so important to the Neoplatonists. Now let us have a closer look at the passage. To begin with, Bar Ḥiyya repeatedly remarks that two terms are operable here: worlds (ʿolamot) and gradations (maʿalot). Though he tells the reader, “you may call them either of the names, as you wish” (Scroll, 22:6–7), Bar Ḥiyya clearly prefers the second, whose names for the five items, as we have noted, are closer to traditional Jewish concepts. After the description of each gradation, he gives the “scientific” appellation, that is, the one used byḥ akhemei ha-meḥqar, which, loosely translated, means “rational investigators.” They always speak of worlds. 49 All five of the worlds or gradations are said to be “above theraq iʿa.” Raqiʿa, usually translated by the quaint English word “firmament,” is a very problematic term, Gradations which, depending both on the author and the context, can refer either to the earth’s of Light and Pairs atmosphere or to the celestial realm.5 In Bar Ḥiyya’s astronomical writings, raqiʿa of Opposites refers to the heavens, the seven or more orbs into which the heavens were schemat- ically divided.6 Hence in the passage under discussion here, I take “above the raqiʿa” to mean hypercosmic; the light of the cosmos (including the sun and the heavens) comes into play only on Day Four. As noted above, the five “worlds” fit a pattern of hypobasis, or descent. In medieval Neoplatonism (to use a term I feel a bit uncomfortable with), the usual scheme is intellect—soul— matter. The final two worlds in Bar Ḥiyya’s pentad fit this perfectly. There are three “worlds” above soul; whether Bar Ḥiyya found this precisely in a source that he saw, or whether he constructed this triad so as to fill in his scheme, is a question that I cannot answer.7 It is interesting, though, that in the letter ofḤ ai or Ḥamai Gaon, a central document for the so-called ʿIyyun circle, there are three kinds of light above the sefirot.8 When we turn to the alternative names (fourth column), we notice two significant differences. First, only three of the grades are called “light.” Moreover, though the first four worlds follow a clear and common pattern of descent, the fifth looks to be an ascent, even a return.9 Its luminous correlate constitutes the highest reward for humanity—that which the midrash already says is “stored up for the righteous in the Messianic future.”10 May we then infer that the worlds close in on themselves, forming the circular pattern so well known in the Platonic traditions, and present as well in Sefer Yeṣira? There is no shortage of pentads in Jewish and non-Jewish thought, but most have no bearing at all on our topic. Such is the case with the five worlds discussed in the Talmud and given a philosophical reading by R. Asher ben Meshullam, or the five “presences” known to Sufis (and possibly known to Maimonides).11 As far as I know, the only tradition to teach specifically “fiveworlds of light” is the Manichean one.12 Points of contact between Manicheism and ancient Jewish sources, or non- Jewish sources that may have come to the attention of Jewish writers such as Bar Ḥiyya, are not unheard of; still, I would not jump to claim a Manichean influence here.13 Pentads play a major role in Manicheism. For Bar Ḥiyya, they appear only in connection with the five worlds of light. On the other hand, one can identify five gradations of light in Neoplatonic sources. The emperor Julian, a devoted disciple of Iamblichus, appears to recognize these five:noethos , noethos-noeros , noeros, hypercos- mos, and eisthatos. These names, however, do not correspond to the terms given by Bar Ḥiyya.14 Moreover, there is no available path of transmission from Julian (or from his teacher, Iamblichus) to Bar Ḥiyya that is known to me. Finally, there is an intriguing and subtle occurrence of five grades of light in a minor work by the great Muslim thinker and Bar Ḥiyya’s older contemporary Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111). The passage is intriguing because al-Ghazālī first states that six “things” (ashyāʾ) are called light, but in the numbered list that follows, only five 50 items appear. If I understand correctly, one arrives at six by adding the metaphorical usage—for example, calling the Qurʾan light.15 It seems, then, that in the philosoph- Texts in ical sources at his disposal, al-Ghazālī learned of five grades of light. I think it highly Transit unlikely that Bar Ḥiyya had access to this obscure epistle. The tentative conclusion must be that both the Jewish and Muslim thinkers drew upon a common source. A few more observations are in order. Ḥokhma and sekhel appear together in Bar Ḥiyya as alternative names for the third world. Madaʿ (synonymous with ḥokhma) and sekhel, according to Gershom Scholem, are “artificially separated” in the letter by Rabbeinu Ḥai, the ʿIyyun circle text already referred to above.16 The early mystical texts associated with the ʿIyyun circle list many more kinds of light, but I see no meaningful or obvious connection between most of their appellations and those of Bar Ḥiyya, bar one: note that Ḥammai’s first light, like Bar Ḥiyya’s first grade (in the alternative terminology), is called “marvelous.”17 Though it is certainly fascinating, important, and deserving of the attention that it has received, the doctrine of five worlds or grades of light features only once in the Scroll, in the passage that we have been discussing. But there is much more to the theory of light in the Scroll that has not been touched upon in any academic study that I know. A simpler theory, recognizing two types—which Bar Ḥiyya calls or and zohar—has a much stronger presence in the Scroll. One can point to a similar pair of terms in Arabic (nūr and ḍawʾ) and Latin (lux and lumen). In the case of some thinkers—those most closely studied, such as Ibn Sīnā—the two types of light are a subject for physics alone.18 In others (e.g., Robert Grosseteste), the pairing extends to metaphysics.19 As we shall see, the same pair of concepts—though named by different Hebrew words—may well lurk beneath the surface of other Hebrew texts. I am not ready to offer a history of this idea and to propose a clear path of transmission. Instead, my aim here is to clarify the usage of or and zohar in Bar Ḥiyya’s Scroll and to call attention in a very preliminary way to possible linkages with other texts. Let us begin with zohar. The Hebrew word, meaning light, resplendence, shining, and so forth, is well known, but what must be determined is its precise meaning in our text. For Bar Ḥiyya, zohar means derivative, attenuated, degraded, or reflected light, and it takes its place in a theory that teaches successive reflections, hence progressively weaker manifestations, of a primordial light. For convenience, in the following I will translate or as “light” but leave zohar untranslated. Light was created on Day One, but it illuminated only the supernal or hypercosmic world until Day Four, when the raqiʿa—which, if Bar Ḥiyya is being consistent, ought to mean here the celestial realm (though in this passage one could make a reasonable case for having it refer to the earth’s atmosphere as well)—was strong enough to accept illumination by zohar:

You find that for those three days entirely, from Day One to Day Three, the light did not illuminate the earth. Rather, it was above the raqiʿa, while there was darkness below the raqiʿa. The supernal world shone with the light that was created on Day One. However, it did not illuminate the earth, because 51 the raqiʿa lacked the strength and thickness to receive the zohar of the light from above. The rays of supernal light nitzutzei( ha-or ha-ʿelyon ) did not illu- Gradations minate the raqiʿa, nor were they diffused upon it or on the surface of the earth, of Light and Pairs until God strengthened them by his marvelous edict (maʾmar), which is [the of Opposites same as] His will, as it says, “Let there be luminaries in the celestial raqiʿa.” By means of this edict the raqiʿa was illuminated. Afterwards it says, “Let there be luminaries in the celestial raqiʿa so as to illuminate the earth.” By means of that edict they illuminated the earth. You cannot say that the light created on Day One illuminated the earth. Were that the case, it would not have said [in connection with Day Four], “to illuminate the earth,” as it would have been already illuminated. Instead, on the first three days theraq iʿa was devoid of light, which was not seen in it; instead, it flows over mefiṣ( )20 it and passes over its body, just as is the case with the night air in our world. It is known that the light of the sun gushes over it. The eye is incapable of controlling that light as long as it gushes over the air of the raqiʿa that is far from the earth. When the dawn rises, at the time [scil. and at that time] the light of the sun reaches the thick air that surrounds the earth, the pillar of dawn, which is the zohar of the light of the sun, is seen inclining to rise over the earth. So was the raqiʿa thin and rarefied like the air that is distant from the earth, but even thinner than it.21 The light from above was incapable of being seen in it, even though it gushed over its body, until God, on Day Four, strengthened it and gave it the thickness requisite for the light gushing over it to be seen on it. (Scroll, 25–26)

Note that unlike most other interpreters of the Genesis story, who assign the thickening of the raqiʿa to Day Two (whose entire activity concerns the raqiʿa), Bar Ḥiyya locates the thickening of the raqiʿa on Day Four. He has scriptural proof and an optical argument, but, more than that, he needs to have it occur on Day Four for the purposes of his eschatological history, where each day of creation corresponds to a millennium of human history, and Jewish history in particular. The illumination of the earth corresponds to Cosmic Day Four, that is, the fourth millennium, when the Torah—which is light, according to Proverbs 6:23—was given to Israel. The fourth world of light corresponds, in the five-worlds scheme, to soul. In the Genesis narrative it pairs with Genesis 1:4, the verse in which God differentiates light from darkness. Bar Ḥiyya writes, “The light [in the verse just cited] hints at the souls of the righteous. The light of knowledge and fear of God overflows onto them, and their souls shine22 on its account and illuminate.” So a higher light emanates onto the souls of the righteous, which then shine and emit what must be a less luminous and pristine light. This presumably refers to the role and capacity of the righteous to instruct and otherwise illuminate the common folk. In this connection, we sorely miss the section on optics in Bar Ḥiyya’s encyclopedia, which has survived only in part.23 52 Another clue—and another possible link to Neoplatonism—is the pairing of light with life in this interesting passage concerning the life of plants: “[God] gave Texts in to the earth permission and the capacity to produce herbage and grass, and she [the Transit earth] produced it by means of the capacity that was given to her. . . . [Scripture] did not have to say ‘And God made [va-y aʿas]’ nor ‘And God created [va-yivr aʾ],’ because things growing from the ground have no share in the shining of the light [zohar ha- or] nor in the spirit of life [ruʾaḥ ha-ḥayyim]. But you find ‘and He made’ [the verb va-y aʿas] in the Genesis story throughout only in connection with thing[s] whose body24 possesses the shining capable of receiving light25 or of receiving the spirit of life” (Scroll, 52 [bottom]). Bar Ḥiyya uses two construct formations here: zohar ha-or , the shining of the light, and ruʾaḥ ha-ḥayyim, the spirit of life. In a construction of this sort, the first element takes on the meaning of a lesser grade of the second element. There is light, and there is something that is merely the shining of the light. The same sort of ranking, I submit, obtains in the second couple as well: there is life, and there is something that is merely the spirit of life. This passage is interesting also in that it may allow us to rule out the influence of certain sources. Additionally, it may help to flesh out some creative adaptations on the part of Bar Ḥiyya. The author ofDoresh Reshumot, a commentary on the Torah written in Christian Spain in 4995a.m. = 1234/5 c.e.—that is to say, someone working approximately in the same cultural region as Bar Ḥiyya, but a little over a century later—reports that “some of the investigative scholars say that the rest of the animals and plants received some of the residuum and dregs of the power of the light of the orb of the intellect, each according to its level.”26 This author, who cites a different philosophical work of Bar Ḥiyya, Higgayon ha-Nefesh (Meditation of the soul), knows of a theory in which some metaphysical light is absorbed by plants and animals, thus accounting for their sensation, odor, taste, and therapeutic properties. In his scheme, then, plants and animals have some small share in metaphysical light. Much earlier, the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus spoke of the heliotropic plants following the light as a form of prayer “accompanying the lights of the cosmos as far as possible.”27 Does this mean that there were two separate traditions, and Bar Ḥiyya tapped into the one that denied plants any share in metaphysical light? Or was there only one idea in circulation, and Bar Ḥiyya’s account of the creation of vegetation thus testifies to his creative approach, in which the contents of texts function as pliable raw materials rather than as firm, unbending doctrines that must be inserted by an author into his book exactly as he found them in his “source”? Bar Ḥiyya continues, “In connection with whatever has no body nor is connected to [nimshakh el] a body, such as the light created on the first day, the wordyehi [‘let it be’] alone sufficed. But that which has a body, but neither emits lightm [ eʾir] nor reflects light mazhir[ ], nor does it have life, and ‘making’ was not mentioned in connection with it—its existence had to be by some other means; for example, the creatures of the third day that we are talking about [and which were brought about the earth]” (54). The vegetable kingdom was created on Day Three, before visible 53 light took hold in the heavens and on earth. God is not said to have made them directly; that formula is reserved for those beings that can shine in some sense of the Gradations term, and which, for that reason, are really alive (in line with the intimate connection of Light and Pairs between light and life). Instead, God merely allowed the earth to produce vegetation. of Opposites The linking between light and life is significant. Plotinus connects light and life in Enneads 4.5.7, where he compares light to a soul that can endow a body with life.28 Of special interest here is the following passage from Philo’s On the Creation:

Special attention is accorded by Moses to life-breath [pneuma] and to light [phos]. The one he entitles the “breath” of God, because breath is most life-giving, and of life God is the author, while of light he says that it is beautiful pre-eminently [huperballontoskalon, referring to Genesis 1:4]: for the intelligible as far surpasses the visible in the brilliancy of its radiance, as sunlight assuredly surpasses darkness and day night, and mind, the ruler of the entire soul, the bodily eyes. Now that invisible light perceptible only by mind has come into being as an image of the Divine Word Who brought it within our ken: it is a supercelestial constellation [huperouranios aster], fount of the con- stellations obvious to sense. It would not be amiss to term it “all-brightness,” to signify that from which sun and moon, as well as fixed stars and planets draw, in proportion to their several capacity, the light befitting each of them: for that pure and undiluted radiance is bedimmed so soon as it begins to undergo the change that is entailed by the passage from the intelligible to the sensibly discerned, for no object of sense is free from dimness.29 (29–31)

Jewish thinkers of the medieval period are not thought to have had direct access to Philo.30 However, in the passage just cited we encounter two ideas that reemerge in the Scroll: a hypercosmic or “supercelestial” light, which (in its descent) is responsible for the illumination of the heavenly luminaries, and the intimate connection between light and life, as evidenced by the Genesis account. I suspect that Sefer ha-Bahir recognizes a similar distinction between primal and secondary light.31 However, ha-Bahir calls the derived light nogah rather than zohar, in keeping with the language of Habakkuk 3:4: “In the future, the nogah that was taken from the primal light [or rishon] will be like or.” 32 Indeed, in one place Bar Ḥiyya describes the primal light as bahir: “The light or[ ] that came to be on the first day did not illuminate the earth, because that resplendent [bahir] light had neither body nor matter . . . for neither matter nor body had been created yet”Scroll ( , 22).33 But what is the connection between Sefer ha-Bahir and Bar Ḥiyya? According to the most recent research, Bar Ḥiyya is the earlier writer, and ha-Bahir made use of Bar Ḥiyya’s ethical tract, Higgayon ha-Nefesh .34 The theory I am interested in, to briefly recap, describes grades of light, which become increasingly physical, visible, and even tangible as they move down the chain of being. The higher or highest grades are divine; the theory is related in a religious dimension. Let me now introduce evidence for its circulation among the Jews of the 54 Mediterranean basin in texts unrelated to Bar Ḥiyya. This survey, which seems to me to be exhaustive, reveals traces of the theory in a number of unrelated settings. Texts in Bar Ḥiyya’s exposition looks to be the most elaborate of the Jewish versions. Of the Transit other instantiations we have only vestiges, some of which must be excavated from beneath layers of text. I will first take brief notice of two short passages, then present more involved discussions of two more; the problematic form in which these two texts have reached us necessitates a lengthier discussion in order to uncover the theory. Three of the four texts are by Maimonides.35 Maimonides’s philosophy, for all the sundry “influences” that can be detected (some of which, indeed, we will herald in what follows), is basically in line with Aristotelianism, especially the variety developed by Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, whom Maimonides openly admired.36 The success of the Maimonidean achievement fairly did in the other philosophies that Jews had entertained, such as the thought of Bar Ḥiyya; we historians must thus work harder to uncover the earlier brands. A powerful, eventually victorious rival to Maimonideanism did emerge in the Kabbalah, especially the varieties developed in the various regions of Iberia. Our fourth text, mentioned only briefly, comes from a major Spanish Kabbalist, who had indeed long been thought to have been the author of the Zohar, but it is intimately connected to the writings of the ʿIyyun circle. Light plays an extremely important role in the Kabbalah that postdates Bar Ḥiyya, but I will limit myself to the one passage discussed below, which directly relates to the theory of interest here. First, an example of the degradation of lights that features in Maimonides’s own system in an important way. In his Guide, Maimonides describes a critical transformation of “lights”—from the context, intellectual or metaphysical lights are intended—into “forces” or powers. The move is critical, because the transformation removes from the celestial orbs that emit these forces any capacity to “influence” (“overflow” or emanate upon, in a quasi-divine fashion), reducing their role to one of the physical effect of the force one body exerts upon another. The passage is found in book 2, chapter 11: “It is further to show that governance overflows from the deity, may He be exalted, to the intellects according to their rank; that from the benefits received by the intellects, good things and lights overflow to the bodies of the spheres; and that from the spheres . . . forces and good things overflow to this body subject to generation and corruption.”37 Light overflows from the intellects down onto the spheres, which transmit it further on down, only in the form of physical forces. Moses de Leon (Spain, 1240?–1305) makes use of ha-or ha-muskal (intelligible light), which he contrasts with ha-or ha-murgash (sensible light). He may also equate intelligible light with ha-or ha-bahir. The higher light is like the light of the sun and the lower light like the light of the moon; the lower light is also called or ha-ḥayyim (the light of life).38 These types of lights have matches in the sefirot, but these are not of concern to us here. They reflect a later instantiation, and transformation, of the concepts deployed by Philo, Bar Ḥiyya, and undoubtedly other thinkers over the course of centuries. Now for the two more complicated pieces of evidence. I believe that there is an 55 oblique reference to a forgotten Jewish version of the theory of gradations of light in Maimonides’s Guide, in the final chapter of the first section. The concluding chapters Gradations of that section contain Maimonides’s arguments against the speculative theology of Light and Pairs known as kalam. Although Maimonides engages Islamic kalam, for the most part, his of Opposites conception of the kalam encompasses non-Muslim thought as well.39 To the best of my knowledge, no one has noticed the Jewish theology embedded in a Maimonidean polemic against the kalam that I shall now describe. The topic is the “second method” of themutakallimūn for refuting God’s corporeality (Guide 1.76), which is based on the “impossibility of resemblance,” that is to say, the impossibility of God’s resembling anything else. The argument, simply put, is this: were God a body, He would resemble other bodies. In order to show just how weak this argument is, Maimonides presents some theologies that maintain that God is a body unlike all other bodies and, for that reason, cannot be refuted by the mutakallimūn. The second of these theologies looks to be Jewish:

On the contrary, he [the corporealist] says that God is the creator of all these bodies and they differ in respect of their substance and true reality. And just as he holds that the body of dung is not identical with the body of the sphere of the sun, so he says that the body of created light—I mean the Shekhinah— is not identical with the body of the heavenly spheres and of the stars; and that the body of the Shekhinah or the created Pillar of Cloud is not identical with the body of the deity, may He be exalted, in his opinion. On the contrary, he says that this body is the perfect and noble essence, which was never composed or changed and which cannot possibly be changed.40

This theology posits a gradation of bodies, which, moving upwards, are: dung, sphere of the sun (equivalent to the body of the heavenly spheres and of the stars), created light (Shekhinah or Pillar of Cloud), the deity. Two of these, at least, are certainly luminous or at least transparent: the sphere of the solar body and the created light. But there are several variants for the Arabic translated as “dung,” most of which point to its being a type of light rather than filth. Salomon Munk reports that Oxford, ms Uri 359 exhibits al-nūriyyāt , an unattested form but one that clearly is built upon nūr, “light.” Munk further suggests that this reading connects to the “erroneous” reading of the printed editions of Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation, which exhibits nitzotzot, “sparks” or “flashes.”41 In his edition and Hebrew translation, Rabbi Yosef Qafih lists two manuscripts that useal- anwār , “lights.”42 All of these readings—which have been unanimously rejected by editors of the Guide—would have some, presumably low-grade, light at the bottom of the scheme, thus giving three types of light, and on top of them all, the deity. TheGuide , we must remember, was written in Judeo-Arabic; when Maimonides uses Hebrew names and terms, he is likely to be alluding to Jewish traditions. Maimon- ides gives Hebrew names, both biblical, for the created light: shekhinah (“indwelling”; Exodus 25:8) and ʿamud he-ʿanan (“pillar of cloud”; Exodus 33:9). I see no reason for 56 his doing this, unless he knew of some Jewish theology that identified those biblical objects with the created light. Although I cannot point to any known cosmogony Texts in that matches Maimonides’s “constructed” rival, such a cosmogony would not be at Transit all surprising. Recall that the “pillar of cloud” is mentioned prominently in Sirach 24:4, in a passage whose intertextuality with Genesis 1 has been noted.43 In view of the anti-kalam context in which this argument is deployed, we are justified in concluding that this theology would have recognized gradations of light, culminating in a material deity. Though Maimonides does not hint at this, these ancient theologians may well have identified the deity, too, with light; such notions were not unknown in antiquity.44 The last passage I would like to present in this section comes fromGuide 1.72, where Maimonides provides a schematic account of the workings of the cosmos. He names light and motion, both deriving ultimately from the heavens, as the two factors responsible for the mixing and compounding of the four elements on earth. In his exposition, Maimonides uses two different Arabic words, thus distinguishing between two types of light. The distinction between the two terms is maintained in the translation by Shlomo Pines: “All this takes place through the intermediary of the illumination [ḍawʾ] and the darkness [on earth] resulting from the light [nūr] in heaven and from heaven’s motion round the earth.”45 Pines unfortunately provided no note. Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation (which has been far more influential in spreading Maimonideanism than the Judeo-Arabic original) is mangled in the common printed editions. However, even in the good manuscripts (as noted by Salomon Munk in his French translation; see below), the same Hebrew word (or) is used to render the two different Arabic terms. In his translation, al-Harizi also uses the same Hebrew word for both.46 Though he is careful to record the terminologies, Munk says nothing about their significance. The only Maimonidean scholar to do so, as far as I am aware, was Rabbi Yosef Qafih, who observes in a note to his Hebrew translation that Maimonides clearly distinguished between the two terms, the one referring to the light reaching us from the sun, the other to the “reception” of this light by the atmosphere. Moreover, Rabbi Qafih finds that the different terms serve to emphasize that light and darkness on earth are not independent or self-subsisting, “but rather a product of the sun’s light in its orbit.”47 Finally, there is a real problem in Maimonides’s original Judeo-Arabic text with regard to the pronomial suffix-hā appended to nūr; being feminine, it must refer back either to a feminine singular or to a plural of either gender. Unfortunately, the only antecedent available is falak, “orb,” which is masculine singular. Salomon Munk, ever alert, addresses the issue in a long note, but there is no grammatical solution available.48 It seems to me, however, that Rabbi Qafih and commentators such Efodi (who glossed Ibn Tibbon’s translation) took the implied invisible antecedent to be the sun. Maimonides apparently does not assign any metaphysical distinction to the two types of light. Indeed, the absence of any metaphysics of light in Maimonides, as well as the lack of interest in the metaphorical usages of light in biblical texts, is noteworthy.49 57 Let me sum up this section. Bar Ḥiyya is an important terminal in the transit of texts across cultural and linguistic borders. Earlier disquisitions on different Gradations gradations of light, very likely coming ultimately from Hellenistic philosophy but of Light and Pairs perhaps from other sources as well, were worked by him into a very Jewish exposi- of Opposites tion of the Genesis story, directed by both the biblical text and a clear eschatological agenda. Traces of related theories can be found in proto-Kabbalistic writings, such as the Bahir and the ʿIyyun writings, as well as in some passages from Maimonides’s Guide. All of these give evidence for the diffusion of the theory in Mediterranean communities. Temurah

Let me now proceed to the second scientific theory that plays an important role in Bar Ḥiyya’s eschatology. In the second chapter of the Scroll, Bar Ḥiyya states that scripture has divided time into two parts: one correlates to light, and thence to peace and benefit for the world, while the other matches up to darkness, and from there to evil. He elaborates: “Each element of these pairs [zugot], which are peace and evil, and day and night, corresponds to its counterpart from the other pair. Thus peace, good, prosperity, wisdom, and everything that benefits the world correspond to day, which is the time of light. War, evil, poverty, corruption, and whatever brings no benefit to the world, correspond to night, which is the time of darkness” Scroll( , 16). This idea, that all of creation exists in pairs, recurs frequently throughout the Scroll. Israel Sandman has found the same theory described briefly in Bar Ḥiyya’s treatise on intercalation.50 I consider it to be fundamental to Bar Ḥiyya’s natural science and worldview. The Hebrew term most often employed by Bar Ḥiyya in connection with this theory of opposites is temurah, a biblical and Mishnaic term meaning “substitute” and used in connection with animal sacrifice. Should someone pledge an animal for sacrifice, but afterward—in contravention of biblical law—declare that another animal will take its place, both the original pledge and its temurah, or substitute, are sanctified. (See Leviticus 27:9–10.) The notion that creation is made up of pairs of opposites is found in a number of early medieval texts. Looking at them serves to establish that texts conveying this concept transited the Mediterranean before Bar Ḥiyya or contemporaneously with his literary activity. With this background we are in a better position to appreciate Bar Ḥiyya’s creative adaptations. Temurah is mentioned at the very end of one version (that commented upon by Saadia Gaon) of Sefer Yeṣira, one of the seminal cosmological texts studied by medieval Jews. Its dating is very controversial, but all agree that it antedates Bar Ḥiyya.51 The final chapter tabulates the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the components of the cosmos that correspond to each one. For nineteen of them (the first three having a special status, in line with the teaching of Sefer Yeṣira), these include pairs of opposites—for example, life and death, peace and evil, wisdom and ignorance. The penultimate passage explains, “This is the 58 rule. Some of these join with each other, while others join with others; these with those, those with these; these substituting for [temurat] those, and those substituting Texts in for these.” Though much has been published onSefer Yeṣira, the passage just cited, Transit which, as noted, appears in just one version, has drawn hardly any attention at all. The idea of pairs or opposites substituting one for the other is the central doctrine of another Hebrew text, Midrash Temurah. The reception history of that tract (also known as Sefer Temurot) is not well known.52 It may even antedate Sefer Yeṣira, but its impact was certainly far less; its diffusion, or perhaps more likely, its suppression, may well be connected to the Albigensian heresy and Provençal Jews’ fear of getting caught up in that bloody episode.53 As far as I know, only one scholar, Adolph Jellinek, who worked over a century ago, tried to make historical sense of Midrash Temurah.54 He detected influences of both Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Pseudo-Galenic dialogue on the soul, and he concluded that Midrash Temurah was written in the first half of the thirteenth century. That dating cannot be upheld any longer, in my view.55 Midrash Temurah is related to Sefer Yeṣira; it may have emerged out of the same milieu, and it may well have been one of the sources exploited by Bar Ḥiyya. Characteristically for a midrash—and in contrast to the scientific and philosophical literature of the thirteenth century—Midrash Temurah reports dicta in the name of ancient sages, such as Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Aqivah,56 and a goodly portion of it is a homily on the list of opposites found in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes. The fundamental cosmological principle is enunciated in the first chapter: “Every single thing has a partner [shutaf], and it has a substitute [temurah]; without the one, there would not be the other.” The same first chapter continues with a discussion of life and death—a pair of opposites if there ever was one. In elaborating upon the biological processes responsible for life and death, Midrash Temurah makes use of humoral theory; blood, phlegm, and the two biles are mentioned explicitly, and so also the qualities and relationships of the four classical elements. The remainder of the midrash is far less scientific in its idiom. Just how thetextus receptus evolved, and the independent circulation some of its components may have enjoyed, is an intriguing issue whose investigation lies beyond the purview of the present study. Pairs of opposites play an important role in the Source of Wisdom, one of the treatises associated with the ʿIyyun circle; recall that this “circle” also held to a doctrine of different forms of metaphysical light. Scholem describes the function of these pairs as follows: “The name of God—so the book begins—is the unity of the movement of language branching out from the primordial root. This movement grows out of the primordial ether, in the form of the thirteen pairs of opposites that are at the same time the thirteen middoth of divine government.”57 The theory of opposites is expounded as well in an early Arabic treatise,Kitāb al-Rusūm waʾl-izdiwāj waʾl-tartīb (The book of norms, pairedness, and rankings), attributed to ʿAbdān (d. 899), the earliest author of the pre-Fatimid Ismailis, and recently published by Wilferd Madelung and Paul E. Walker.58 The literary form, and, of course, the covenantal frame of reference are totally different from bothSefer Yeṣira and Midrash Temurah, but the fundamental doctrine is very much the same. Kitāb 59 al-Rusūm offers a very clear expression of the very same theory taught byMidrash Temurah and hinted at by Sefer Yeṣira: Gradations of Light and Pairs All things seen and unseen have of necessity two aspects: coarse and fine; and of Opposites every thing coarse and fine is of necessity of two kinds: alive and inanimate, one of which is the contrary of the other, and its partner and mate. All things exist in their paired relationship, joined to the other, mutually contrary, one in need of the other. One is an indication of the other, so that from the mate its mate can be deduced, and by the contrary its contrary, and by the like its like. Each partner is unrecognizable except through its partner.59 In my estimation, the theory deployed in the texts that I have just surveyed is idiosyncratic, very different from the major competitors in the realm of natural philosophy (such as hylomorphism or atomism), and, for that reason, it is fitting here to posit a common source.60 The theological trajectories of the texts, however, as well as the literary forms in which they are embedded, are very different. As monotheistic texts, they naturally contrast the duality inherent in the cosmos with the singularity of the deity. Beyond that shared feature, however, the texts have little, if anything, in common. Kitāb al-Rusūm is a Shiite text, and the possible connection between Bar Ḥiyya and the Shia is worth exploring further, though, I must add immediately, Kitāb al-Rusūm is as yet the only Shiite text (indeed, the only Islamic text) to teach the theory of conjugate opposites. Bar Ḥiyya’s account of the transmigration of the unique “pure soul” from its initial infusion by God into Adam, until its diffusion through a community constituted by Jacob’s twelve children (Scroll, 72), calls to mind Shiite doctrines of the transmigration of the soul of the Mahdi or messiah; these in turn play an important role in the thought of a later Hispano-Jewish thinker, Judah Halevi.61 Bar Ḥiyya may have learned of the theory of paired opposites by way of Kitāb al-Rusūm . It is equally possible, however, that he borrowed the theory of paired opposites from Midrash Temurah, or even from the Saadia version of Sefer Yeṣira. There is no reasona priori why he could not have made use of two or all three of these texts. In any event, Bar Ḥiyya certainly expanded the theory and made other modifications, so as to adapt it to his own cosmological ideas. The importance he attaches to this theory is manifest, I submit, in his positioning it at the beginning of the Scroll, in a passage that I will take up next. In this passage (Scroll, 5), Bar Ḥiyya tells us that there are two kinds of temurah, or, if you wish, that temurah is used in two senses. It refers in the first instance to pairs of entities, or, better said, to pairs composed of an entity and its counterpart nonen- tity. Entities possess form (ṣura) and existence (qayyama) or reality (ḥashshasha),62 and they bring benefit to creatures of this world. None of the above applies to non- entities. Examples of the first group are life, light, and wisdom, theirtemurot being death, darkness, and ignorance, respectively. In the second instance, one speaks of the temurah of qualities (aikhuyot), such as red taking the place of black, or the bitter changing into sweet; note that Bar Ḥiyya mentions one of the Aristotelian catego- 60 ries, quality. In this second case, both members of the pair of opposites are real and sensible. As we have already seen, these concepts taken from Greek medical theory Texts in are all noted in Midrash Temurah.63 Transit Near the end of the Scroll, Bar Ḥiyya states that he has discovered, or succeeded in proving (ʿalah bi-yadeinu ), “that God counts the years and days for the wicked in this world by the reckoning of the moon, but He counts the years of the righteous by the reckoning of the sun.” It seems likely that this odd idea—odd because Jewish thought traditionally associates lunar calendars with the Jews, hence they ought to be good—is also related to the idea that everything comes in pairs. This same theory gives Bar Ḥiyya insight into a key image of the Genesis story, “the tree of knowledge of the good and the bad.” Since all change in the world is due to the existence of pairs of opposites, and all are subsumed under the pair of categories good and bad (so we must conclude), knowledge of the good and the bad brings with it knowledge of all processes. Thus whoever has access to that very special tree will know all change and alteration in the world (Scroll, 61): “ ‘the tree of knowledge of the good and the bad’: Whoever attains zokheh[ ] this tree and connects to it will understand and sense [ḥoshshesh] all the alteration in the world [temurei ha-ʿolam] by which they change, which are good and bad, life and death, and the like.” But temurah does not apply to all things; some are unchanging, having no opposite. In the Genesis creation story, God is said to “make” (va-y aʿas Elohim) only those things to which temurah—and the related, or synonymous, terms ḥilluf and gilgul— applies. The light created on Day One, which is “the light of the supernal world,” is not susceptible to temurah, and so God is not said to have “made it.” Does this mean that the light mentioned in the third verse of Genesis is uncreated, as Philo maintains? Or does this mean that its coming-into- being was by a different means than those things that God is said to have “made”? Bar Ḥiyya may be finessing a very delicate point here! Later on (Scroll, 28), Bar Ḥiyya adds that the word va-yaʿas establishes gilgul ha-ḥiddush, the recurrent or cyclic coming-to-be, on whatever was created on that day. Once again, Bar Ḥiyya refers not only to the beings created on a given day, according to Genesis, but also to what I call the “cosmic day,” that is, the millennium corresponding to the creation day.64 In this way Bar Ḥiyya can explain why the verb va-y aʿas does not appear in the story of Day Five; instead, one finds the verbva- yivr aʾ. The reason for this is not the creatures introduced on the fifth day of the Creation, but rather the defining event on the cosmic scale: the destruction of the Second Temple, which took place in the fifth cosmic day. The absence va-of y aʿas in this case indicates that the destruction will not recur. A nice combination of the ideas of pairs of opposites, their intermixing, and the seven “days,” referring here both to the seven days of Creation as well as to the seven cosmic days, is found in this passage from the second chapter (Scroll, 35):

when “the sin of the Amorites was complete” [cf. Genesis 15:16], and our forefathers inherited the land [of Israel], three cosmic days [yimot ha-ʿolam] 61 were completed [as well]; they were the days of darkness. There remained four cosmic days, from Day Four through Day Seven. Three days had a mix- Gradations ture of light and darkness, as it was written about each one of them, “And of Light and Pairs there was evening and there was day.” For this reason, they were fit to have of Opposites a mixture of good and bad, of good deed and crime. These three days were divided into two parts: one and a half days of good, and one and a half days of bad and exile. The fourth day was nothing but good, wisdom, and Torah. And for this reason we say that from the fourth day from the giving of the Torah, which is the seventh cosmic “day,” redemption and rescue will come, with the help of God, just as the Torah was given on the fourth “day.” In sum, then, theories about the progressive degradation of light, from quasi- divine metaphysical light to the light perceived by our eyes (and even lower, according to some schemes), as well as the pairing of all components of the universe, circulated in different versions around the Mediterranean. Abraham Bar Ḥiyya feasted upon this rich variety of source materials. However, by no means did he merely paste selections from his “influences” into hisScroll . Instead, he creatively adapted the theories and data at his disposal, combining them and mustering them for the interpretation of biblical verses and, ultimately, for the production of a highly original work of Jewish eschatology.

Notes

1. Cited as Scroll hereafter. I use the edition of Adolf Poznanski,Sefer Megillat ha-Megalleh von Abraham bar Ḥiyya, rev. and intro. Julius Guttmann (Berlin: Mekiza Nirdamim, 1924). A Catalan translation with introduction and very helpful notes was published by J. Millàs i Vallicrosa, Llibre reve- lador: Meguil·lat Hamegal·lè (Barcelona: Editorial Alpha, 1929). All citations in this article are my own translations from the edition of Poznanski-Guttmann. Mention must also be made of the recent dissertation by Hannu Töyrlä, “Abraham Bar Ḥiyya on Time, History, Exile, and Redemption” (Ph.D. diss., Åbo Akademi University, Finland, 2012). 2. One can find lists of Bar Ḥiyya’s scientific writings in encyclopedia entries, including the Wikipedia entry on him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_bar_Hiyya), which should not be dismissed out of hand. I will be concerned here mainly with Bar Ḥiyya as philosopher. Again, most histories of medieval Jewish philosophy give Bar Ḥiyya a chapter or subchapter; see, most recently, Colette Sirat,A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 97–104, and the literature cited there. However, for the most part the themes to be taken up in this chapter have not been taken up anywhere else. One recent paper worth noting here is Jonathan V. Dauber, “ ‘Pure Thought’ in R. Abraham bar Ḥiyya and Early Kabbalah,” Journal of Jewish Studies 60 (2009): 185–201. 3. On these anonymous or pseudonymous early Hebrew authors, see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and On Studying History Through Maqbilot (Parallels),” Aleph 2 (2002): 169–89. 4. The passage is found inScroll , 22. See most recently Sirat, History of Jewish Philosophy, 101–2. The most extensive discussion is that of Gerhard [Gershom] Scholem, “Reste neuplatonischer Spe- kulation in der Mystik der deutschen Chassidim und ihre Vermittlung durch Abraham bar Chijja,” Monatschrift für die Wissenschaft und Geschichte des Judenthums 75 (1931): 172–91; though toward the end of his study Scholem does examine the text of Bar Ḥiyya, his attention is mostly focused upon the way the five worlds figure in the thought of the so-called Ḥasidei Ashkenaz. My suggestions for con- textualizing Bar Ḥiyya’s teaching are not those of Scholem. In his attempt to understand these terms, Israel Efros, “Studies in Pre-Tibbonian Philosophical Terminology: I. Abraham bar Ḥiyya, the Prince,” 62 Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 17 (1927): 323–68, at 342–43, is grasping at straws. 5. The problems are especially evident in the attempts to understand some hints that Maimon- ides drops in his discussion of the creation in Guide 2.30; see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “ ‘The Making of the Texts in Firmament’: R. Ḥayyim Israeli, R. Isaac Israeli, and Maimonides,” Shlomo Pines Jubilee Volume, part I Transit [= Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8] (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1988), 461–76 [Hebrew]. 6. References to Bar Ḥiyya’s book on the calendar (Sefer ha-ʿIbbur) and on astronomical com- putations (Heshbon Mahalakhot ha-Kokhavim), where raqiʿa can only be understood to refer to the heavens, are cited by Elieser ben Iehuda (Eliezer ben Yehudah in modern spelling) in his Thesaurus Totius Hebraitatis et veteris et recentioris, vol. 14 (Jerusalem: Talpiot, 1951/1952), 6732. See also Efros, “Studies,” 357; Efros translates raqiʿa as “sphere” and, far less felicitously, “sky,” though Efros too is aware that Bar Ḥiyya always has in mind the heavens rather than the atmosphere; hence Efros chooses odd- sounding phrases such as “eight skies” and “the highest all-encompassing sky.” 7. Julius Guttmann,Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1973), 127, suggests that Bar Ḥiyya “expands the traditional Neoplatonic scheme of a tripartite intelligible world into a five-level model by superimposing above the intellect a world of light and a world of dominion.” 8. Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. Allan Arkush (Philadelphia: Jewish Publi- cation Society, 1987), 351. 9. This is even clearer if we combine the first two, leaving us with just four gradations. As I understand him, Bar Ḥiyya says that the rabbis have done just that, and I think that he has in mind here Sefer Yeṣira. 10. Midrash Rabba, Genesis (part 1), trans. H. Freedman (London: Soncino Press, 1939), 22. 11. Gad Freudenthal, “A Twelfth-Century Provençal Amateur of Neoplatonic Philosophy in Hebrew: R. Asher b. Meshullam of Lunel,” Chora 3–4 (2006): 155–82; William Chittick, “The Five Divine Presences from al-Qunawi to al-Qaysari,” The Muslim World 72 (1982): 107–28; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “A New Look at the ‘Treatise on Unity’ Ascribed to Maimonides,” Tarbiz 65 (1996): 109–28 [Hebrew]. 12. Bayard Dodge, ed. and trans., The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2:777 and n. 152. 13. See, for example, Scholem, Origins, 96 n. 77, where Bar Ḥiyya and a Manichean text are proposed as alternative sources for the “form of light” mentioned in Sefer ha-Bahir . 14. I am grateful to Gabor Buzasi for sharing with me a copy of his fascinating paper, “The Sun in Proclus’ Theology,” which he presented at theProclus in the Abrahamic Traditions conference (Istanbul, December 2012), and for additional information that he provided me in our electronic correspondence. The main reference in Proclus on the gradation of light is H. D. Saffey and L. G. Westerink, eds.,Theo - logia Platonica (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1974), 2.4, p. 33 (cf. 2.7, p. 45). There he lists only intelligible, intelligible-intellectual, intellectual, and visible light, but in 6.12, p. 59 of the same work, he seems to add a fifth phase of light as well, which is between the intellectual and the visible, called hypercosmic. In general, he says (2.4, p. 33, lines 19–21) that there are as many phases of light as the levels of reality that they illuminate. See further John Dillon, “The Theology of Julian’s Hymn to King Helios,”Ítaca: Quaderns catalans de cultura clàssica 14–15 (1999): 103–15. 15. Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Miʿrāj al-Sālikīn , in Majmūʿa Rasāʾil al-Imām al-Ghazālī , ed. Ibrāhīm Amīn Muḥammad (Cairo: al-Tawfīqiyya, n.d.), 83–84. 16. Scholem, Origins, 350 and n. 302, which refers to infra, 357. 17. Slightly different forms of the Hebrew adjective are employed by BarḤ iyya (niflaʾ) and Ḥam- mai (muflaʾ). The connection between the two texts was noted by Mark Verman,The Books of Contem- plation: Medieval Jewish Mystical Sources (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 43 n. 29. 18. A good recent discussion can be found in Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s “De Anima” in the Latin West (London: The Warburg Institute, 2000), 108–19; on the Latin tradition in particular, see also Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 392–393. 19. Robert Grosseteste, On Light (De luce), trans. and intro. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942). Cf. Adeena Krentzman-Ossi, “The Implications of the Metaphysics of Light of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya,” Granot 2 (2002): i–xvii, which is mostly devoted to possible links between Bar Ḥiyya and Pseudo-Dionysius and does not bear directly upon the issues we are raising here. 20. Like its Arabic homonyms (from the root f.y.ḍ), the Hebrew means literally “to overflow” but 63 also (following a metaphor employed in other languages as well) “to emanate.” 21. Medieval cosmologists agreed that there is no vacuum in the heavens, but they did not or could not say much about the matter that fills them. Gradations 22. Correcting zehirot to zoharot, if zehirot is not a printer’s error. of Light and Pairs 23. José Millás Vallicrosa, La obra enciclopédica Yesodé ha-Tebuna u-Migdal ha-Emuna de R. Abra- of Opposites ham Bar Ḥiyya ha-Bargeloni (Madrid and Barcelona: n.p., 1952). 24. Hebrew guf, usually “body,” but here it seems to mean “matter.” 25. This may mean “shiny enough to be reflective,” as in the widely diffused simile of the burnished mirror; perhaps the text is corrupt and should be emended to “possessing the capacity to receive the shining of the light.” 26. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Cosmology and Cosmogony in Doresh Reshumot, a Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Torah,” Harvard Theological Review 97 (2004): 199–228, esp. 216–17. 27. De sacrificio, cited from R. M. van den Berg, Proclus’ Hymns: Essays, Translations, Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 20; see also 21. 28. John Finamore, “Iamblichus on Light and the Transparent,” in The Divine Iamblichus: Philos- opher and Man of Gods, ed. H. J. Blumenthal and Gillian Clark (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 57–64, at 58 and references in n. 8. 29. Philo, On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses (De Opificio Mundi), trans. F. H. Colston and G. H. Whitaker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 22–25. 30. See, however, Langermann, “Beginnings,” 181–83. 31. On this most seminal work of early Jewish mysticism (for lack of a better word), see Daniel Abrams, The Book Bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994). 32. Ibid., 183 (passage 98). The translation is my own. The two types of light are briefly noted by A. Pirtea, “Divine Light, Plotinus, Sefer ha-Bahir,” Studia Hebraica 9–10 (2009–2010): 294–314, at 302 and n. 32. Nogah is also found in a work ascribed to Ḥai or Ḥammai (Verman, 43), and it not primordial, but “generated from ʿarafel.” Verman (189–190) worries quite a bit about this term, especially how nogah, a type of light, could be generated from ʿarafel, “fog,” and decides (with some hesitation; the reader must study his entire discussion and especially note 80) that nogah is really a mistaken transcription of the Spanish noche, “night.” However, Verman has not noticed the usage of Sefer ha-Bahir , nor has anyone noticed the afterlife of the Sirach’s understanding of the biblical “pillar of cloud,” which I will bring to light (pun intended) below. See also Cheryl Taylor, “Paradox upon Paradox: Using and Abusing Language in The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Texts,” Parergon 22 (2005): 31–51, at p. 47: “When . . . The Cloud attains its redefinition of the darkness of thevia negativa as a superabundance of spiritual light, the affective content is transformed but the visual content stays formless and unbounded. The cloud-darkness- light imagery central to The Cloud’s organization reworks traditional elements from the Bible and writings of the via negativa.” Taylor studies the use of language in the writings of fourteenth- century English “contemplatives”; it seems, however, that they were not the first to transform the cloud into a source of light. 33. In Bar Ḥiyya’s Higgayon ha-Nefesh , ed. E. Freimann (Leipzig: n.p., 1860), 3, the raqiʿa is said to be immersed and hidden within the surrounding resplendent (bahir) light that was created on Day One. A systematic comparison of Bar Ḥiyya’s views on light and the heavens in all of his writings would be very worthwhile, but it lies beyond the purview of the present study, which is limited to the Scroll. 34. Joseph Dan, History of Jewish Mysticism and Esotericism, vol. 4, The Gaonic Period and the 11th–12th Centuries (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2008–12), 282. 35. There may be an oblique reference to Bar Ḥiyya and light in a passage from Maimonides’s Guide, 1.2, where Maimonides sarcastically refers to a sinner who is rewarded by being transformed into a star in heaven. Maimonides may be mildly mocking Bar Ḥiyya’s Higgayon ha-Nefesh (ed. Freimann, 5), where the person who is wise but evil is elevated to the celestial realm, above the lower, earthly realm, but is incapable of reaching the highest world. 36. Lawrence V. Berman, “Maimonides, the Disciple of Alfārābī,” Israel Oriental Studies 4 (1974): 154–78. 37. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 275; emphasis added. For further discussion, see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Maimonides’ 64 Repudiation of Astrology,” Maimonidean Studies 2 (1991): 123–58, repr. in Maimonides and the Sciences, ed. Robert Cohen and Hillel Levine (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). 38. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hai Gaon’s Letter and Commentary to ʿAleynu: Further Evidence of Texts in De Leon’s Pseudepigraphic Activity,” Jewish Quarterly Review 81 (1991): 365–410, at 387. The texts named Transit in the title belong to the ʿIyyun circle discussed above; in the manuscripts, Ḥai and Hammai are often interchanged. 39. See, for example, the exposition of the twelfth premise of themutakallimūn at the end of Guide 1.73. In a note to the passage in his justly acclaimed modern Hebrew translation (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2002), 1:223 n.119, the late Professor Michael Schwartz remarks that the kalām books do not adopt the position that Maimonides attributes to them, namely, that the senses cannot be relied upon. But at the very end of the passage, Maimonides himself discloses that his source is not the Muslim theologians but Galen. 40. Guide (trans. Pines), 229, slightly modified. 41. S. Munk, ed., Le Guide des égarés (Paris: n.p., 1856), 1:455 n. 1. 42. Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon, Moreh Nevukhim, Dalālat al-Ḥaʾirīn, ed. and trans. Yosef Qafih (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1972), 1:249 n. 9 to the edition. 43. Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam: Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 75–77. 44. Adherents of the late antique cult of theos hypsistos worshipped light; though the precise nature of the connection of this cult with Jews and Judaism remains a matter of controversy, strong links certainly are in evidence. The affinity with Judaism and the worship of light is recorded by Gregory of Nazianus, cited by Stephen Mitchell, “The Cult of Theos Hypsistos Between Pagans, Jews, and Christians,” in Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, ed. Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, 81–148 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 95. Some faint traces of this ancient cult may have reached Maimonides. One may also wonder whether there is any connection between the vestiges of this cult and a controversial issue in Jewish liturgy. Saadia Gaon (882–942) omits the phrase, “May You shine a new light on Zion, and may we all merit to see by means of its light,” from one of the blessings of the daily morning service. Saadia explains that “we do not recite a blessing over the light that will be in the future, in the messianic era, but rather over the light that we see each morning.” See Naphtali Wieder, “Fourteen New Genizah-Fragments of Saadya’s Siddur Together with a Reproduction of the Missing Part,” in Saadya Studies, ed. Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, 245–83 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943), 262. The phrase is omitted by Maimonides and in several other rites as well. Perhaps these authorities, in an effort to suppress vestiges of light-worship, wished to confine ritual references to light to visible light alone. 45. Guide (trans. Pines), 187. 46. I checked the unique manuscript, ms Paris, BnF héb. 682, fol. 69b. 47. Qafih,Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon, 1:201–2 n. 38. 48. Guide (trans. Munk), 1:362 n. 2. 49. That Maimonides might have said more is illustrated by a chapter from Joseph Albo’sBook of Principles (Sefer ha-ʿIqqarim) on light (or) as a multivalent term. That chapter is a calque on many chapters from the first part of theGuide that are devoted to the multiple meanings of Hebrew words. Why did Maimonides choose not to devote a chapter to this key word for religious imagery? I take up this question in a book now in progress on Maimonides. 50. Israel Sandman, “Biblical Hermeneutics in Abraham Bar Ḥayya’s Book of Intercalation,” in Pesher Nahum: Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages, Presented to Norman (Nahum) Golb, ed. Joel L. Kraemer and Michael G. Wechsler (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2012), 203–13. (Whatever reasons Sandman may have for preferring the spelling Ḥayya, it introduces unnecessary confusion into the field.) 51. See Langermann, “Beginnings,” as well as the article by Steven Wasserstrom in the same issue of Aleph. 52. For the most recent discussion, see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “A Different Hue to Medieval Jewish Philosophy: Four Investigations into an Unstudied Philosophical Text,” in Studies in the History of Cul- ture and Science: A Tribute to Gad Freudenthal, ed. Resianne Fontaine, Ruth Glasner, Reimund Leicht, and Giuseppe Veltri (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 71–89, esp. 79–82. 65 53. This explanation was suggested by the late Israel Ta-Shma; see Langermann, “Different Hue,” 82. 54. Adolph Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch , part 1 (repr., Jerusalem: n.p., 1938), xx. The Pseudo-Galenic Gradations dialogue has been studied most recently by Ermenegildo Bertola, “Un dialogo Pseudo-Galenico sui of Light and Pairs problemi dell’anima,” Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 60 (1968): 191–210. of Opposites 55. Langermann, “Different Hue,” 79–82. 56. See here ibid., especially 79–80. 57. Scholem, Origins, 332. 58. Wilferd Madelung and Paul E. Walker, “TheKitāb al-Rusūm waʾl-izdiwāj waʾl-tartīb , attributed to ʿAbdān (d. 286/899): Edition of the Arabic Text and Translation,” in Fortresses of the Intellect: Ismaili and Other Islamic Studies in Honour of Farhad Daftary, ed. Omar Alí-de-Unzaga (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 103–66. 59. Ibid., 113. 60. One may trace the theory of opposites back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander. See Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 159; Gad Freudenthal, “The Theory of Opposites and an Ordered Universe: Physics and Metaphysics in Anaximander,” Phronesis 31 (1986): 197–228. 61. The connection between Halevi and Bar Ḥiyya on this point, and the possible Islamic source for the teaching, was pointed out already by B. Ziemlich, “Abraham b. Chijja und Judah Halewi,” Mon- atschrift für die Wissenschaft und Geschichte des Judenthums 29 (1880): 366–74; see the summary of his study in Poznanski’s introduction to the Scroll, xxi–xxii. The classic study is now Shlomo Pines, “Shīʾite Terms and Conceptions in the Kuzari,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 165–251, reprinted in The Collected Works of Shlomo Pines, vol. 5, Studies in the History of Jewish Thought, ed. Warren Zev Harvey and Moshe Idel (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997), 219–305. 62. This is the correct translation ofḥ ashshasha; this same translation is found in Scholem, Ori- gins, 63 n. 24 as well. Efros, “Studies in Pre-Tibbonian Terminology,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 17 (1926): 129–64, at 159, notes correctly that the term is “unusual,” but his translations—“impression,” “perceptibility”—are infelicitous. 63. It may be relevant to add in this connection that one of the titles of Aristotle’s Meteorology reported by al-Kindī may be translated “Treatise on extremes, that is, things that are opposed to one another.” See Peter Adamson and Peter E. Pormann, The Philosophical Works of al-Kindī (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 283 and n. 15. 64. On these cosmic days, see Scholem, Origins, 471.

Texts in Transit Four

Cryptography in the Late Medieval Middle East

From Mosul to Venice?

Leigh Chipman

Description

The Mongol/Mamluk period was one of cultural efflorescence, even under the constant threat of warfare among various powers and empires. Despite this hostility, knowledge moved across the borders, in both directions, between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. This knowledge was transferred by travelers, traders, soldiers, diplomats, and spies. The last two groups made much use of secret writing.1 The term “secret writing” comprises many different things, from the use of lemon juice as invisible ink through the enciphering of diplomatic dispatches to the occult books of alchemists. Secret writing has been used in diplomacy since antiquity, but scholarly research on cryptology seems to be somewhat limited; perhaps most research is classified. Within Islamicate culture, the main study still remains Bosworth’s 1963 article on the section on codes and ciphers in al-Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (see below),2 which formed the basis for the historian of cryptology David Kahn’s claim that “cryptology was born among the Arabs. They were the first to discover and write down the methods of cryptanalysis.”3 This may be so, but the rest of his book expresses a point of view according to which cryptology was raised and reached maturity in Europe, as Kahn—and most other historians of cryptology—focused on developments in the chanceries of Renaissance Italy, and then in France.4 This point of view changed in 1980, following the discovery by a group of Saudi scholars of a manuscript containing several cryptological treatises in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul.5 Thismajm ūʿa, ms Aya Sofya 4832, holds works attributed to various scholars active in the vicinity of the Abbasid court, including the philosopher and mathematician al-Kindī (d. 260/873), as well as several treatises dating to the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. The cryptological methods recorded there are more sophisticated than had been hitherto suspected, predating (by several centuries) the European usage of such methods as letter frequency, polyalphabetic substitution, and messages with no word-dividers. These findings led Simon Singh to suggest that “Islamic discoveries in science and mathematics strongly influenced the rebirth of science in Europe, and cryptanalysis might have been among the imported knowledge.”6 This chapter will concentrate on the ways and means of encrypting poetry and prose collected in the writings of three medieval Arabic authors whose works were found in the Süleymaniye majmūʿa and whose lives span the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods: Ibn Dunaynīr (d. 627/1229), Ibn ʿAdlān (d. 666/1268), and Ibn al-Durayhim (d. 762/1368). The abovementioned al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418) was a legal scholar and a secretary in the Mamluk administration in Egypt. His Ṣubḥ al-aʿs hā fī ṣināʿat al-insh āʾ provides a detailed overview of the theoretical and practical knowledge required of a secretary, together with copies of actual documents as a guide to official correspondence. As noted above, the section on codes and their decipherment is one of the few sources on Arabic cryptography to be widely known, thanks to Bosworth’s article. Al-Qalqashandī relies to a great extent on Ibn al-Durayhim, and in the following discussions, his remarks will be noted mainly where they differ from the latter’s. I should point out, however, that al-Qalqashandī appears to be the only author of the period to discuss secret writing in the form of invisible inks, of which he gives a list.7 Before I deal with these three authors and the methods proposed by them, some remarks about the technical terms I shall use are in order. Cryptography is the science or study of techniques of secret writing, such as codes and ciphers, and especially the processes and methods of making and using such secret writing, while cryptanalysis is the science of translating or interpreting (colloquially, “breaking”) such secret writings whose key is unknown. A cipher is a method of encrypting the plaintext by substituting letters/signs for the original letters of the message. codeA is a method of encrypting the plaintext by substituting a sign or signs for each word or expression in the original message. Steganography refers to methods of hiding the existence of a secret message (as opposed to cryptography, which merely hides the meaning of a message). Finally, two important forms of ciphers: monoalphabetic substitution, in which each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a certain other letter or symbol, 68 and polyalphabetic substitution, in which each letter of the alphabet is replaced by more than one other letter or symbol. Most of the ciphers reported by our authors Texts in are steganographic or substitution ciphers of one kind or another. Transit The Authors Turning now to the biographies of the cryptologists, certain interesting parallels appear. Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad Ibn Dunaynīr al-Lakhmī was born in Mosul in the second half of the seventh/twelfth century and was executed at Ṣubayba (Qalʿat Namrūd) in 627/1229 by al-Malik al-ʿAzīz ʿUthmān. A cipher clerk in the service of the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt and Syria, he was celebrated in the biographical dictionaries of his day as a poet, critic of poetry, and cryptologist. The Saudi editors quote this information from the entry in al-Aʿl ām,8 itself based on data from a manuscript held by one Aḥmad ʿUbayd of Damascus, and that gentleman’s further reading in Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Tārīkh Dimashq, the relevant volume of which is yet unpublished. All that I have been able to find so far in direct primary sources is the entry in al-Ṣafadī’s Wāfī, as follows:

Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī, the honourable imam [al-imām al-fā ḍil] Sharaf al-Dīn Ibn Dunaynīr, the diminutive of dīnār. He has a book [called] al-Kāfī fī ʿulūm al-qawāfī [The sufficient in the sciences of versification] and a book [called] al-Shihāb al-nājim fī ʿilm waḍʿ al-tarājim [The fiery comet in the science of composing ciphers] and a book [called]al- Fu ṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall al-tarjama [The clarifying chapters on the solution of ciphers]. He lived at the time of al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Ghāzī, son of the sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf b. Ayyūb.9

In addition, al-Aʿl ām reports that he was descended from the pre-Islamic kings of Lakhm and that he served first theamīr Asad al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Mihrānī and then, from 614/1216, the sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ayyūb, composing poetry in praise of them. According to his dīwān, he is supposed to have begun composing poetry around 606/1208. Furthermore, al-Aʿlām claims—without going into detail—that Ibn Dunaynīr was a heretic and a freethinker (mulḥid wa-zindīq ) who drank wine. Quoting Ibn al-Shāʿir’s ʿUqūd al-jumān fī shuʿarāʾ hādhā al-zamān (The strings of pearls of the poets of this period),10 Ibn Dunaynīr is described as a beautiful youth with a ruddy complexion (shabb ashqar jamīl al-ṣūra) who knew grammar well and understood cryptography. He travelled in the service of princes in this capacity, but his heresy was his downfall, as papers in his hand expressing unorthodox views were shown to al-ʿAzīz ʿUthmān, who executed him. Unfortunately, the specifics of these unorthodox views are unknown, but we certainly have a connection here between cryptography and court intrigue. Our second author, ʿAfīf al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn ʿAdlān, was also born in Mosul, in 583/1187. He studied in Baghdad and taught in the mosque (jāmiʿ) of al-Salāḥ Ẓāhir in Cairo, where he died in 666/1268.11 He served the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, al-Malik 69 al-Ashraf Muẓaffar al-Dīn Mūsā (d. 635/1237), and it is to him that Ibn ʿAdlān dedicated his treatise al-M uʾallaf lil-Malik al-Ashraf fī ḥall al-tarājim (The composition for Cryptography al-Malik al-Ashraf on the solution of ciphers), in the hope of becoming a member in the Middle East of court.12 In addition to his cryptological writings, Ibn ʿAdlān is noted as an adīb, specifically as a student of Abū al-Baq āʾ al-ʿUkbarī (d. 616/1219), the grammarian and Ḥanbalī jurist, and is often given the title of al-naḥwī. He seems to have been particularly renowned for solving verse ciphers within a given period of time, as much of his biography is devoted to such anecdotes (see below). Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ibn al-Durayhim was a third native of Mosul, born there in 712/1312. A wealthy orphan, Ibn al-Durayhim received the finest education his mother could buy, studying Qurʾan reading (qirāʾāt) and Shāfiʿī jurisprudence, grammar, and hadith. He was considered a prodigy in both rational and received sciences, described as “fording the oceans of traditional sciences and crossing the expanses of the rational sciences” (khāḍḍ biḥār al-manqūl wa-qa tʿ mafāwiz al-maʿqūl), particularly in mathematics and its various branches. As an adult, his career as a merchant saw him traveling between Cairo and Damascus. Accord- ing to the biography recorded by his contemporary Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Ibn al-Durayhim composed over eighty treatises, of which some twenty were devoted to cryptography and other occult subjects, such as the meaning of the mysterious letters at the beginning of some chapters of the Qurʾan (asrār al-ḥurūf allatī fī awāʾil al-suwar). He was sent from Cairo as the emissary of the sultan al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn to the king of Ethiopia, but died at Qūs, on the way, in 762/1362. In his biographies, he is occasionally compared to the elusive Ibn Dunaynīr,13 and it is perhaps worth noting that both men bear obscure names that are diminutives of coins—dīnār and dirham. The significance of this is uncertain. As can be seen, all three men were known not only as cryptographers, but for their skill in language generally, and especially in grammar and poetry. This is not surprising, for although today university courses on cryptography will be found in departments of computer science or mathematics, this is due to technological advances. In the past, sensitivity to language was one of the cryptologist’s most vital tools, and knowledge of the intricacies of grammar was particularly helpful. In fact, it seems that combinatorics developed in the Islamic world from the ninth century on the basis of al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad’s phonological analysis of the Arabic language, and cryptographers made use of his theories in order to calculate letter frequencies and the frequencies of permutations, substitutions, and combinations.14

The Methods: Prose Let us proceed to the books themselves. Ibn ʿAdlān divides his treatise into three sections: a preface, rules, and a conclusion. In the preface, he sets out the requirements for a cryptanalyst. These include intelligence; linguistic ability and experience; knowledge of prosody, rhymes, letter and word frequencies; practical experience; and knowledge of the methods of enciphering. Despite this last requirement, al-Muʾallaf lil-Malik al-Ashraf contains only methods for cryptanalysis and no discus- 70 sion of methods of cryptology. The preface contains only a very basic description of how to encipher: “To encipher, you inscribe the plain letters of any language, under Texts in which you draw agreed signs. Then you write using these signs, and when you reach Transit the end of a word, you put a sign for a space.”15 The twenty methods or rules (Ar.qaw āʿid) of cipher-breaking that Ibn ʿAdlān proposes involve letter frequency (single letters, bigrams, trigrams, and even quadro- grams), the structure of the enciphered text (its length, probable words such as stock opening and closing phrases), and the structure of the Arabic language (finding the initial al- and the likely adjacent letters, which letters may be repeated twice at the beginning or end of words, and so on). He also gives rules for finding whether the cryptogram makes use of a spacer symbol dividing letters into words. Two rules (16 and 17) are devoted to deciphering encoded poetry, which will be discussed further below. The book ends with a practical example of an enciphered message, using a cipher where names of birds substitute for letters of the alphabet. Ibn ʿAdlān takes the reader step by step through his algorithm:

1. Counting the different “symbols” appearing in the cipher text. In this case, there were nineteen; i.e., the cryptanalyst has to find nineteen different letters. 2. Establishing the frequency of the different letters. This ranged from eighteen times to once or twice. 3. Establishing the cipher for spaces between words (if it is used), checking and dismissing possibilities according to the length of the words created. 4. Deciphering bigrams, such as min, thumma, ʿan, inna, etc. 5. Finding the definite articleal- , which can be preceded only by certain letters. 6. Deciphering longer words, checking constantly for coherence. As more and more bird names are replaced by letters, it is sometimes necessary to go back and change the decipherment, if the plaintext does not make sense. As words appear, the context may change and make something that was previously meaningless able to be understood.

At no point does Ibn ʿAdlān discuss the reasons for enciphering and/or deciphering messages. He boasts of his cryptanalytical skills; perhaps to him, the necessity of enciphering is too obvious to be mentioned? According to Schwartz, during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, cryptology became increasingly militarized. She views Ibn ʿAdlān’s references to his work for various members of the Ayyubid ruling family and to messages “intercepted . . . from some frontiers” as evidence for his appealing to cryptology’s military significance in order to boost the likelihood of his in fact receiving a post at the court of al-Malik al-Ashraf Mūsā.16 Alternatively, of course, Ibn ʿAdlān can be viewed as part of a tradition of linguistic virtuosi going back to the Abbasid court in Baghdad and even earlier. Ibn Dunaynīr’s major work on cryptology is Maqāṣid al-fu ṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall al-tarjama (The purposes of the clarifying chapters about the solution of ciphers; fols. 54a–80a). The emphasis here is on cryptanalysis, and Ibn Dunaynīr quotes 71 his sources, some of which are other treatises in the Süleymaniye majmūʿa, such as al-Kindī’s Risāla fī istikhrāj al-muʿammā (Epistle on cryptanalysis) and the “Two Cryptography Essays” by an anonymous author. Furthermore, Ibn Dunaynīr divides his book into in the Middle East two parts, the first dealing with the cryptanalysis of prose ciphers, and the second with the cryptanalysis of poetic ciphers. In both cases, he discusses the principles and tools of cryptanalysis, types of enciphering, and algorithms of cryptanalysis. Like the other authors, he ends the book with practical examples. As noted above, Ibn al-Durayhim composed some twenty treatises devoted to cryptography and other occult subjects. Until the discovery of the Süleymaniye majmūʿa, it appeared that none of these works was extant. Here I will discuss only Miftāh al-kunūz li-īdāḥ al-marmūz (The key to the treasures that make clear what is hidden). This treatise (fols. 47b–59a) seems to be the most comprehensive of all those preserved in the Süleymaniye majmūʿa, dealing with the qualities required of a cryptanalyst, eight types of enciphering, a discussion of the morphology of Arabic, and an algorithm for breaking messages enciphered by substitution. It concludes with two practical examples. Ibn Dunaynīr’s and Ibn al-Durayhim’s treatises have many points of similarity and will be discussed together. Both begin, as noted above, with a list of the cryptanalyst’s tools. Ibn Dunaynīr opens his treatise by stating the two aspects of successful cryptanalysis: acquaintance with letter frequencies and thorough knowledge of the possibilities of combination and noncombination. Furthermore, the cryptanalyst must be familiar with methods of enciphering and should himself be endowed with intelligence, intuition, and an inherent flair for the subject, “otherwise he would never stand to benefit by any of the methods conducive to cryptanalysis. Nay, some may have the plaintext already right under their very nose, yet they are not well-guided to read the cipher message contained therein.”17 In his discussion of letter frequency, Ibn Dunaynīr points out the importance of knowing what language the plaintext was composed in, as frequency changes from language to language. Because of this, he says, he will limit himself to methods of enciphering in Ara- bic. Ibn al-Durayhim makes no such explicit statement; however, he points out the necessity of a thorough knowledge of the language and grammar of the cryptogram and discusses the numbers of letters and their possible combinations in a variety of languages, including Mongolian, Armenian, Latin, French, Turkish, and Hebrew.18 The first five speak to cryptography’s importance in diplomacy and foreign affairs, while the last seems a throwback to its past as a learned recreation at the caliphal court.19 As we saw earlier, enciphered poems—of which more below—continued to be a source of amusement into the Mamluk period. Ibn al-Durayhim divides ciphers into four general categories: transposition (e.g., writing words backwards), substitution, augmentation or reduction of the number of letters, and the use of cipher devices.20 Ibn Dunaynīr, in contrast, divides enciphering into simple and composite. Simple enciphering comprises letters changing their forms (substitution ciphers of various kinds) and letters retaining their forms (transposition ciphers), while composite ciphers are combinations of various 72 simple ciphers. He begins by enumerating simple ciphers and their methods of decipherment. The first method is a simple monoalphabetic substitution, along the lines Texts in of Caesar’s cipher, where a given letter of the alphabet is merely replaced by another Transit one.21 Naturally, letter frequencies remain the same, as is true also of the second method, where letters of the alphabet are replaced by symbols: “If encipherment is done by maintaining the forms of letters but changing their relative positions in relation to the surrounding letters, it is very easy to cryptanalyse. Observing the incoherence of the connection, you realize that letters have been interchanged. You try to restore their original arrangement time and again, and you are in line for hitting the mark.”22 In both cases, guessing the opening and/or closing formulae of letters will solve the cipher quite quickly. Ibn al-Durayhim expands on this, noting that the letters of the alphabet form a circle—thus laying the theoretical groundwork for the cipher disk (a circular device comprising two circular and concentric plates, one fixed for plaintext and the other movable for the cipher text), used as late as the American Civil War, and previously thought to have been invented by Leon Battista Alberti in his De cifris (1466/7). He also points out that many cipher alphabets may be created by substituting the following or preceding letters at various distances for the plaintext letters:

Using the numerical alphabet order [i.e., abjad-LC], by substituting for each letter the one immediately following; thus the letterb āʾ is substituted for alif, and jīm for bāʾ, and so on until the end. The letteralif is substituted for ghayn. This is because letters are like a circle [i.e., they are viewed as located on a circle circumference or a disc—eds.], in that the last letter is replaceable by the first letter as if to follow or precede it. Example: MḤMD (clear text); NṬNH (cipher text). You may substitute for each letter every third letter next to it, so that MḤMD (clear) becomes SYSW (cipher), and ʿLY becomes ṢNL; or every fourth letter, so that MḤMD becomes ʿKʿZ and ʿLY—QSM, and so on and so forth till the end of letters. This results in 28 cipher alphabets.23

If this idea is converted into tables, we end up with something that looks very like the sixteenth-century Vigenère tables.24 Something even closer is created by Ibn al-Durayhim’s proposal to use a keyword or key sentence to form a polyalphabetical cipher—this would have been unbreakable at the time.25 The steganographical ciphers reported by both authors include hiding the words of the message among “null” words that create a story or plausible letter,26 or embroidering the distance between various holes representing the letters of the alphabet on a length of cloth.27 In another method, used by Ibn ʿAdlān in his practical example as well, each letter is encrypted by a word on a particular theme, such as the name of a bird, or a derivative of such a word.28 These, too, could be made to form a story. Additional cipher devices included chessboards and the use of colored beads. In the first case, each square is allotted a letter and the message is spelled out by the placing of the chessmen.29 73 In the second, each letter of the alphabet is assigned a bead of a different color and the beads are strung so as to spell out a message.30 Cryptography Both Ibn al-Durayhim and Ibn Dunaynīr deal quite briefly with transposition, in the Middle East in which the plaintext is enciphered by changing the order of the letters, a huge methodical anagram, as it were.31 This is the very first method to be mentioned by both, but of course it is the least secure cipher. Ibn Dunaynīr’s parallel to Ibn al-Durayhim’s third class is enciphering by the addition of null letters (which should not be vowels) to the plaintext or by the omission of letters in order to create the cipher text.32 The Methods: Poetry We turn now from the cryptanalysis of prose to that of poetry. The first reaction of anyone familiar with Arabic poetry to the idea of encrypting it may very well be, Why would anyone bother? Is poetry not hard enough to understand in plaintext? Despite this, there appears to have been an established tradition of poetry encryption, as the treatise attributed to al-Kindī in the Süleymaniye majmūʿa already discusses this. Indeed, the majmūʿa contains several treatises devoted solely to the cryptology of poetry: that of Ibn Ṭabaṭabā (d. 322/934; fols. 48a–53a), that of the “Author of Adab al-sh uʿarāʾ” (dates unknown, but after Ibn Ṭabaṭabā and before Ibn Dunaynīr; fols. 119b–133a), and two treatises of al-Jurhumī (dates unknown; fols. 80b–81b, 83a–86b). These works, which will not be dealt with in detail here, are the sources of the discussion of the cryptanalysis of poetry in the writings of the Ayyubid and Mamluk authors under consideration. They are evidence for the importance of poetry in the recreation of the learned bureaucrats of the Abbasid court and its successors; from the twelfth century, poetic cryptography appears to have been discouraged on the grounds of field security.33 According to Schwartz, “poetic cryptology’s popularity encouraged a bureaucratic backlash, which attacked poetic cryptology for its uselessness and indis- cretion, and fostered prose cryptology’s official use.”34 Despite this, as shown by the anecdotes in the cryptographers’ biographies, the former continued to be a source of amusement for the learned. For example, much space in Ibn ʿAdlān’s tarjama is taken up by anecdotes about his cipher-breaking and riddle-solving abilities. Two such tales, reported by al-Ṣafadī, follow. The first is told by a certain al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Salām:

Muḥammad b. al-Jahm wrote to me in code (fī al-m uʿammā):

rubbamā ʿālaj al-qawāfī rijālun fī al-qawāfī fa-taltawī wa-talīn un ṭāwaʿathum ʿayn wa-ʿayn wa-ʿayn wa-ʿaṣathum nūn wa-nūn wa-nūn Often men have dealt with versification and versification became intricate and easy by turns ʿAyn and ʿayn and ʿayn are obedient to them and nūn and nūn and nūn are disobedient to them

He [= Ibn ʿAdlān] translated these two verses for me with difficulty and 74 wrote: “ʿayn and ʿayn and ʿayn like that, and this was hard for me, and it took me two hours to translate them.” I said to him: “How do you manage to Texts in understand ciphers and make words of satire in place of these words, as Allāh Transit the Exalted said: “layer upon layer of darkness” [Q 24:40, Pickthall trans.]?” So he said to me: “Had you not heard this poem before?” And I said: “No, by God,” and he said: “. . . the meaning of the two verses: that the material should be understood and not brought in prose or verse or criticism, so that the firstʿa yn stands for ʿarabiyya, and that is grammar proper, and the second ʿayn stands for ʿarūḍ, prosody, and the third ʿayn stands for ʿibāra which is the best-chosen expressions.” The second tale is told by Ibn ʿAdlān himself:

... Ismāʿīl al-Masmūl, who belonged to al-Ṣalāḥ b. Shaʿbān al-Irbilī, made these verses for me to interpret for al-Ṣalāḥ:

wa-mā nabtun lahu fī kulli ghuṣnin ʿuyūn laysa tunkiruhā al-ʿuqūl idhā basaṭūhu talqāhu qaṣīran wa-in qabaḍūhu tabsiruhu yaṭūl It has no growth in any branch; eyes that the minds do not acknowledge When spread, it will meet it shortly and if grasped, its gaze will lengthen

I said to him: This is a frame shabaka[ ] for hunting birds. He began to revile me, so I said to him: I have already taken it down, and I need nothing more of it, and he stopped reviling me.

Surprisingly, in both cases the questioners’ response to receiving the correct answer is not satisfaction or pleasure, but anger and vilification. I am not sure what to make of this, but apparently telling riddles was not a mere harmless pastime, but rather one with definite consequences, at least in terms of prestige. In the works under discussion here, poetic cryptography appears briefly or as the second part of the book. Ibn ʿAdlān devotes qāʿida sixteen and seventeen of al-Muʾallaf lil-Malik al-Ashraf to cryptanalyzing poetry. As this requires knowledge of prosody and rhyme, each qāʿida deals with one or the other. Beginning with prosody, Ibn ʿAdlān points out the importance of introductory formulae, such as qāl al-sh āʿir, indicating that the next few words are poetry rather than prose. Knowledge of prosody, especially of the number of letters in a line of verse, or better, a hemistich, can help find the end of a poetic section embedded in prose, and divide those letters into possible words. Rhyme is even more important a tool, as the existence of “surplus” letters helps indicate that therāwī is in fact the previous letter and thus the surplus must be a long alif, wāw, or yāʾ, with the last being the most frequent. These principles are not new. Ibn ʿAdlān does not name his sources, however, and for a more detailed 75 treatment we turn now to Ibn Dunaynīr. Ibn Dunaynīr devotes chapters 35–57 of his book Maqāṣid al-fu ṣūl to the crypt- Cryptography analysis of poetry ciphers. According to his editors, in this section he relies mainly in the Middle East on al-Kindī, Ibn Ṭabaṭabā, and the “Author of Adab al-shuʿarāʾ.” 35 Beginning with a reiteration of the tools of the trade common to the cryptanalysis of both poetry and prose (i.e., letter frequency, possible letter combinations, and the frequencies of the latter), Ibn Dunaynīr then sets forth the specific requirements for one who would cryptanalyze poetry. These are knowledge of prosody, rhyme, and metrical structure; being appreciative of poetry, both having the ability to write verse himself and having committed a great deal of poetry to heart; and extensive cryptological experience. Despite what Ibn al-Durayhim and al-Qalqashandī seem to imply (see below), as far as Ibn Dunaynīr is concerned, cryptanalysis of poetry is not a matter for beginners. After briefly discussing the five metrical circles and sixteen poetical meters, Ibn Dunaynīr moves on to what he and the “Author of Adab al-sh uʿarāʾ” call being “insight- ful in writing” (baṣīran bil-kitāba ), that is, understanding the rules and principles of writing in Arabic. The topics covered here include the use of the definite articleal- and the word patterns related to it; bigrams and their frequency; the relation between a verse’s meter and the number of letters in it; orthography (letters pronounced but not written and vice versa);wāw , yāʾ, and hamza and how they help or hinder the cryptanalyst; and prefixes and suffixes. Ibn Dunaynīr also discusses problems less often encountered, such as very long words without theal- ; nonsense verse of sound meter, and its opposite, unsound meter and language, due to the poet’s inferiority; and the verse’s being too short to allow for frequency analysis. Despite the last- mentioned problem, it is agreed that enciphered verse is usually much shorter than enciphered prose. Finally, two practical examples allow Ibn Dunaynīr to demonstrate his algorithm of poetical cryptanalysis. Starting with a series of apparently unrelated words, beginning with saʿd, fahd, fahd, ward, he describes the process of cryptanalysis:

Having found thirty-four letters, I concluded that the verse belongs toal-basī ṭ al-makhbūn metre. It also came home to me that the last word involved the rhyme, which was of the overlapping type as it consisted of three vocalized letters lying between two neutralsukūn s. I further perceived that the final letter of the second hemistich is identical with the final letter of the first hemi stich. Sorting out the letters according to their order of frequency, I elicited first and foremost the name of God allāh( ), utilizing the repetition of the letter lām in it and the fact that His name all-often goes in front position. I thus labeled the lettersalif , lām and hāʾ. Then I checked the form of the letter mīm and found it repeated six times, i.e., exceeding in frequency the form of the lettersalif and lām. Therefore I held it would probably bemīm . Switching over to the next frequent form of the lettery āʾ, I found it recurring three times, and I made it yāʾ. Thereupon I took up the tetragram (four-letter 76 word) following the name of God, with the letterslām , yaʾ and mīm already known, and sampled such words as: yaslam, yaʿlam, yaẓlam, etc. to reserve Texts in judgement on it for a while. I now sought the next word—a trigram [three- Transit letter word] the middle letter of which was still covert, the initial and terminal letters beingalif and yāʾ respectively. By sampling words such as ummī, abī, annī, the following got out as possibilities: allāhu yaẓlamu ummī/abī/annī, which I immediately dismissed as out of the question. Of these words I had my heart set on annī, promptly turning my assumption to the word yaʿlam instead of yaẓlam by extension, and thus sounding meaningful and poetical. The next word was another tetragram beginning and ending with the letter mīm. I guessed at words such as mughram, mughzam and the like, but the context soon lent credence to mughram as the apposite choice, and so the word-group read: allāhu yaʿlamu annī mughramun. Now I looked into the next word which was a trigram ending with the lettermīm . Experimenting with letters in the light of contextual connection, the wordbi- kum developed. It was along these lines that cryptanalysis was carried out.36

The end result, the verseallāh u yaʿlamu annī mughramun bi-kum / wa-kull u jāriḥatin minni tuḥibbukumu—roughly, God knows how much I am besotted with you, heart and soul—was found using the following steps:

1. Calculating the number of letters in the verse in order to determine the meter; 2. Inferring from this the type of rhyme; 3. Assuming that the rhyme letter at the end of the first hemistich is the same as that at the end of the entire verse; 4. Sorting letters according to frequency and thus eliciting letters such asalif , lām, hāʾ; 5. Checking the next high-frequency letters, such asmīm and yāʾ; 6. Experimenting with probable words, based on letters so far discovered; 7. Composing a group of words of sound meter and sense; 8. Repeating until the plaintext of the verse is revealed.

Comparison with Ibn ʿAdlān’s algorithm for cryptanalysis of prose above shows them to be basically the same. “Counting symbols” is equivalent to “calculating the number of letters in the verse in order to determine the meter.” “Establishing frequency” is identical to “sorting letters according to frequency and thus eliciting letters such asalif , lām, hāʾ,” and the like. “Deciphering bigrams” and “Finding al-” parallels “experimenting with probable words, based on letters so far discovered,” while “Deciphering longer words” is the last stage, “composing a group of words of sound meter and sense” and “repeating until the plaintext of the verse is revealed.” Only “finding a spacer” has no real parallel; it appears that Ibn ʿAdlān is helped by the fact that he assumes a spacer cipher to be the most frequent form, while Ibn 77 Dunaynīr seems to assume no spacers, making an initial identification of word length impossible. The poetic meter and the common forms of Arabic words have to replace Cryptography the spacer, in this case. in the Middle East Unlike Ibn ʿAdlān and Ibn Dunaynīr, Ibn al-Durayhim mentions poetry only in passing, saying that when a beginning cryptanalyst is given enciphered poetry to decipher, “poetry should be written to him in such a way as to enable him by the aid of meter to solve some letters,” such ash āʾ and tāʾ that denote the feminine, or long vowels. This same passage, as well as the expressional- man ẓūm wal-manthūr (poetry and prose) in another, is quoted by al-Qalqashandī, who makes no other references to enciphering poetry. Significance and Speculation

We have seen how ciphers were used; why and when was this done? This is a question difficult to answer—at least at this stage—without speculation. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, little research has been undertaken on cryptography in the Islamic world. Even in Adam Silverstein’s Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World,37 which devotes much space to intelligence, there is no mention of the use of codes and ciphers. The chapter on espionage in Reuven Amitai-Preiss’s Mongols and Mamluks38 is similarly devoid of any reference to secret writing. Very few state documents from this period have survived, so we have no actual examples of cipher texts, as far as I know. At the present state of our knowledge, it seems that David Kahn’s question, “Did the Arabs have black chambers?,” is still unanswerable.39 However, it may be that the diplomatic stage of the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods in the Middle East encouraged the use of ciphers. With a number of Crusader states, Ayyubid successor states throughout the Fertile Crescent, and then the Mongols to the north and east, the fragmented Middle East shows certain similarities to the many Italian city-states at the time of the Renaissance—a time usually considered a golden age for cryptography. Perhaps similar political situations caused similar flourishing of secret writing?

The Mosul Connection Let us return to the common characteristics of Ibn ʿAdlān, Ibn Dunaynīr, and Ibn al-Durayhim. All three were interested in language and served the Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers of Syria and Egypt—in the context of the period, it is unlikely that anyone but courtiers would have written on codes and ciphers, as only at court would espionage and entertainment have mingled with learning. To my mind, the most interesting characteristic that our three authors have in common is their origin outside the Ayyubid/Mamluk realm, in Mosul, under the rule of either Badr al-Dīn Luʾluʾ or a Mongol epigone. What, then, was happening in Mosul in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? We are quite well informed about political history for the first half of the thirteenth century, thanks to Ibn al-Athīr and Bar Hebraeus, and enough objets d’art have survived to indicate a prosperous and beautiful material culture, but—as in so many 78 other times and places of the Islamic Middle Period—not very much is known about the social and intellectual history of the city. A spot of detective work, however, Texts in brought me to the figure of the polymath Kamāl al-Dīn Mūsā b. Yūnus (d. 639/1242), Transit who, despite being a major attraction for wandering scholars in thirteenth-century Mosul and an important teacher of the famous mathematician and astronomer Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, has been denied an entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (first and new editions) and thus remains obscure to the majority of scholars. For the purpose of this chapter, he is significant as an example of the intellectual context in which our authors grew up, in which mathematics and language skills were intertwined. Kamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Maʿālī (or Abū al-Futūḥ ) Mūsā b. Yūnus al-Mawṣilī al-ʿUqaylī is described in the most glowing terms by Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, who provides a pedigree going back eleven generations. Students flocked from east and west to study both manqūlāt and maʿqūlāt with him.40 Ibn Abī Usaybiʿa reports that he answered questions on astronomy and other sciences posed to Badr al-Dīn Luʾluʾ by the “emperor of the Franks,” Frederick II.41 According to Ibn Khallikān, himself a student of Kamāl al-Dīn, the latter studied Shāfiʿī fiqh at the Niẓāmiyya madrasa in Baghdad for a few years, but otherwise spent his life in Mosul. Kamāl al-Dīn succeeded his father and taught in a mosque originally founded by the amir Zayn al-Dīn, lord of Irbil, but which became known as the Kamāliyya madrasa after him. Ibn Khallikān calls him unparalleled in combining of all the sciences (wa-jamaʿa min al-ʿulūm mā lam yajmaʿhu aḥad), listing—in addition to substantive fiqh, in which he was consulted by Ḥanafīs as well as Shāfiʿīs—exegesis (tafsīr), hadith, jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh ), theology (uṣūl al-dīn ), Arabic grammar and literature, and history, on the one hand, and logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, geometry, astronomy, music, and mathematics, on the other hand. Ibn Khallikān goes into great detail with regard to Kamāl al-Dīn’s mathematical skills. In addition to algebra and arithmetic based on the Greeks, he was familiar with a Chinese method (ṭarīq al-khi ṭāʾiyyīn); Ibn Khal- likān also notes that Kamāl al-Dīn used to study the Torah and the New Testament with Jews and Christians, and even to interpret these scriptures with them.42 In short, a true polymath, and apparently an open-minded one, too. Unfortunately, due to the wording of the biographies of Ibn ʿAdlān, Ibn Dunaynīr, and Ibn al-Durayhim, it is impossible to draw up an orderly list of their teachers, especially in the maʿqūlāt. In their day, Mosul had obviously become a center for mathematical studies, and it seems highly unlikely that they would have been unaware of Kamāl al-Dīn. The only direct connection I have found so far, though, is that Ibn al-Durayhim studied al-Ḥāwī al-ṣaghīr, an important manual of Shāfiʿī jurisprudence by ʿAbd al-Ghaffār al-Qazwīnī, with the qāḍī Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAbdallāh Ibn Yūnus, according to the commentary (sharḥ) of the latter’s father, the Kamāl al-Dīn under discussion.43 This “Mosul connection,” the fact that all three authors were born and at least partially raised in a frontier town that has been described as “caught on an uneasy middle ground between Mamluk Islam and the Islam of the Ilkhanids, suffocated in a waste 79 land roamed by petty princelings, mercenaries, and brigands; and whatever cultural production there might have been soon floundered in a babel of languages and dia- Cryptography lects. In the absence of one single dominant—and thus orientating—language, intel- in the Middle East lectual output dwindled into insignificance and sank into oblivion,”44 immediately draws attention. I obviously do not agree with this description, and certainly further research on the cultural and intellectual history of Mosul after Badr al-Dīn Luʾluʾ is needed, perhaps through the prism of biographical dictionaries—what Wadad al- Qāḍī has called “the alternative history of the Islamic community”45—rather than the more political point of view of the chronicles. Furthermore, it is precisely the multilingual and multiethnic composition of the city that may be significant for the history of cryptography. In contradiction to the author I have just quoted, it is quite possible that the so-called babel was instrumental in turning scholars’ thoughts to encryption, since even writing a known language in an unknown alphabet—the case of Judeo-Arabic comes readily to mind—is a form of secret writing. I might add that it is just around this time, or slightly later, that the use of chronograms—verses the sum of whose letters according to theabjad alphabet equals the hijrī year—to date public inscriptions becomes popular. This popularity seems to increase over time, to the extent that almost all late Ottoman-period inscriptions use this method.46 Using chronograms rather than simply writing the years, be it in words or in numerals, can perhaps even be considered a special form of enciphering poetry.

From Mosul to Venice? Furthermore, another important issue for the history of cryptography is the fact that Mosul was a station on the Silk Road, as shown by Marco Polo’s route to China.47 Venice, Polo’s homeland, was the first to establish a cipher bureau in 1145 or 1226, well before any other Italian city-state, just as it was beginning its rise to commercial supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean. During this time, Venice’s principal trading partner was the Mamluk sultanate. “Consuls were appointed to serve in the principal ‘colonies’ in Mamluk lands . . . in addition to the frequent dispatches, they had to write a full report or relazione on their return giving all details of the history, geography and customs of the locality,”48 which conceivably could have included the Mamluk use of ciphers. Venetian contact with the Islamic world shifted its focus to the Ottoman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and even more so after the Mamluks’ defeat in 1517. Thebailo of the Venetians in Constantinople, a combined consul and ambassador who oversaw the merchant community there, was considered to hold the most senior foreign posting in the Venetian diplomatic service, and the highest paid one, too.49 Surviving dispatches from this period include cipher texts.50 Early Venetian ciphers left consonantsen clair and enciphered only vowels— a method that suited Latin and Italian, but would have been meaningless in Arabic. Later, from the fifteenth century, diplomatic ciphers made use of special symbols, in addition to the letters of the alphabet, in monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic 80 substitutions. A common feature was a single symbol that enciphered two identical letters, perhaps as a result of the many double letters found in Italian spelling. Nulls Texts in were common, and this was also meant to make decipherment more difficult.51 Theo- Transit retical works on cryptology and cryptanalysis appeared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most famously the Venetian Leon Battista Alberti’sDe cifris (On ciphers, 1466/7), where the cipher disk is described for the first time in a European language, and the Neopolitan Giambattista della Porta’sDe furtivis literatum notis (On the writing hidden in books, 1563), which describes a polyalphabetic substitution cipher that was a forerunner of Vigenère’s “undecipherable cipher.” So far, the question of the sources of Italian cryptological knowledge has not been researched in depth, and most studies have been content to describe the theories. However, given the fact that even within Europe, it is difficult to trace precise and definite connections between the Italians mentioned above and a near contemporary in Germany, such as Trithe- mius (d. 1514)—leading to rhetorical questions of the type “Was this indeed a creatio ex nihilo, an invention by a stroke of genius, as so often suggested . . . 52?” —tracing such connections between theoretical cryptological writings in Arabic and in Latin seems an almost impossible enterprise. On the contrary, it is sometimes baldly stated that a certain writer on ciphers “was ignorant of the Arab treatises existing at the time.”53 Despite the possibility that similarities between methods of enciphering and cryptanalysis in the Islamic world and in early modern Europe may simply be a case of convergence, that is, similar environments giving rise to similar solutions to problems, I think that the case for migration of cryptological knowledge cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is now quite widely accepted that scientific knowledge in Arabic, particularly in astronomy, was transferred to Renaissance Europe via routes different from those of the Arabic to Latin translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, routes that involved the oral, rather than written, translation of manuscripts: “their contents, which were originally Arabic and Persian could now be directly assimilated into the Latin texts, without having to translate the whole text into Latin. This method of transfer of knowledge constitutes by itself a new phenomenon that is rarely acknowledged by all those who study the transfer of knowledge across cultures.”54 In the last decade, this picture has been complicated further with the addition of the Hebrew tradition. The links between Venice and Italy in general with the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire included Jews who travelled between the Christian and the Islamic realms for purposes of trade, learning, and pilgrimage, just like the Gentiles.55 Evidence of knowledge of late medieval Islamic astronomy in Hebrew has been found in the notebooks of Mordecai Finzi of Mantua (d. 1475),56 and especially in the Taʿlūmot ḥokhma by Moses b. Judah Galeano (Mūsā Jālīnūs), a Jewish polymath who had close connections at the court of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), visited Venice around 1500, and completed his book in Candia, the capital of Venetian-ruled Crete, in 1536.57 Furthermore, some of the active proponents of the new science in Italy were 81 fascinated by codes and ciphers,58 such as the abovementioned Giambattista della Porta, who, according to Saliba, was also interested enough in Arabic to plan to have Cryptography his Magia naturalis (Naples, 1559; English translation Natural Magick, 1685) trans- in the Middle East lated into Arabic. Indeed, della Porta used a praise poem in Arabic prefacing his 1610 book on meteorology, De aeris transmutationibus, to indicate the book’s worthiness.59 Oral transmission of knowledge is notoriously problematic for the historian, since the argument from silence can, of course, be made to prove anything. This being said, we do know that oral transmission of hadith continued to be important in Islamic culture well into the Mamluk period, despite the continuous rise in lit- eracy and in writing.60 Early modern Europe shows various methods of circulating scientific knowledge: “from oral communication, the writing of letters, lectures at the university, and manuscript dissemination, to . . . formal publication.”61 In other words, both in the Islamic world and in Renaissance Italy, a living tradition of knowledge migrating orally, as well as in writing, was available. We are hampered by the loss of pre-Ottoman archives in which the records of Middle Eastern “black chambers” may have been preserved; the differences between Arabic—as a language and as a script—and Latin will have caused some differences in usage, but the rise of cryptography in Italy precisely in times and places that had the most extensive connections with dār al-islām remains suggestive. The hints and clues mentioned above may be all there is. We may never be able to state conclusively that there was an Arab influence on Italian cryptology, but the possibility should not be ignored.

Notes

This chapter is the fruit of research originally begun in 2009 under the auspices of the Working Group on Migration of Knowledge at the Minerva Center for the Humanities, Tel Aviv University, headed by Rivka Feldhay. My research led me in various different directions, and versions of this paper have been presented a number of forums, most importantly at the conference on “Egypt and Syria under Mamluk Rule: Political, Social and Cultural Aspects,” held at Haifa University (April 2011) and as the Sixth Ulrich Haarmann Memorial Lecture at the Annemarie-Schimmel-Kolleg “History and Soci- ety in the Mamluk period (1250–1517),” Bonn University (September 2012). I thank my audiences for their enthusiastic and useful comments. I am especially grateful to the members of the subgroup on “Migration of Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin in the late medieval and early modern periods”—Tzvi Langerman (group leader), Ofer Elior and Roni Weinstein—for fruitful discussions, and to Keren Abbou-Hershkovits and Michal Biran, who read drafts of this paper. Robert Morrison’s suggestions much improved the final version of this paper. 1. For the transfer of knowledge between Venice and the Mamluks, see Deborah Howard, “Venice and the Mamluks,” in Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797, ed. Stefano Carboni (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 80, and references there. Mention of the importance of codes and ciphers for military and diplomatic purposes abounds in the treatises under discussion in the present article; for more on Italian cryptography, see note 4 below. For a later example of the use of codes in Venetian diplomacy, see C. Villain-Gandossi, “Les dépêches chiffrées de Vettore Bragadin, baile de Constantinople (12 juillet 1564—15 juin 1566),”Turcica 9–10 (1978): 52–106. 2. C. E. Bosworth, “The Section on Codes and Their Decipherment in al-Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā,” Journal of Semitic Studies 8 (1963): 17–33. 3. David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 93. 4. Ibid., 106–24. 5. This manuscript has been edited and translated by M. Mrayatī et al.,The Arabic Origins of Cryptog- 82 raphy (Riyadh: KFCRIS & KACST, 2004), 6 vols. The findings there have been studied in Ibrahim Kadi,al- “Origins of Cryptology: The Arab Contributions,”Cryptologia 16, no. 2 (1992): 97–126, and Kathryn A. Schwartz, “Arabic Cryptological Treatises from the 9th to the 14th Centuries” (undergraduate thesis, Cam- Texts in bridge University, Faculty of Oriental Studies, 2008); idem, “Charting Arabic Cryptology’s Evolution,” Transit Cryptologia 33, no. 4 (2009): 297–304. I thank Kathryn Schwartz for providing me with copies of her work. 6. Simon Singh, The Code Book (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 28. 7. Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī ṣināʿat al-inshāʾ (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya), 9, 229. 8. Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī, al-Aʿlām (Beirut: Dār al-ʿilm, 1990–2011), 1:62. 9. Khalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī al-wafāyāt: Das biographische Lexikon des Ṣalāḥaddīn Ḫalīl ibn Aibak aṣ-Ṣafadī (Beirut: Dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth, 2000), 6:126 (no. 2561). 10. This work has been published but is unavailable to me. 11. Al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī, 21:308–18; cf. Muḥammad b. Shākir al-Kutubī, Fawāt al-wafāyāt (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1972), 2:106–8; Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, Taʾrīkh al-islām (Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 2004), 57:221–22; al-Qāsim b. Muḥammad al-Birzālī, al-Muqtafī ʿalā kitāb al-rawḍatayn al-maʿrūf bi-tārīkh al-birzālī (Sidon: al-Maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 2006), 1:179–80. 12. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 3:38 [English]. 13. Al-Ṣafadī, Aʿyān al-na ṣr wa-aʿw ān al-ʿaṣr (Frankfurt: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, 1990), 2:355. 14. See Roshdi Rashed, “Combinatorial Analysis, Numerical Analysis, Diophantine Analysis, and Number Theory,” in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, vol. 2, Mathematics and the Physical Sciences, ed. Roshdi Rashed (London: Routledge, 1996), 377. 15. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 3:43 [Arabic]. 16. Schwartz, “Arabic Cryptological Treatises,” 39–40. 17. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 4:72. 18. Ibid., 3:52. 19. See the section on “The Abbāsid Court: Pairing Cryptology and Poetry for Amusement and Its Effects,” in Schwartz, “Charting the Evolution of Arabic Cryptography.” 20. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 3:56–68. 21. Ibid., 4:98–99. 22. Ibid., 3:82–83; 4:98–99. 23. Ibid., 3:62–63. 24. These are the invention of Blaise de Vigenère (d. 1596), who based them on the work of his Italian predecessors. The Vigenère table, or tabula recta, consists of the alphabet written out twenty-six times in different rows, each alphabet shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous alphabet. The encrypter makes use of a key to choose which row to use for each letter of the plaintext. See Singh, The Code Book, 46–51. 25. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 3:62–65. 26. Ibid., 3:74–75; 4:110–15. 27. Ibid., 3:68–69; 4:132–33. Bethany Walker suggested, in the discussion after the Bonn lecture, that this cloth may have been that used to wrap diplomatic dispatches, thus sending an open and a hidden message simultaneously. 28. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 3:104–13, 74–75; 4:136–37, 140–41. 29. Ibid., 3:66–67; 4:120–121. 30. Ibid., 3:82–85; 4:134–35. 31. Ibid., 3:56–61; 4:100–101. 32. Ibid., 3:66–67; 4:102–3, 106–7. 33. Schwartz, “Arabic Cryptological Treatises,” 21, 27. 34. Schwartz, “Charting Arabic Cryptology’s Evolution,” 301. 35. Mrayatī et al., Arabic Origins, 4:48. 36. Ibid., 4:182 [English]. 37. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civ- ilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 83 38. Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Īlkhānid War, 1260–1281 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 139–56. 39. David Kahn, “The Future of the Past—Questions in Cryptologic History,” Cryptologia 32 Cryptography (2008): 57. in the Middle East 40. Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, Majmaʿ al-ādāb fī muʿjam al-alqāb (Tehran: Muʾassasat al-ṭibāʿa wa-ʾl-nashr; Wizārat al-thaqāfa wa-ʾl-irshād al-islāmī, 2006), 4:264 (no. 3816). 41. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anb āʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-a ṭibbāʾ, ed. Niẓār Riḍā (Beirut: Dār maktabat al-ḥayāh, 1970), 410–411. 42. Ibn Khallikān, Wafāyāt al-aʿyān (Beirut: Dār al-thaqāfa, 1968–1972), 5:311–318. 43. Al-Ṣafadī, Wāfī, 22:67. 44. Percy Kemp, “Power and Knowledge in Jalili Mosul,” Middle Eastern Studies 19 (1983): 201. 45. Wadad al-Qadi, “Biographical Dictionaries as the Scholars’ Alternative History of the Muslim Community,” in Organizing Knowledge: Encyclopaedic Activities in the Pre-Eighteenth Century Islamic World, ed. Gerhard Endress (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 23–75. 46. See, e.g., Moshe Sharon, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, vol. 1: -A- (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 8, 10, 12, 36, 39, 41, and passim. 47. The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Orion Press, 1958), 24. 48. Howard, “Venice and the Mamluks,” 82. 49. Julian Raby, “The Serenissima and the Sublime Porte: Art in the Art of Diplomacy, 1453–1600,” in Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 92. 50. See note 1 above. 51. This paragraph is based on information from Aloys Meister,Die Anfänge der modernen diploma- tischen Geheimschrift (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1902). I thank Alexander Boxer for providing me with a copy of this book. 52. Gerhard F. Strasser, “Ninth-Century Figural Poetry and Medieval Easter Tables—Possible Inspirations for the Square Tables of Trithemius and Vigenère?” Cryptologia 34 (2010): 22. 53. The reference is to Cicco Simonetta (1410–1480), chancellor of Milan, in Augusto Buonafalce, “Cicco Simonetta’s Cipher-Breaking Rules,” Cryptologia 32 (2008): 64. Buonafalce also points out that “his elementary observations had been well known for more than a century by the cipher makers” (ibid.). 54. George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 95. 55. An example of relevance is the Soncino family’s printing business, which moved from Venice to other Italian towns, and thence to Istanbul and Salonika. See M. Marx, “Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino’s Wander Years in Italy (1498–1527),” Hebrew Union College Annual 11 (1936): 427–501, esp. 441, 477. 56. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Medieval Hebrew Texts on the Quadrature of the Lune,” Historia Math- ematica 23 (1996): 34–35. 57. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “A Compendium of Renaissance Science: Taʿalumot ḥoḵhma by Moses Galeano,” Aleph 7 (2007): 285–318; idem, “Medicine, Mechanics, and Magic from Moses ben Judah Galeano’s Taʿalumot Ḥokhma,” Aleph 9 (2009): 353–77. 58. For a full discussion of the connections between cryptography and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century in Italy and England, see Kristie Macrakis, “Confessing Secrets: Secret Com- munication and the Origins of Modern Science,” Intelligence and National Security 25 (2010): 183–97. 59. George Saliba, lecture given at the 2010 Festival della Scienza held in Genoa, Italy, online at http://www.festivalscienza.it/archivio-live-2010/Home/News/articol09704.html (accessed 8 July 2013). 60. On the hadith culture of Mamluk Cairo and Damascus, see Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), respectively. 61. The reference is to Isaac Newton. See Koen Vermeir, “Openness versus Secrecy? Historical and Historiographical Remarks,” British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2012): 170. 84

Texts in Transit Five

Remembering, Knowing, Imagining

Approaches to the Topic of Memory in Medieval Islamic Culture

Leonardo Capezzone

If we can speak of humanism in Islamicate history and define a set of historical-cultural experiences along the so-called classical age of Islam (second/eighth to seventh/thirteenth centuries), it means that a system of cultural values produced a texture of cultural relationships and of transmission of knowledge through issues that persisted over time and worked out a relationship with the past. Memory seems to be the connection point of that relationship, especially when memory of the past is nurtured and fostered by an effort (and by its own rhetoric) to discover and translate written sources in order to conceive of a set of unprecedented answers to ancient questions.1 The theme of memory will be analyzed here in varied ways. We shall follow memory, its persistence, and its transition from being a moral virtue to a human faculty located in a specific part of the brain. Along this transition, shifting epistemological approaches measured the new extent of “what’s to be known” and “how to know.” The authors here engaged in a transit of texts and contexts (as well as in discussions inherited from the past and projected into “modern” perspectives) are Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, the theologian ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Rufus of Ephesus, al-Fārābī, and Nemesius of Emesa, up to the “science fiction” of Pseudo-Jābir ibn Ḥayyān and his artificial creature whose brain must learn to know.

In the article devoted to Ibn al-Muqaff aʿ for the Encyclopédie de l’Islam, Francesco Gabrieli stated that the Adab al-kabīr is one of the few texts whose authenticity is generally acknowledged by scholars. He also

I would like to thank Robert G. Morrison for his suggestions and remarks, which I have taken into consideration. noted that the worldview offered by theAdab al-kabīr would be more appropriate for a man of the Renaissance than for a man who was living in the Islamic Middle Ages.2 With this statement (which mirrors an Orientalist attitude heavily criticized a few decades later by Edward Said), the Italian Arabist raised a question of analogy between different historical experiences in time and space. In other words, even without having a clear awareness of it, Gabrieli’s statement arises from the deep ambiguity that lies behind the issue of periodization (on which Marshall G. S. Hodg- son would have commented with pleasure). A comparative approach that sees, in classical Islamic culture, the “anticipation” (in a premodern frame) of themes and issues generally taken to belong to Western modernity often causes discomfort: the historian of classical Islam faces the ambivalence of a world in which modalities and categories of Late Antique thought still persist, and at the same time, from that world, questions come to light—and ways to ask questions—that could hardly be placed within the Middle Ages, a period actually borrowed from Western historiography. The historian of the Islamic “Middle Ages” constantly feels exposed to a disturbingly anachronistic methodology, as outlined by Nicole Laroux.3 In other words, the Zeitgeist or—in Foucauldian terms—the disposition of the epistème recognized by Gabrieli as “Renaissance” in Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s secular view seems to confirm, on the one hand, the discomfort of resemblance as a descriptive resource, and on the other, the limits of a periodization applied to a historical texture that actually never experienced a “Middle Age” (at least according to the original meaning of the label given by traditional Western historiography). That occasional historical-cultural definition of the Renaissance has been replaced with a more articulated and more motivated definition of humanism, one certainly more appropriate for synthesizing the values embodied by adab culture.4 Beyond the fact that such a definition better translates a particular feature of classical Islamic culture into an interdisciplinary concept common to historians, its consistency as a valid comparative description of a change could be verified by observing the way in which some concepts, or some issues, persist as phenomena of longue durée in an in-between zone that has experienced (and experimented with) the passage from Late Antiquity to a never-ending (pre-)modernity. The topic of memory ḥ( ifẓ), along with the complex of meanings it conveyed during the formative period of classical Islamic culture (the first/seventh to the fourth/elev- 86 enth century), is strongly persistent. It is more visible in the field of religious-traditional knowledge and, consequently, in scholarly competence focused on sciences epistemo- Texts in logically founded on revelation and language—on the one hand Qurʾan, traditions, and Transit jurisprudence, and on the other philology, rhetoric, and grammar.5 In narratives about the transmission of these forms of knowledge, memory seems to play a structural role within a probably false dichotomy between orality and writing6—both intended not as real practices of documenting knowledge, but rather as cultural representations of the constitution of a perfect text and its preservation. The reference to memory is the cornerstone of a perceived ambivalence between the ideal authoritativeness of an oral text and the great abundance of written texts, between the living voice of the master and the silence of an urban landscape filled with libraries. Not by chance, narratives about the transmission of knowledge often give an account of an underlying distrust of memory and its reliability, which makes verification of the text necessary in any case. The text is, however, the unavoidable referent: we see the recurrenttopos of a learned man who is said to have never had recourse to a book.7 If memory is related to oral transmission (especially in its cultural aspect), this is not the case in the constitution of an oral text; this is perceived as perfect only through the performance of the master’s reading. The master can dictate a text by memory, but the text has always been established previously. There is indeed a network of intersections between memories and writing, where memorization is often the last step of an already achieved process, generally through the writing of a text to which the student has listened.8 Within a similar view of transmitting knowledge, and within its ethics, memory is not conceived as the subject of an autonomous discourse, but according to its functionality. Thus, it seems to be a twofold device for preserving and learning knowledge.9 Furthermore, memory is regarded as a moral virtue: this particular feature has been pointed out by T. L. Librande in an article devoted to the biographies of 143 learned men whose names include the honorific title ofḥāfiẓ .10 It is just this ethical value, according to which memory is perceived, that will be transferred, and confirmed, from the realm of religious-traditional knowledge to that of adab secular culture. Memory becomes an intellectual virtue that helps define the portrait of the man of letters (or the humanist, if you prefer).11

Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ: The Historiographer’s Knowledge and the Memory of the Subdued

The short handbook known asal- Adab al-ṣaghīr attributed to Ibn al-Muqaff aʿ is probably the most explicit example of a text on the topic of memory from the cultural boundaries of the transmission of religious knowledge toward a field in which a modern historiographical sensitivity could easily recognize a humanistic air de famille. The main element for such a comparison is the secular tenet of the work; memory here is detached from the implicit connection that usually bonds it to a text, and from those representations of knowledge and its continuity in time that emanated from the forms of religious learning and education.12 The question of whether a false 87 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ could hide behind the Adab al-ṣaghīr has been raised on philological grounds by Gerhard Richter and Francesco Gabrieli;13 more recently, Mohsen 14 Remembering, Zakeri has provided fresh evidence in favor of a different, later authorship. If one Knowing, assumes the pseudepigraphic status of al-Adab al-ṣaghīr, this text appears doubly Imagining exemplary: the path along which a humanistic topic particular to the Abbasid age is treated—ethics (tahdhīb al-akhlāq)—comes across an older, persistent motif of memory, which entrusts its authority to the authorship of a classic (emblématique, just to recall ʿAbdalfattah Kilito’s terminology)15 and borrows the constitutive elements of a contemporary claim (third/ninth–fourth/tenth centuries), from a speech able to sound deliberately and likely ancient (first half of the second/eighth century). The handbook is addressed to a typical educated reader who lives in theadab courtly culture. The main issue throughout its pages is the preservation of knowledge, perceived as a necessary reflection, common to the whole history of mankind, and conceived within the metaphor of a heritage to be managed. This heritage is to be gathered, classified, and then fruitfully used, making it consonant with the historical period and functional to whoever wants to draw upon that treasure: the motif becomes an introduction and a frame to the whole treatise. The humanistic discourse carried out by adab culture, founded in this text upon the strong image of recover- ing the past, puts orality and writing, teaching and reading, and teacher and book (min kalām aw kitāb) all on the same level.16 The first step to taking advantage of the ancient legacy is the preservation of its speech (ḥifẓ qawl [var. kalām] al-muṣībīn), learned from the wise men of the past (wuffiqaliʾl -akhdh ʿan al-ḥukamāʾ), in order to increase knowledge.17 The author places his own speech at the confluence of three currents: religion, knowledge, and ethics (al-dīn waʾl-ʿilm waʾl-akhlāq).18 Within this space, a courtly disposition must adopt six virtues. The fifth is the virtue of a good memoryḥ ( usn al-w aʿī, where memory is rendered with al-waʿī ), strictly connected (as we will see below) with the sixth one, namely, the care, defense, and safeguarding of what is believed to be right and of that upon which convictions are founded (al-t aʿahhud li-mā ukhtīra wa-uʿtuqida).19 If the order chosen for the virtues aims to represent a progressive refinement of character, the author places at the top of such an ethical portrait two synonymous virtuous attitudes—al- w aʿī and al-t aʿahhud, a lexical distinction usually unified by the termḥ ifẓ. Yet in this case the distinction wants to signal a demarcation between remembering/learning and preserving/transmitting; that is to say, to signal the conceptual distance that separates memory as a physical faculty from memory as an intellectual virtue. Both the physical faculty and the intellectual virtue are merged into a single image of knowledge and its practices: “Memory and preservation are both the goal of any path to knowledge, because on man, by his own nature, oblivion is always incumbent. So it is necessary that when he recognizes a speech or an action carrying the good, his mind must be able to retain them in order to make them fruitful at the right time.”20 Here, the classical image of the memory archive, also familiar to the Latin world, is evoked (although in classical Islam, a mnemonic technique has never been described). Alongside this speech 88 about virtuous memory that claims to be ancient, we always find the silent presence of a text—a book, a document, a monument—behind the memory function and its Texts in functionality. Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaff aʿ meaningfully adds to the powerful concepts of Transit qawl and kalām (speech, or better,à la Foucault, discourse) aw kitāb. If we grasp the “premodern” resonance of the terms qawl and kalām, we can fully realize the cognitive image that those terms convey. The discursive power of the past is set around these two terms, and only when they are brought back to the apprehensible form of a (written) discourse can they rescue the past from oblivion. In fact, the two terms seem to suggest an enlargement of transmission models traditionally based on the khabar—a piece of information representing the fundamental constituent of a text, supported by a chain of transmitters that are able to guarantee its historicity. Melting two concepts like al-w aʿī/al-ḥifẓ and al-t aʿahhud in a unique intellectual construct, Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s virtuous memory surely encompasses that model of “textualizing” knowledge, but confronted with a body of knowledge founded on a wider although ineffable relationship between knowledge and history, it also reveals a suspicion—if one might say so—regarding the inadequacy of the khabar model of making history. In this context, the memory virtue is still bound to a view of education conceived as a summation of texts, but it begins to raise the question—in a germinal way—of a different model of producing, gathering, and transmitting knowledge, one able to leave aside the traditional techniques of orality. We are therefore faced with a concept of memory particular to the written text culture and to its technical apparatus,21 which claims a different cultural status within a broader, underlying reflection on what a source is. Actually it is possible to see, behind the profane virtue of memory, the premises of a historiographical view that aims to overtake the imperfect device of an individual memory. Not by chance, the classifications of knowledge that since the third/ninth century have been intended as a programmatic knowledge plan place the akhbār historiographical genre (founded on the systematic comparison of manifold individual memories) among those sciences epistemologically inherent to the tradition, while taʾrīkh, being devoted to universal history, is placed within the intellectual boundaries of adab. Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaff aʿ’s virtuous memory is still an individual memory, empowered by an explicit component of subjectivity that meditates in front of the heritage of a world history: the wise man (al-ʿāqil) should be concerned with the wisdom coming from the nations of the past, preserving its memory, enumerating it, classifying it (an yuḥṣiyahā), and processing it in practice (an yaṣnaʿa fī tawẓīfihā).22 Preserving the memory of knowledge is never separate from a weighted use of reason (lā ḥifẓ bi-ghayr ʿaql).23 Memory and understanding, al-ḥifẓ waʾl-fahm , are placed within a single rhetorical formula that makes them complementary to one another and subordinates them to reason: misusing reason represents, in fact, a bad use of preserving and understanding.24 It is clear that, given the perspective from which Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ speaks about memory as a virtue, he is alluding to a historical memory: namely, from his own point of view, the memory of people and cultures subjected to Arab dominion. From the point of view of the conqueror, it is the memory of a foreign knowledge, 89 an alien wisdom. Highlighting this point, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s alleged text can be better understood following two interpretations. The first one gives a glimpse of the politi- Remembering, cal use of memory and its discursive power, whereas the alien knowledge represents Knowing, ancient Greece and pre-Islamic Iran: in this profane treatise, memory seems to imply Imagining vindication of a historiographical aspiration after defeat. In order to enhance its view with a surplus of authoritativeness which comes from the past, both its author and his vindication are backdated. The virtue of memory—that is, the crucial point of this littleadab discours sur la méthode, so conceived and projected backward to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ—is also the supreme virtue particular to the historiographer. It is no coincidence that this meaning of history similarly inspires, in Islamic medieval culture, the genre of the “history of knowledge,” where every attempt to give knowledge a history (from Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist to Mīskawayh’s Jāwidān-i khirad, or Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī’s Ṭabaqāt al-umam) enters the subject matter with an account of the previous civilizations included within the Islamic boundaries and absorbed into the ideological frame of a legacy. Consequently, the historical memory to be preserved, as it is outlined by Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, is the self-representative vindication of a foreigner. Speaking about self-representation, in fact, allows us to grasp, behind Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s shade and his alien knowledge, another reading entirely based on subjectivity. As an Iranian subdued, he writes texts (whose authorship is undisputed, like al-Adab al-kabīr or al-Risāla fī ʾl-ṣaḥāba) in which he teaches the conqueror how an empire should be ruled; as a crucial figure of early Islamic humanism, he makes his otherness the key element in a sociocultural view that cannot do without him. When a false text—emanating from a strong literary convention according to which textual authorship is always bound to the most representative among the authors related to a specific genre25—is conceived to communicate a plea for preserving and transmitting a conquered knowledge, the alleged author can only be the most representative among the subalterns of his time. Such an attribution brings with it just one aspect of the manifold ways—not yet wholly explored—in which the historical tension between Arabs and Persians was expressed in cultural terms.26 The true Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ is translating memories from an alien language into the language of empire; the false Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, who would meditate on the meaning of the past, becomes a historian of those memories. Even without referring to historical psychology,27 the memory actually treated by Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ is different from memory as it was intended by the practices of transmission of religious-traditional knowledge. From this difference, an example of subjectivity in making history (and in our seeing the making of history) comes to light. It is something that defies any formalization, yet it marks the unfolding of history; it is the je ne sais quoi de l’histoire. . . . Perhaps the author’s absolute will to integrate the otherness of his own memory to the universal memory of the empire is a clue for the right reading of a forgery.

Is Knowing Remembering? Greek Sources and the Philosophical-Scientific Reflection 90 of the Fourth/Tenth Century

Texts in At the end of the fourth/tenth century, the qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī Transit (d. 415/1025) gives an example of how memory has a relevant role in knowledge theories. In some short passages of his main works (the Mughnī, a theological treatise, and the Sharḥ al-uṣūl al-khamsa, a commentary on the five principles of the Mutazilite theological school), ʿAbd al-Jabbār shows the role played by memory (ḥifẓ and tadhakkur, defining the twofold human faculty of retaining and remembering) within the process of knowledge acquisition. The epistemological frame of knowledge (ʿilm) to which the author refers is that of certain knowledge, ascertained and acquired through the theoretical exertion of naẓar.28 Memory as tadhakkur (remembering), being a mode of acquiring knowledge, can be confused with this tool in the service of reason. But whereas theoretical reasoning is in search of knowledge about something provided with qualities, tadhakkur recognizes something that has already been acquired.29 The author acknowledges a capacity to distinguish and to process knowledge in retentive memory (al-ḥifẓ), seeing in such an attitude another mode of knowing, probably connected with the establishment of the premises of a demonstrative syllogism: knowing the way a speech has been reported and arranged (al-ʿilm bi-kayfiyyat waṣf al-kalām wa-tartībihi).30 Here, within a wider theory of the relationship between knowledge and language, the author highlights a relevant point: retentive memory has recourse to language structures in order to arrange knowledge. This is inferred by the interaction, pointed out byʿ Abd al-Jabbār, among orality, writing, and memory (kalām, kitāba, ḥifẓ): whereas the distinguishing quality (immediately receptive) of speech is one of a phonetic kind (ṣawt), and that of writing is one of a signic kind (amāra), memory is recognized as having a quality of a cognitive kind, in that it is knowledge (maʿrifa) of how speech is constituted and arranged. Elsewhere, the author comes back to these issues and writes, “Knowledge is only called memory when it is possible for us to re-tell (al-ḥ ikāya) what we know; consequently the knowledge we have about a person is not called memory. There- fore, in memory there is not speech, but memory makes it possible for us to produce speech.”31 ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s reflection on the constitutive quality of knowledge held by retentive memory is refined, though fugacious; as a theologian, he shares the investigation of knowledge with philosophers, since both kalām and falsafa draw upon the body of Greek knowledge and its methods that made the medical and physiological dimension of memory familiar to the Islamicate intellectual horizon. At the end of the fourth/tenth century, while ʿAbd al-Jabbār circumscribes remembering within the semantic field ofdhikr and places the twofold function of memory—cognitive- reproductive and recognitive-reproductive—into the semantic field ofḥ ifẓ, Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist witnesses the presence, in Baghdad libraries, of Rufus of Ephesus’s medical treatises (late first century) in Arabic translation. Among them, the most famous bookseller of the city names a Kitāb fī waṣāyā ḥifẓ al-ṣiḥḥa (that is to say, on health care), and then a Kitāb al-dhikr.32 The second title shows a lexical choice by the translator, which over time would be perceived as archaic: Ibn al-Qifṭi and 91 Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (both fl. seventh/thirteenth century) will quote this book, lost in Arabic, with the changed title of Maqāla fī al-ḥifẓ.33 Some fragments of Rufus’s text on Remembering, memory quoted by Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī in his Ḥāwī (or Continens) still Knowing, remain.34 Rufus’s textual presence in Islamicate territories between the third/ninth Imagining and the fourth/tenth centuries is rather relevant.35 The dissemination of his work, as shown by the rich list of translated books given by Ibn al-Nadīm, goes beyond Iraq’s borders: it seems to be the basis of a medical interest in memory (related to melancholy) in another Islamic area—North Africa—during the same period. It is an interest apparently connected, judging from the titles, with the diffusion of Rufus’s De memoria and De melancholia (another lost text of his).36 Memory (al-ḥifẓ) appears among the rational-soul motions in a Maqāla fī al-mālīkhūliyā written by Isḥāq ibn ʿImrān (d. fourth/tenth century), a physician who moved from Baghdad to the Aghla bite court of Ziyādat Allāh in Ifrīqiyya.37 The treatise was translated into Latin by Constantine the African during the eleventh century; in his translation, ḥifẓ is rendered as ratio memoria retinendi, along with cogitatio (fikr qawwī), investigatio rerum incomprehensibilium (al-faḥṣ ʿan maʿānī al-umūr), suspicio (tawahhum), spes (taẓannun), imaginatio (takhayyul), perfectum et imperfectum rei arbitrium (al-raʾy al- muṣīb).38 It was Constantine who brought, from the Maghreb to the Christian West, another medical text on memory, lost in the Arabic original edition: the anonymous De oblivione (or De memoria et oblivione), attributed to Ibn al-Jazzār (d. 395/1004).39 This kind of interest evidenced in a peripheral zone like North Africa is but a reverberation of a general intellectual attitude toward memory as a topic of medical investigations. Coming back to our main focus, we find memory among the topics of philosophical reflection. In a renowned passage of hisal- Madīna al-fā ḍila, al-Fārābī (d. 338/950) points out the progressive order according to which faculties are developed, and he then presents the well-known tripartite brain theory: three separate zones rule the functions of imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila), of logical-discursive thought (al-quwwa al-nā ṭiqa), and of memory and remembering (al-ḥifẓ waʾl-dhikr ). The passage is a good illustration of how linguistic work on concepts like representation and imagination had undergone a process of semantic refinement, probably perceived as a need by the translators from Greek.40 This process seemingly does not concern the usual double definition of remembering/ memory. Actually, the distinction between dhikr/tadhakkur and ḥifẓ reveals—in a more obvious way in al-Fārābī than in ʿAbd al-Jabbār— an ever more marked conceptual difference in progress during the fourth/tenth century.41 On the one hand, the concept of ḥifẓ maintains its broad significance, on which Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ had built the foundation of a new concept of memory, one capable of connecting Islamic historical culture to a wider meaning of history, just having recourse to an archaic word like waʿī in order to distinguish its sense from the “mere” function of dhikr. On the other hand, the scientific-philosophical use of ḥifẓ can overcome the heuristic limits of a univocal definition ofdhikr when this notion helpfully names the mnemonic perception, as it occurs in the Arabic versions of sources, on which the philosophical quotation of tripartite brain physiology depends.42 92 A relevant source seems to be the basis for the philosophical treatment of the threefold activity of the mind in the fourth/tenth century, for it reports a discussion Texts in neglected by al-Fārābī43 but accepted by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and developed by the Transit scientific community gathered under the name of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: it is Nemesius of Emesa’s De natura hominis (fourth century), whose full Arabic version was completed by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn (third/ninth century). An early and incomplete version survives incorporated in a famous esoteric treatise, Kitāb Sirr al-khalīqa, attributed to Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, which played an important role in the development of alchemical science.44 In this version, the three soul faculties (to phantastikòn kai dianoetikòn kai mnemoneutikòn), whose activities are placed into three ventricles of the brain, from the outside to the inside, are rendered with al-tawahhum, al-fahm, al-dhikr. 45 The long discussion on the nature of memory is as follows:

The faculty of memory consists of bringing into existence ījād[ ] what the soul elaborates through imagination and understanding. If the soul were not able to remember [qādira ʿalā al-tadhakkur ], its memory [al-dhikr fīhā] would not have any motion, nor would it retain what the soul had reached as a result of the activities of imagination and understanding. That is possible only if the soul remembers; hence the faculty of memory [quwwat al-dhikr ] is acting in the soul: in this sense memory brings into existence. This faculty may or may not be active; but if it is active, then there is, within it, the motion produced by that activity. That motion is the outcome of memory, the source of every recollection [tadhakkur]. According to Origen, memory is retention [imsāk] of what the soul senses [taḥissu] and imagines; however, this is a mistake, for he confuses understanding with the senses, and it is not so. According to Plato, memory is retention of what the soul perceives and understands, but he too is wrong, as he makes mention of the senses while neglecting the imagination. According to A.n.qūr.s46 the soul grasps the manifold sensa- tions, so producing a presumptive knowledge [ẓann]; then it apprehends the intelligible through the intellect, and this is an act of reason. When the soul retains [ḥafiẓat] the representations of what it supposes or of what it knows, then we say of a man: he remembers [innahu dhākir]. Plato considers the intellect and the intelligibles as the very place of understanding and concepts, but in doing so he is wrong, since one thing is intellect, and another thing is understanding.

This version of Nemesius’s treatment of memory, in the previous passages as well as in the following, largely differs from the original in expanding the extent and the terms of a discussion disguised as “ancient.” In fact, the inclusion of memory among the motions of the soul, and the consequent reflection on the soul’s capacity of memorizing—having a memory of its own—probably depends on contemporary debates (and contemporary theories) raised by the first translations of Aristotle’s De anima as well as the Theology of Aristotle.47 Moreover, compared to the original 93 text, the imagination is granted notable relevance to the way memory participates in the construction of knowledge. The translation goes on thus: Remembering, Knowing, Actually we remember what is related to perception through the experience Imagining we have had from it, and we recall a concept thanks to what we previously have understood; as for the intelligible, we do not remember it through something we have previously experienced, or previously understood. Actually we have knowledge of the intelligibles through our own natural disposition [min ṭabīʿatinā] owing to the faculty of remembering what has been [bi-quwwat al- dhikr li-mā qad kāna]. Per se, the intelligible is not something that previously existed, and then is forgotten: indeed, it is permanent and everlasting. There- fore we will say: the intelligible is memorization [tadhakkur] although it is known at the moment it exists. For this reason A.n.qūr.s is misleading when he argues that a definition of memory ḥ[ add al-dhikr ] could be retention [ḥifẓ] of the imagination and of the understanding. As for recollection, we have it when [momentarily?] we forget what we have previously memorized [al-madhkūr ]: it is in the very nature of recollection that it may fall into oblivion. . . . Knowledge is memorization of single parts [tadhakkur al-ajzā ʾ], and memorization is not affected by oblivion of perceptions and concepts; actually, it depends on the very nature of the intelligible concepts. It does not come from apprenticeship, but rather, it is a component basically inherent to one’s disposition toward knowledge. It is as when you say: sky is a reality. You do believe such a reality, and you can distinguish between reality and its own memorization, because intellect cannot be forgotten. This is made possible by its being memorized [inna hādhā bi-tadhkīrihi]. He who imagines [al-mutawahhim] is someone who gets knowledge from the sensibles, and knowing them reaches [their] understanding. As for understanding and thought, when they apprehend the sensibles coming from imagination and turn them into knowledge, they entrust that knowledge to memorization. Memory [al-dhikr ] is placed in the rear part of the brain. . . . 48

The discussion presented in this passage of the De natura hominis is reported— although in a shortened version—by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in their epistle On Opinions and Religions, where they outline theories related to perception and to the acquisition of the intelligibles. Their treatment follows Nemesius’s. What changes is the lexicon: al-quwwa al-ḥāfiẓa is the key definition for memory/memorization. Much space is devoted to imagination and its creative power, and to logical thought (here, respectively, al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila and al-quwwa al-mutafakkira ). Just within the context of these faculties, the authors deal with the subject of memory. They consider it as an autonomous faculty (as inherent to ḥifẓ) and at the same time as a tool (as inherent to dhikr), thus establishing a parallel between language and memory: the discursive power of mind is made possible by the interaction between the cogi- tative faculty and the logical faculty, thanks to the tool of language, and in the same 94 way the semiotic properties of knowledge, permanently acquired, are carried out owing to the interaction (fa-innahā mushtarika) between thought and the faculty of Texts in memory (al-quwwa al-ḥāfiẓa), whose tool is placed in the frontal part of the brain.49 Transit The discussion of the role played by memory in acquiring knowledge is paraphrased by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ as an explication of the ancient opinion that what we know through reason becomes firmly embedded in the body.50 Hence, memorization of acquired knowledge is a necessary consequence (fa-hiya taḥtāju ilā al-tadhkīr). Therefore, they write (quoting the Platonic locus in a more precise way), “learned men call knowledge memory, and they refer to Plato’s word that knowledge is remembering (al-ʿilm tadhakkur).” Thus it is clearly explained that what makes it possible for the soul (nafs) to pass from the cognitive potential to the cognitive act is the learning process, and only in this sense is knowledge remembering.51 The problem of memory as it had been set down inDe natura hominis is placed and developed by Pseudo-Jābir ibn Ḥayyān in a more problematic perspective. As is known, the Jabirian community of alchemists flourished in Iraq in the tenth century. It entrusted its own scientific production, and its consequent authority, to the alleged pupils of the sixth Shiite imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, considered to be the father of Arabic alchemy.52 Here the fictional device of attributing a statement to a source of knowledge coming from the past is working: the ancient is the authoritative basis for a modern issue (in this specific case, as innovative as it is heterodox). Being faithful to the postulate that alchemical art is the translation of philosophical knowledge into the domain of practice, the Jabirian community members grasp not only an epistemological issue in memory but also a problem of an operative kind. Their field of investigation is actually the realm of the body, and their reflection is focused not so much on the mind (intended as an abstract entity) as on the brain, since they conceive the latter as the locus of the matter on which their science has to work. In the Kitāb al-tajmī ʿ, a treatise devoted to the artificial creation of an individual (shakhṣ) endowed with a natural disposition to law (nāmūsī al-ṭibāʿ),53 the artificial creature’s memory is a crucial point of the Jabirian project. It appears set (although in a more problematic way) following the range of dilemmas reported by Nemesius. Jabirian authors obviously share the tripartite brain theory; regarding this issue, they rely on Pseudo-Porphyry’s authority.54 Intending to use the brain as a matrix in order to generate (tawlīd) a human being, they pay special attention to how intelligence should be produced, and to which of the three parts would be the most appropriate to realize it: the part in which imagination (khayāl) has its seat, the part where thought (fikr) resides, or the part deputed to memory (dhikr).55 A further discussion, registered by the Jabirian authors according to the “symposium” model (ijtamaʿū al-falāsifa, thus pretending to face an ancient issue), presents three arguments about the origin of this creature’s knowledge. The first considers the creature capable of acquiring knowledge thanks to his maker’s teaching; the second assumes that knowledge is inborn and spontaneous; and the third ambiguously states that there is neither teaching nor innateness. According to this last argument, the creature is essentially ignorant: that is proven by the fact that the creature (or better, the part of the brain 95 used to generate him) does not remember anything of its previous state at all.56 The Jabirian community of alchemists do not present their own theory; never- Remembering, theless, when they report the opinion of a group of philosophers who are inclined to Knowing, use the rear part of the brain designated for memory, they show this opinion within Imagining the rhetorical equation “knowledge = remembering”: “A third group argues that the third section [of the brain] is the best one; that is the seat of memory (bayt al-dhikr ). It must necessarily be—so they state—the best one, because when the human being knows, he accomplishes a mnemonic act (al-insān fī al-ʿilm mutadhakkir). Actually, all the cognitions involving thought activities are nothing but knowledge previously acquired.”57 The Heterodox Desire: Is Knowing Imagining?

A point remains unclear: when transferring ancient ideas into a new language evi- dently contemporary to that utilized by al-Fārābī and Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, the Jabirian community never resorts to the term ḥifẓ. While the first two authors clearly choose this semantic field to expand the view of a memory intended as a faculty of the soul, the third one remains tenaciously anchored to the use of dhikr. This use can hardly be defined as archaic,58 if we compare it to the terms khayāl and takhayyul, used instead of the older and unanimously overtaken wahm and tawahhum, for “imagination” and “imagining.” Perhaps there might be a will to differentiate their ownscientific discourse from pure philosophical discourse. Could this will be aimed at giving an account of a diverse epistemological disposition, expressed by those who—like this premodern scientific community—were searching for a verification of the theories about mind faculties onto bodily matter? However, the Jabirian authors conclude their review of theories in a quite ambiguous way: “As to the first amma[ al-awwal ], they [fa-innahum ] consider it as if it were the whole brain [jaʿalūhu min al-dimāgh bi-asrihi].” 59 What do the authors mean by “the first”? It is not immediately clear, but if we come back to the text, we can find the section of the brain in which imagination has its seat named as the first, connected with a first group ṭāʾifa( ) of philosophers who choose this section to use it as the matrix. I do not see any other translation that may be in accordance with the next passage: “if this is the case, thus this would be the best one among the sections [hādhā al-qism idhan ajwad al-aqsām ], because it would contain what all the others have in potency [kāna qad yajmaʿu mā kāna fī quwwat ūlāʾika].” If my interpretation is correct, the intelligent creature desired by the Jabirian community seems to be perfectly aligned with the global revolutionary project to refound the world, a project cherished by its members throughout the pages of their anonymous alchemical political corpus. The creature would have no need to retain any memory of a previous state because—according to those who choose the seat of imagination—“thanks to it [that section of the brain] the human being can imagine everything.”60 Perhaps this is the last frontier of a desire linking al-Fārābī, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, and Pseudo-Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.61 From different perspectives, the politician, the pure philosophers, and the scientists are imagining a future world. Next to theory, 96 the interaction between knowledge, imagination, and memory of what is known (and of what can be known) is verified on an intellectual ground able to produce a social Texts in view: the classification of knowledge. This is an intervention in reality, where each of Transit the three cases aims to plan an organization model of knowledge and of how to know.

Notes

1. See in general Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2. Francesco Gabrieli, “Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ,” in Encyclopédie de l’Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954–), 3:883–85. 3. Nicole Laroux, “Eloge de l’anachronisme en histoire,” Le genre humain 27 (1993): 23–40. 4. To name but three examples: Mohamed Arkoun, Contribution à l’étude de l’humanisme arabe du IVe/Xe siècle: Miskawayh philosophe et historien (Paris: Vrin, 1970); Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival During the Buyid Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986); Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also the Orientalist debate on humanism (and the alleged lack of humanism) in Islam as reported in Joel L. Kraemer, “Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A Preliminary Study,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 135–64. 5. Still in the tenth/sixteenth century, al-Ṣuyūṭī, al-Muzhir fī ʿulūm al-lugha wa-anwāʿihā, ed. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm (Cairo: n.p., 1325/1907–8), 2:18, writes that ḥifẓ is required in adab studies (here in the strict meaning of philology) as well as in Qurʾan and Tradition studies. 6. A well-known passage reported by al-Dhahabī is apparently a cultural myth: during the year 143/760, writing becomes an official practice of transmission of knowledge, that, meanwhile, changes the conditions of preserving knowledge: “qabla hādhihi al-ʿaṣr kāna al-aʾimma yatakallimūna min ḥifẓi- him wa-yarawna al-ʿilm min ṣiḥaf ṣaḥīḥa ghayr murattaba.” The passage is quoted by al-Suyūṭī, Taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ, ed. ʿAbdallāh Masʿūd (Aleppo: Dār al-qalam, 1411/1991), 250. On orality and writing, see Gre- gor Schoeler, Écrire et transmettre dans le débuts de l’Islam (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), especially 57–107. See also Abdesselam Cheddadi, “À l’aube de l’historiographie arabo-musulmane: La mémoire islamique,” Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 29–41. 7. A number of examples are given by George A. Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); see also Antonella Ghersetti, “L’utilità della scrittura e la lode del libro: Testimonianze di alcuni scrittori arabi medievali,”Annali di Ca’ Foscari 33, no. 3, Serie Orientale 25 (1994): 67–76. 8. Let us think of the master’s gift of a text to his pupil at the end of the course. See Georges Vajda, “De la transmission orale du savoir dans l’Islam traditionnel,” in Vajda, La transmission du savoir en Islam (VIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (London: Variorum Reprint, 1983), 1–9. 9. The sociocultural functionality of memory is well represented, along with the topic of longevity, in the role of the centenaries (muʿammarūn) within a transmission of oral knowledge whose authoritativeness was founded on the transmitters’ continuity in time. They filled the chronological gap—because a tradition could be in danger of being lost—and provided the historiographical construction with a knowledge pattern that proceeds in the most linear manner. See G. H. A. Juynboll, Muslim Tradition: Studies in Chronology, Provenance, and Authorship of Early Ḥadīṯ (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1989), especially 206–217; Juynboll, “The Role ofm uʿammarūn in the Early Development of Isnād,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 81 (1991): 155–75. 10. Leonard T. Librande, “The Scholars ofḤ adīth and the Retentive Memory,” Cahiers d’onomas- tique arabe 1 (1988–92): 39–48. The article sheds light on the way retentive memory was considered a virtue analogous to piety. It was considered a requisite by the ethics of knowledge, whereas moral qualities and more “technical” attitudes related to transmission—prudence, accuracy, precision—were to establish a reliability criterion. 11. The relationship between humanism and the élite of secretaries is the focus of Tarif Khalidi’s discussion of the influence ofadab on historical writing in his Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83–130. 97 12. (Pseudo-) Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, al-Adab al-ṣaghīr, in M. Kurd ʿAlī, ed., Rasāʾil al-bulagh āʾ (Cairo: Dār al-kutub al-ʿarabiyya, 1913), 19–54. 13. Gustav Richter, “Über des klein Adabbuch des Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ,” Der Islam 19 (1931): 278–81; Remembering, Francesco Gabrieli, “L’opera di Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ,” Rivista degli studi orientali 13 (1932): 197–247. Ibn Knowing, al-Nadīm, Fihrist al-ʿulūm, ed. Riḍā Tajaddud (Tehran: Marwī, 1391/1977), 132, has no doubt in attrib- Imagining uting authorship to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ; this might raise some reflections on the plausibility of this forgery. The problem does not seem relevant at all, either, to Paule Charles-Dominique, “Le système éthique d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ d’après deux épitres dites ‘al-Ṣaġīr’ et ‘al-Kabīr,’ ” Arabica 12 (1965): 45–66, or to Khal- idi, Arabic Historical Thought, 92–95. Nevertheless, see also Iḥsān ʿAbbas, “[al-] Adab al-ṣaġīr,” in Ency- clopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985–), 1:446–47. 14. Mohsen Zakeri, “ʿAlī ibn ʿUbaida al-Raiḥānī: A Forgotten Belletrist Adīb( ) and Pahlavi Trans- lator,” Oriens 34 (1994): 76–102. 15. Abdelfattah Kilito,L’auteur et ses doubles: Essai sur la culture arabe classique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985). 16. (Pseudo-) Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, al-Adab al-ṣaghīr, 20. 17. Ibid., 21–22. 18. Ibid., 28. Religion, needless to say, in this context is meant as a social bond encompassing the relationship between ruler and subjects, and as a counterpart of dawla, according to the Persian Fürstenspiegel formulation. 19. Ibid., 22. The other virtues are to act with kindness, to not be afraid to exaggerate in searching for knowledge, to be firm and resolute in one’s own choices, and to strongly believe in the good. The noun al-w aʿī actually is unusual and may have been chosen because of its etymology—less generic than ḥifẓ, as it is connected with the meaning of preserving, retaining, or remembering something that has been heard, and so establishing a direct inference between retaining and learning. See Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab (Būlāq, n.d.), vol. 9, s.v. 20. (Pseudo-) Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, al-Adab al-ṣaghīr, 23: “ammā ʾl-ḥifẓ waʾl-taʿahhud fa-huwa tamām al-darak li-anna al-insān muwakkil bihi al-nisyān waʾl-ghafla fa-lā budda lahu idhā ijtabā ṣawāb qawl aw fiʿl min an yaḥfiẓahu ʿalayhi dhihnuhu li-awān ḥājatihi.” 21. See Giuliano Lancioni, “Sull’ordinamento dei dizionari classici arabi,” in In memoria di Fran- cesco Gabrieli (1904–1996), supp. 2, Rivista degli studi orientali 71 (1997): 113–27. 22. (Pseudo-) Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, al-Adab al-ṣaghīr, 28. 23. Ibid., 45. 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Again, see Kilito, L’auteur et ses doubles. 26. On this topic, see Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “The Social Significance of the Shuʿūbiyya,” in Studies on the Civilization of Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 62–73; Roy P. Mottahedeh, “The Shuʿūbiyya Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 7 (1976): 161–82; Jamsheed K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Élites in Medieval Iranian Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 27. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s could be the case for such an approach, resembling more than one aspect of the picture offered by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Flavius Josèphe ou du bon usage de la trahison (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977). 28. ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī, al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-taw ḥīd wa-ʾl-ʿadl (Cairo: n.p., 1380–89/1960– 69), 12:34–36, 67–68. The passages have been studied by Johannes R. T. M. Peters,God’s Created Speech (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 388–92. See also Marie Bernard, “La notion de ʿilm chez les premiers Muʿta- zilites,” Studia Islamica 36 (1972): 23–45; 37 (1973): 27–56. 29. Peters, God’s Created Speech, 388; ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī, al-Mughnī, 12:7, 62. 30. ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī, Sharḥ al-u ṣūl al-khamsa, ed. ʿAbd al-Karīm ʿUthmān (Cairo: Mak- tabat Wahba, 1384/1965), 191–92. 31. ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Hamadānī, al-Mughnī, 12:204; the passage is translated in Peters, God’s Created Speech, 389; on this theory about language and sign, 390–91. 32. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 350. 33. Ibn al-Qifṭi, Taʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ, ed. Julius Lippert (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlags- buchhandlung, 1903), 185; Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ, ed. August Müller (Cairo, 1882; repr., Farnborough: Gregg International, 1972), 1:33–35. 98 34. See Charles Daremberg and Émile Ch. Ruelle, Œuvres de Rufus d’Ephèse (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1879), vi, xxxvii, no. 50. The passage quoted by al-Rāzī is given in Latin translation at 459–60. 35. Moritz Steinschneider, Die arabischen Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen (Graz: Akademische Texts in Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt,1960), 468–74; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (henceforth Transit GAS) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 3:64, 68. 36. Daremberg and Ruelle, Œuvres de Rufus d’Ephèse, xxxiii, no. 11. 37. On this physician and his travels, see Ibn Juljul, Les generations des médecins et des sages (Ṭab- aqāt al-a ṭibbāʾ waʾl-ḥukamāʾ), ed. Fuʾād Sayyid (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1955), 84–86. On his knowledge of Rufus’s works, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), 82; Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 57–59. 38. Isḥāq ibn ʿImrān, Maqāla fīʾl-mālīkhūliyā und Constantini Africani Libri duo de Melancholia, ed. Karl Garbers (Hamburg: Buske, 1977), 102–3. 39. Heinrich Schipperges, Die Assimilation der arabischen Medizin durch das lateinische Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1964), 46, according to whom Ibn al-Jazzār would have written a book, lost in Arabic (and never mentioned in the medieval repertoires), surviving in De oblivione under Constantine the African’s authorship. Furthermore, this text would depend exclusively on Greek sources like Galen, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Paul of Aegina, and would fail to show any Arabic influence; see Sezgin, GAS, 3:304–6, and Gerrit Bos, “Ibn al-Jazzār’s Risāla fīn-nisyān and Constantine’s Liber de oblivione,” in Constantine the African and ʿAlī ibn ʿAbbās al-Majūsī: The “Pantegni” and Related Texts, ed. Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 203–32. 40. Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abū Naṣr Al-Fārābī’s Mabādiʾ Ārāʾ Ahl al-Madīna al-Fā ḍila, rev. with intro., trans., and commentary by Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 205–11. While in al-Fārābī phantasia is rendered with takhayyul, in al-Kindī the loan translation fanṭasiyā is attested along with tawahhum and quwwa muṣawwira. See the pre-Farabian sources discussed by Walzer in his commentary to this passage. 41. An example of such lexical and conceptual distinctions between dhikr (memory), tadhakkur (recollection), and ḥifẓ (retentive memory) at work during the ninth and tenth centuries comes from the Arabic translation, adaptation, and transmission of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia (many thanks to the anonymous reviewer who has recalled the relevance of this text to our context). Actually, the Arabic version, Kitāb al-Ḥiss waʾl-maḥsūs, deals with memory in book 2, Fī al-dhikr waʾl-tadhakkur (On memory and recollection). Nevertheless, on the wide range of problems surrounding the Arabic transmission of the Parva naturalia, see Rotraud Hansberger, “The Arabic Adaptation of theParva Naturalia (Kitāb al-Ḥiss waʾl-maḥsūs),” Studia Graeco-Arabica 4 (2014): 301–14 (reference to the passages on memory at 304–5). 42. Some examples of the treatment of the Greek theory on the three parts of brain designated, respectively, for imagination, logical thought, and memory, are al-Kindī, Rasāʾil al-Kindī al-falsafiyya , ed. M. ʿA. Abū Riḍā (Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1369/1950), 1:297–98; Ibn Sīnā, Kitāb al-Najāt , as edited and translated by Fazlur Rahman in Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation of Kitāb al-Najāt, Book II, Chapter VI (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 3; Ibn Sīnā, De anima, ed. Fazlur Rah- man (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 267; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil (Beirut: Dār ṣādir, 1957), 3:406–7 (where they speak about al-quwwa al-ḥāfiẓa along with al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila and al- quwwa al-mufakkira ). 43. Al-Fārābī does not include memory among the virtues of the ruler of a virtuous city. Rather, as is well known, a great emphasis is given to imagination. The philosopher can rationalize the phenomenon of prophecy, and its predictive power, as the consequence of an imaginative faculty developed to the maximum extent. In this view, the domain of imagination as an intermediate hermeneutical plane bridges the dichotomy between the transcendence of reason and materiality of sensibility. 44. TheKitāb ṭabīʿat al-insān edition I am referring to here is that included in Balīnās (Pseudo- Apollonius), Kitāb Sirr al-khalīqa: Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung, ed. Ursula Weisser (Aleppo: University of Aleppo, 1979). The passage related to the soul’s motions (chap. 13 of the Greek text, reasonably placed between chaps. 7 and 8 by the Arab translator) is at 578–83. The Greek text is published in Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 40, cols. 483–844. A recent English translation is Nem- 99 esius, On the Nature of Man, trans. with intro. and notes by R. W. Sharples and P. J. van der Eijk (Liv- erpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). See also Khalil Samir, “Les versions arabes de Némésius de Ḥomṣ,” in L’eredità classica nelle lingue orientali, ed. Massimiliano Pavan and Umberto Cozzoli (Rome: Remembering, Acta Encyclopedica, 1986), 99–151; on textual criticism related to this work, see Moreno Marani, “Tra- Knowing, duzioni orientali e filologia greca,” in La diffusione dell’eredità classica nell’età tardo antica e medievale: Imagining Il “Romanzo di Alessandro” e altri scritti; Atti del Seminario Internazionale di Studio (Roma–Napoli, 25–27 settembre 1997), ed. Rosa Bianca Finazzi and Alfredo Valvo (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), 175–87 (especially 181–87). 45. Greek text: col. 632; Arabic text: 578. 46. I cannot identify this name. He does not appear in the Greek text. 47. See Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, 5–14, about Plato on memory, and 328–62 for Nemesius and his Arabic translation as a source of Avicenna, in the general context of Arabic and Jewish transmission of the classics, and of the idea of “classic.” We should also consider the influence of the Syriac version of Nemesius on this Arabic translation: see Mauro Zonta, “Nemesiana Syriaca: New Fragments from the Missing Version of the De Natura Hominis,” Journal of Semitic Studies 36 (1991): 223–58. 48. Greek text: cols. 659–666; Arabic text: 583–85; English translation: 118–23. Henceforth, the text goes on with the location of the other faculties of the brain. 49. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 3:421. 50. Such an embedding is rendered here by the term markūza, while the Arabic translator of De natura hominis uses maghrūs (Kitāb ṭabīʿat al-insān , 585). 51. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,3:424. 52. Toufiq Fahd, “Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq et la tradition scientifique arabe,” inLe shiʿisme imamite: Collo- que de Strasbourg (6–9 mai 1968) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 131–41; the standard reference for Jābir ibn Ḥayyān is still Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. 1, Les Catalogues, in Mémoires de l’Institut d’Egypte 64 (1943); vol. 2, Jābir et la science grecque, in Mémoires de l’Institut d’Egypte 63 (1942). 53. That is to say, according to the Shiite heterodox view particular to the Jabirian community, an individual who, giving the city a nomos, could be able to fill the void caused by the concealment of the imam—the only real interpreter of the sharīʿa. On the political-philosophical debate around the double level of nāmūs and sharīʿa and the Jabirian community response, see L. Capezzone, Fuori dalla città iniqua: Legge e ribellione nella filosofia politica dell’Islam medievale (Rome: Carocci, 2010), 79–132. 54. (Pseudo-) Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Kitāb al-tajmīʿ, in Mukhtār Rasāʾil Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, ed. Paul Kraus (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1354/1936), 374. The passages related to the modes of instilling knowledge in the creature’s brain, and to the discussions of the varying relevance of the three parts of the brain, are at 369–80. See Paul Kraus’s commentary to this text in Kraus, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, vol. 2, Jābir et la science grecque, 116–19. 55. (Pseudo-) Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Kitāb al-tajm īʿ, 370–73. 56. Ibid., 375–78. 57. Ibid., 372. 58. The argument for an intrinsic archaism could represent evidence for a supposed early dating of the Jabirian corpus. I have discussed this issue elsewhere, proposing a dating of Pseudo-Jābir ibn Ḥayyān’s work based on an evaluation of its political-philosophical views as a heterodox minority response to the intellectual debates in a specific Shiite context (the absence of the imam) that emerged during the fourth/tenth century: see L. Capezzone, “Jābir ibn Ḥayyān nella città cortese: Materiali eterodossi per una storia del pensiero della scienza nell’Islam medievale,” Rivista degli studi orientali 71 (1997): 97–144. 59. (Pseudo-) Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Kitāb al-tajm īʿ, 372. 60. Ibid., 371. 61. I am obviously referring to al-Fārābī, Catálogo de las ciencias, ed. and trans. Angel González Palencia (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), and to the treatise on speculative arts and practical arts in Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,1:258–95; eventually, to the Kitāb al-ḥudūd, in Mukhtār Rasāʾil Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, 97–114.

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Texts in Transit Six

Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Epistolae V commentatoriae de perditione Acconis, 1291 as Evidence of Multifaceted Textual Movement in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian N. Becker

The fall of Acre, on May 18, 1291, was an extremely sorrowful event for Christendom. It brought an official end to the Crusader States’ two centuries of existence in the East and evoked great lamentation in the Christian West. Indeed, many Christians were beside themselves with grief after learning of Acre’s fall, but perhaps few of them expressed and documented their grief as well as the Florentine Dominican Ric- coldo da Montecroce. He had journeyed to the Levant in 1288 both to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and to missionize to Mongols and Muslims, initially preaching his way through the Mongol Ilkhanate and eventually arriving in Baghdad, where he studied Arabic and read the Qurʾan. It was also in Baghdad that Riccoldo received the dis- tressing news that Acre had been lost to the Mamluks, which moved him, in his intense sorrow, to pen his remarkable Five Letters on the Fall of Acre, 1291. In these letters, which read much like lamentations or prayers, Riccoldo expresses his surprise and despair resulting from recent Muslim victories over Christians in the East, implor- ing God, the Virgin Mary, and an assortment of saints and martyrs to explain this turn of events to him. Riccoldo’s Five Letters offers a unique opportunity to advance scholars’ understanding of many aspects of ethno-religious interaction during the Middle Ages, including insight into the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of a thirteenth- century Western missionary in the East.1 Yet, on a macro level, we can also learn much about larger narratives, such as Western missionary activity in the East and interconfessional interaction. In the specific context of this volume, Riccoldo’s Letters also offers literary scholars and historians valuable insight into the movement of both physical and intellectual goods within the East and across the Mediterranean. Nearly nothing is known about Riccoldo da Montecroce’s (ca. 1243–1320) early life,2 other than a single admission made by the man himself when he begins to address Saint Francis in his third letter: “O blessed Francis, to whom I have been devoted continuously from my infancy to this day . . . I cry out and groan mournfully to you.”3 But it is not until his early twenties that information about his life begins to appear in greater abundance. He joined the Dominican order in 1267, showing such an aptitude for academics that, by 1272, he had been appointed lecturer in the Dominican convent of Pisa. His ascendency in the order continued in 1287, when he was appointed leader of the Dominican convent in Prato. Riccoldo probably entered his order with at least a decent education in letters, but it was during this twenty-year period of living in and around Florence that he blossomed as a scholar. As an aspiring intellectual from the increasingly influentialpopolo ,4 Riccoldo was fortunate enough to be born in Florence, a city whose financial and educational prestige was growing rapidly during the second half of the thirteenth century. A significant amount of the credit for Florence’s growing reputation as a center of learning belongs to Riccoldo’s home priory, Santa Maria Novella, which by 1300 housed ninety-six friars, making it one of Europe’s largest Dominican houses.5 The priory was also a well-established center of learning by this time, serving the whole of central Italy as a Dominican studium generale since at least 1305, and it possessed a sizeable library.6 Stefano Orlandi, one of the pioneering historians of Santa Maria Novella, has noted that by 1338 the size of the priory’s library had warranted the construction of a larger building, which in turn required expansion in 1421.7 These dates fall slightly after Riccoldo’s lifetime, but it is safe to say that even in his time at Santa Maria Novella he had access to one of the largest libraries in central Italy. The library was home to numerous collections of scripture, biblical exegesis, sermons, the works of ancient scholars and the Church Fathers, and the like.8 This was certainly an atmosphere in which a young scholar would thrive, and all indications are that Riccoldo took full advantage of his surroundings. There are many instances in his Five Letters in which Riccoldo shows himself to be widely read in scripture, exegesis, and scholasticism.9 It is no surprise that he makes numerous direct and implicit references to biblical passages throughout the Letters, but he also shows a familiarity with the Proslogion of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, when he echoes the last lines of chapter 1 in his first letter: “For I do not seek to understand so 102 that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand. And I believe this because unless I believe, I will not understand.”10 It is also not surprising that he demonstrates Texts in a thorough knowledge of the works of fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas. In his sec- Transit ond letter, which he addresses to the Virgin Mary, Riccoldo describes Muhammad’s recent successes by saying that he was sent by God “in virtute armorum,” or “in the force of arms,” which mirrors Aquinas’s use of phrases very similar to this in his Summa contra Gentiles to describe Muhammad’s advance.11 Riccoldo again makes an implicit reference to Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles in his third letter, when he complains to the Holy Spirit that Muhammad’s “power and pestilential doctrine are now beginning to be confirmed by miracles.”12 Here, he is clearly referencing Aquinas’s claim that Islam is inferior to Christianity because Islam had not been confirmed by miracles, whereas Christianity had.13 Riccoldo even evinces some familiarity with Hebrew literary form, as he includes a Latin transliteration of Hebraic onomatopoeia in his fourth letter: “for me, the word of the Lord has been fulfilled: ‘Order upon order, order upon order, rule upon rule, rule upon rule, a little here, a little there.’ ”14 Riccoldo had thus used Santa Maria Novella’s library to great effect during his first twenty-one years as a Florentine friar. He had engrossed himself for decades in the study of scripture along with the writings of the Church Fathers and scholastics, and presumably in other literary genres as well. It is unknown what he read in detail, but perhaps at least some of this literature inspired him to pursue missionary activity, because in 1288 the master general of the Dominican order, Muño de Zamora, granted his request to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and missionize among the Mongols and Muslims.15 It would henceforth be these peoples on whom Riccoldo would bring his literary education to bear—especially scripture, of course, but also other useful works of a Christian nature. Riccoldo himself would therefore become, in a sense, a transmitter of textual ideas on his pilgrimage/mission as he spread his book-based knowledge far and wide across the Middle East. It was indeed with his education that he hoped to convert Muslims to Christianity, as he admits in his first letter: “And I myself, just like a presumptuous man, thought for a long time that I could bring him down through your strength and rid us of his pernicious doctrine. This is why I voluntarily accepted this mission out of my obedience to your vicar and came to these remote parts of the East.”16 Perhaps it was Muhammad’s “pernicious doctrine” itself and the cultural milieu that produced it that had motivated him to go on pilgrimage. The late thirteenth century in Italy was in fact a time of great interest in the study of all things “Arab,” such as Arabic language, literature, science, philosophy, and so on.17 It was at this time that the University of Bologna, having always been a great center of learning in many fields, added the study of Averroes to its curriculum and soon became a leader in this field as well.18 Frederick II of Sicily was famously interested in Arabic culture and proficient in the Arabic language, even to the extent that he was able to converse with those envoys of Muslim leaders who visited his Sicilian court.19 The popularity of the Arab world in the West also greatly influenced Riccoldo’s home- 103 town of Florence. Miguel Asin Palacios has argued that many Florentine authors of the thirteenth century were influenced by Arabic and Islamic literature, includ- Riccoldo ing Dante Alighieri, who, in his Divine Comedy, describes both Heaven and Hell in da Montecroce’s terms reminiscent of the miʿrāj, the traditional Islamic story of Muhammad’s journey “Epistolae V” to heaven.20 Other scholars, such as Jean Richard and María Rosa Menocal, have demonstrated clearly the influence that thescuola siciliana (Sicilian Arabic poetry) had on early Italian vernacular literature, remarking that many Italian intellectuals of the time “were Arabized and Arabizing.”21 The intellectual climate of Florence during the second half of the thirteenth century was thus one in which an engaged scholar such as Riccoldo could have learned much about the Arab world. This was an opportunity made possible by the frequent movement of Arabic texts of many genres from East to West, many of which were translated into Western languages and widely disseminated.22 This certainly was the case in Riccoldo’s Florence, and it is probable that at least some of his desire to go East grew from his desire to fill out what he read in these Eastern books with his own personal experiences. It is also possible that Riccoldo’s immersion in Florence’s intellectual climate, combined with his training as a Dominican missionary, instilled in him the belief that it was necessary to read texts in their original languages in order to capture more accurately their intended meaning. Thomas E. Burman has indeed demonstrated that Christian translators of the Qurʾan in the Middle Ages frequently referred directly to Muslim sources to inform themselves about its meaning. It was in fact common for these translators to base their translations on, and even directly incorporate into them, Muslim Qurʾan commentators’ views on difficult passages.23 While this philological approach certainly previews that of modern translators, medieval translations of the Qurʾan, perhaps unintentionally, often suffered from their creators’ substandard philological ability.24 This would certainly be an argument for learning the languages needed to read texts in their original forms, especially for a Dominican missionary like Riccoldo, whose charge was to win converts to Christianity by proving the irrationality of other faiths as described in the writings of their adherents. This was one half of the two-pronged missionary strategy adopted by the Dominicans from very early in their history, with the other being the defense of the faith.25 The Dominican emphasis on missionaries’ need to learn foreign languages was well established by the 1280s, when Riccoldo received his approval to embark on an Eastern mission. As early as 1236, the general chapter had recommended the study of local languages by missionaries, and by the 1240s the order had established schools both in the East and West for the express purpose of teaching foreign languages to missionaries.26 Riccoldo’s own writings echo the preoccupation of his order with foreign language study. He acknowledges the necessity for missionaries to become proficient in the local vernaculars of their targeted areas of activity, and he demonstrates a sincere personal dedication to this task. In his Liber peregrinationis, he notes that he passed six months at the beginning of this journey in Tabriz preaching with the aid of an interpreter, which was presumably difficult enough to convince him to take up the study of Arabic.27 Riccoldo began his language study in Baghdad, which is also where he 104 wrote his Five Letters not long after learning of the fall of Acre. In fact, he makes many references in these letters to reading the Qurʾan, and on several occasions he states Texts in specifically that he had read it in Arabic.28 It is certainly not necessary for Riccoldo to Transit state that he is reading the Qurʾan in its original language, but he seems to be doing so as an effort to convince his readers that the Qurʾanic passages he cites as evidence of true Islamic beliefs can be trusted because he is taking them directly from the source, and thus preserving their intended meaning. If he can establish this point, then his refutation of the irrationality of Islamic beliefs will thus carry more authority. It is also interesting to note that Riccoldo makes very clear that his reading of scripture, especially one line in particular, had both inspired and was a primary motivation for his desire to become a missionary. The purpose of his second letter is to express to the Virgin Mary his despair at not having received a divine response to his first letter. During the ensuing discussion, he acknowledges the hardships he has suffered on his mission: “It has occurred to me before now that during the many years ‘I have reflected upon my ways and turned my feet’ toward the testimony of your son, the enemy of the human race has stood in my way so as to divert me, setting up along my pilgrimage route many, very grave dangers which, in my frailty, have been unbearable.”29 Riccoldo’s reference to Psalm 119 is rather subtle here, but he reveals much more openly how this passage affected him in the first chapter of his account of his Eastern travels, Liber peregrinationis, when, after citing the same phrase from the psalm, he states, “I tell you, I realized that it was not prudent for me to sit and be idle for so long and to not try some of the hardships of poverty and a long pilgrimage, especially considering the long and laborious pilgrimages I had undertaken up to that point in order to study the secular sciences which are called liberal.”30 This admission by Riccoldo is interesting for many reasons, but especially because of the direct link he makes between this psalm’s line and pilgrimage. A pilgrimage need not be limited to the undertaking of a physical journey, for Riccoldo; a pilgrimage can also be undertaken through book-based study, wherever that happens to take place.31 It is a fascinating insight into the mind of this particular missionary, who certainly evinces a deep admiration for texts as instillers of motivation, inspiration, and revelation in those who seek these things. It makes a good deal of sense that Riccoldo would include the study of texts as a form of pilgrimage, because the written word was considered to be an integral part of travel for most Dominicans when, for whatever reason, they left their home priories. The training of Dominicans for missionary activity, as discussed above, was clearly a program that emphasized the rigorous study of appropriate texts to aid them in their task of disproving other religions through reason. The texts chosen for this curriculum are not necessarily important here, but it is important to note that this curriculum instilled textual content in Dominican missionaries, which they then carried and disseminated to their target areas of activity. We thus see Dominican missionaries transmitting textual content far and wide through their work, but clearly one could not memorize all of this content; it does not appear that the missionaries even tried, because they frequently carried texts with them in the field. In fact, Ric- 105 coldo remarks that it was an altogether common practice for Dominicans to take multiple volumes with them while traveling. In the midst of explaining to Dominic Riccoldo himself that, despite his best efforts, all of his searching among those returning from da Montecroce’s the fall of Acre had yielded no one who could tell him if any of his fellow Friar Preach- “Epistolae V” ers remained alive, he continues, “But indeed I am worried, searching among the captives if by chance to find a few of my Brother Preachers, and I have found none. Yet, I have found habits and vestments, and also books and breviaries, in the hands of the Saracens. O Friar Preachers! Where have you gone without your habits and breviaries? For it is not customary for your brothers to go on a long journey without their habits and breviaries.”32 It must have been a rare thing indeed for Dominicans to become separated from their traveling libraries on long journeys, because Riccoldo expresses more than once his astonishment that this very thing had happened to the Friar Preachers at Acre. For example, he returns to this same theme a little later in his fourth letter, writing, “How very bewildered I was to find garments, tunics, books, and breviaries, but no brothers, for I knew that it is not our custom for friars to journey without tunics and breviaries.”33 It is thus clear that those Dominicans who traveled in Riccoldo’s day were regular participants in the widespread movement of texts within Europe, between East and West, or wherever their business took them. This is not at all surprising, considering the emphasis on book-based study in Dominican education, missionary training, and the like. A good indication of just how deeply the order fostered this connection between its members and texts is Riccoldo’s sincere astonishment that a Dominican who was abroad would be found without those books he had brought with him on his journey. It would appear that he was only able to reconcile himself to this unfathomable situation by taking com- fort in the fact that his brothers’ martyrdom had made further study, and therefore their books, unnecessary to them. After acknowledging those Dominicans who had been killed by the Mamluks at Acre as martyrs, he concludes, “I am not surprised that you have abandoned your breviaries, books, and tunics; indeed, you no longer need them, because in all things you have become rich in Him, in all words and in all knowledge, just as the witness of Christ has been confirmed in you.”34 Riccoldo’s Letters also offers a window onto just how widely disseminated Chris- tian texts were, physically and linguistically, in the late thirteenth-century East. In letter 3, while chiding the patron saints very harshly for being unwilling to help Christians in the East against the advance of the Muslims, Riccoldo lists a series of Qurʾanic statements concerning Jesus. He seems to take issue with one of the statements in particular: that the name of Muhammad is written in the gospel and that Jesus prophesied about him. Riccoldo cites the Qurʾan itself on this point: “I have read in the sixty-first chapter of the Qurʾan that Jesus, son of Mary, said: ‘I am the messenger of God, O children of Israel, and I am a truthful messenger; I declare to you that an ambassador will come after me, and his name is Muhammad.’ ”35 He is then quick to doubt the existence of this statement, however, admitting that “in truth, I have not found this in the gospel, not in the Latin, the Chaldean, or the Arabic texts, even though I have searched most diligently for it throughout the East.”36 Riccoldo 106 may have had trouble finding this statement in the gospels, but it is evident that he did not have much trouble finding multiple copies of this text (and in a number Texts in of languages as well). It is also clear that the wide dissemination of Christian texts Transit among non-Christians could result in certain unpleasant experiences for Christian missionaries such as Riccoldo, who expresses to Saint Paul just a little later, in letter 3, that “[y]our epistles have been scattered among the Saracens, and they mock them contemptuously because you said that Jesus Christ is God and son of God. For they have introduced as an effective argument in the Qurʾan that God can in no way have a son, because he does not have a wife. And in saying this, they prevail against us, or rather they say that this is the reason that God afflicts us, because he considers it wrong that we give him a son.”37 This is not to say that the ready availability of these texts is in any way surprising, given the widespread popularity of the gospels and the writings of Paul, but it is if nothing else good evidence for their reception and perception among non-Christians in the Levant. Riccoldo considered it a significant enough disgrace for Muslims (or anyone) to mock the gospels and other texts sacred to Christianity, but he had also witnessed them express their disrespect for the religion in other, even more injurious, ways. He describes this sad state of affairs to the Virgin Mary at the beginning of letter 2, which he feels is necessary to write because Divine Wisdom had never responded to the pleas of his first letter. He had come to the East to preach Christ, baptize, and join to the Church those very people whom he now sees being captured by the Muslims and sold as slaves all the way to Baghdad. In addition to this, he continues to hold out hope that he will find some of his fellow friars among the groups of captives with whom he comes into contact, but instead he sees that “the chalices, vestments, and other ornaments of the altars which had been consecrated by spiritual ministers have passed from the table of Christ and from service to the body and blood of the Lord to the tables of the Saracens. The books of the prophets and the gospels have been thrown to the dogs.”38 Riccoldo had witnessed some of these atrocities, but he had also heard of many others inflicted on Christians by Muslims. He makes this clear in his third letter, when, in his address to the Apostles, he remarks that “Christian churches have been torn down and Saracen mosques have been built. The books of the holy evangelists have been burnt up and tossed into the sea, while the law and perfidy of the Saracens has been exalted to the skies.”39 This statement may be more for effect than a reference to a specific event, but Riccoldo does seem intent on conveying his belief that, compared with the Qurʾan, Christian texts have lost all respect in the East. As if to prove the point, he continues the same paragraph by relating one of his personal experiences, in which he came across a Christian prayer book that had been desecrated by Muslims. After declaring that the gospel is now reckoned as nothing throughout the East in comparison with the Qurʾan, Riccoldo records, “Oh, if only the gospel were revered among the Christians as much as the Qurʾan is among the Saracens and Tartars! For, in the great city of Nineveh, I found a missal, captured as though it were a slave, among the loot taken from the Christians of Acre; it contained the epistles and the gospels. The Saracens have forbidden this book; 107 they want to destroy it, and have scratched off [the writing on] its pages in order to make skins for drums and tambourines, of which eastern peoples make great use.”40 Riccoldo He thus offers yet more evidence of the lowly state to which Christians and the texts da Montecroce’s associated with them have fallen in Eastern lands. “Epistolae V” The examples above provide good evidence that there was intense textual transmission in the late thirteenth-century Middle East among diverse peoples and confessions. In some ways, this was beneficial to a Christian traveler/Dominican missionary/avid reader in the East such as Riccoldo, because he found many texts readily available for purchase at local markets. There was, however, the possibility that the Christian texts circulating so widely, and valued so greatly by Riccoldo, would fall into the hands of local non-Christians who were more likely to abuse than revere them. As the above evidence attests, this is something Riccoldo describes as occurring many times throughout the course of his Letters, and he certainly considers it a tragedy. It is interesting to note the particular way in which Riccoldo describes the conveyance of these Christian texts through Eastern lands by Muslims: he overtly refers to these volumes as Muslim “slaves” or “captives.” It seems clear, then, given the evidence, that Riccoldo on some level considers those Christian texts in the possession of Muslims to be suffering from the same affliction as human Christian captives. This is a theme he wishes to emphasize, because he returns to it multiple times in his Letters. There was, of course, Riccoldo’s discovery of the missal at Nineveh among the loot taken from the Christians of Acre, “quasi sclavum portatum,” as described above, but in this city he also discovers other Christian writings in the same predicament. One in particular seems to have gained his notice, which he makes clear in an address to Gregory the Great in letter 3. Riccoldo specifically mentions coming across Greg- ory’s Moralia in Job, which had been brought by the Muslims all the way to Nineveh after the fall of Acre, “as though it were a captive slave who had been separated from Christianity by more than a fifty-day camel journey in every direction.”41 Beyond this, it is worth noting that he describes not only Christian texts in these terms, but also the very clothes his brother preachers had worn at the time of their capture. Finding Christian texts (and the habits of his fellow friars) in such a deplorable state was certainly a moving experience for Riccoldo, one that appears to have evoked many of the same feelings he expresses when describing Muslims reducing his fellow Christians, of whatever station, to captivity and slavery. It is perhaps for this reason that he takes such an active role in reclaiming these items when the opportunity presents itself. Riccoldo does not merely see these habits of his fellow friars and Christian texts in the markets of Nineveh and abandon them; he instead purchases them with his own money. For example, after observing in the market those habits, vestments, books, and breviaries that had been taken by the Muslims as loot after the fall of Acre, Riccoldo reports in letter 3 that “then those returning from the destruction offered me a habit pierced by a lance or sword, which was also red with a little blood. Thereupon, wailing and weeping, I said: ‘this is the habit of my brothers; this is the habit of my order!’ I bought it for a small price.”42 He admits doing the same thing after he had found the abovementioned copy of Gregory the 108 Great’s Moralia in Job. After this volume had been taken from Acre to Nineveh by Muslim merchants, Riccoldo informs Gregory himself that he “ransomed” the book Texts in in Nineveh.43 The image of Christian texts and possessions as Christian captives is Transit conveyed clearly here by Riccoldo, but he adds yet another layer of meaning to this image through the language he chooses to employ. In both of the above descriptions, Riccoldo uses the Latin verb redimere (buy back, redeem, ransom, rescue), thus making a clear association between his act of reclaiming these Christian items from their Muslim owners and the act of ransoming slaves. He is thus evincing his desire to take possession of these items, not necessarily for his own personal benefit, but to restore them to their rightful place with a Christian owner. The association Riccoldo makes between the reclamation of these items and slave ransoming also has a clear symbolic significance, given his personal experiences in the East. TheLetters repeatedly invoke his heartbreak and sorrow over the territorial losses of Christian warriors in the East, such as at Acre, and it was especially difficult for him to bear the suffering that his fellow Christians endured along with these losses. Riccoldo had seen items removed from the altars of Christian churches and put up for sale in local markets. He had heard accounts of Muslims scattering all the Christian books throughout the world. Much worse for Riccoldo, however, were the many horrific reports he had heard concerning Christians who were at Acre when it fell to the Mamluks: many of them had been slain, including a large number of fellow friars, while others had been taken away as slaves. He had personally searched through the markets of the East in hopes of finding even a few of these unfortunate souls, but to date he had been entirely unsuccessful in this regard. He was, however, successful in discovering a number of Christian-related items in local markets, including some habits, vestments, books, and breviaries for sale by Muslim merchants.44 If he were to buy some of these items, he would be rescuing them from their Muslim owners, much as he wished to rescue those Christians who had been enslaved by the Mamluks after Acre had fallen. He had been unable to find and ransom any of the human captives from their Muslim masters, but he could at least ransom those texts and items that they held sacred as Christians. These purchases were thus symbolic acts of redemption for Riccoldo, in that they gave him the chance to reestablish Christian ownership of these items, perhaps they somewhat assuaged his guilt for being unable to help Christian captives. The very existence of Riccoldo’sLetters is proof of the insurmountable setbacks the Crusader States had suffered by the second half of the thirteenth century, but their real value is in documenting the trials and tribulations suffered by one particular Dominican pilgrim/missionary in the East, as well as his response to these devastations. The most personal of Riccoldo’s five letters is the last, in which he explains the long-awaited divine response to all of the questions he had asked the respective addressees of his previous four letters: God the Father, the Virgin Mary, the Church triumphant and the celestial court, and Patriarch of Jerusalem, Friar Nicholas, and the other Friar Preachers who were killed at Acre. He asks numerous questions of each addressee, but they all essentially have the same theme: Why 109 has God allowed Christian communities in the East, presumably both indigenous Christians and those who came to the region from the West, to suffer unending Riccoldo hardships and even massacres? Riccoldo writes, “I, above all, desired to hear why da Montecroce’s the Lord was striking us with so cruel a punishment as this plague of our enemy, and “Epistolae V” to know both how long this harsh oppression would last, as well as for what reason the Lord struck us using the Saracens, people of such a perfidious faith, who blas- pheme the entire celestial court so flagrantly.”45 He has yet to receive a response to his queries, and Riccoldo decides to change strategies by turning his attention to the “holy books for an answer from God concerning my astonishment.”46 He now has, unopened on the table before him, the same copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job which he had earlier ransomed from the market of Nineveh. He prays to Greg- ory: “O Saint Gregory, since you do not want to respond to me either through a trustworthy messenger or new letters, I ask you to show me through your ancient teachings why God does not respond to me, especially since I am in a state of such bitterness and also anxious on account of the divine response.”47 Riccoldo’s answer was quick in coming, for he hears a voice in his heart that exhorts him to “[t]ake up and read! Take up and read!”48 He then opens Gregory’s Moralia to a random page, places his finger down on a passage, and falls upon the following words from Job: “Why do you speak out against him that he did not respond to all your words? God speaks for himself one time, and then a second, but does not repeat.”49 Riccoldo continues by citing at length much of Gregory’s explanation of this passage, which has as its conclusion that God does not respond to every individual plea made to him, but instead divulges the Holy Scripture to humanity as a way to instruct and answer every plea collectively. This response appeases Riccoldo in the end, and he thanks God for it, although he cannot help but inform God that this has only been a response in words. He still eagerly anticipates God’s response in deeds: “In the end, I give thanks for your theoretical response, but nevertheless wait affectionately and ceaselessly for your practical response.”50 There are, for our purpose here, two important points to note in the context of Riccoldo’s fifth letter. First, when Riccoldo beseeches Gregory the Great for an answer to his pleas, he asks for the response through his ancient texts (my emphasis). Second, after Riccoldo receives his response, he thanks God for his helpthrough his servant Gregory (again, my emphasis). In many ways, this letter exemplifies the extent to which texts and the ideas contained therein flowed from group to group, culture to culture, and confession to confession in the late thirteenth-century Middle East. Riccoldo makes abundantly clear just how long he had sought a reply to his questions, and when the reply finally comes, it is not particularly surprising that Riccoldo finds what he seeks in a Western theological text. What is interesting here is that this particular copy of the Moralia in Job had a Western, Christian author but had been in the East at the time of Acre’s fall and was then transported as Muslim booty to Nineveh, where it was put up for sale by a Muslim merchant and purchased by a Dominican missionary. There is no reason to assume that Riccoldo’s copy of the Moralia had a unique journey; it is very probable that many other volumes shared the 110 same fate in a region of such cultural and confessional diversity. It is also worth noting, although admittedly somewhat more fancifully, that Riccoldo’s response from Texts in Gregory exemplifies not only the physical movement of texts over distance but also Transit how the ideas contained within those texts are transmitted over time. Indeed, when an answer finally came to Riccoldo’s pleas for understanding, this anxious Christian soul found solace in the words of a pope who had lived seven hundred years before. In conclusion, Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Five Letters on the Fall of Acre, 1291 offers scholars an excellent opportunity to study the movement of both texts and the ideas contained within them in the late thirteenth-century Mediterranean. Texts played an important role early in Riccoldo’s life, beginning with his Dominican education at Santa Maria Novella in his hometown of Florence. At this priory, he had the opportunity to read widely in scripture, exegesis, and scholasticism. Indeed, there is much evidence in his Letters attesting to his proficiency in these areas. A new phase of Riccoldo’s life began in 1288, when he departed for the Middle East on a pilgrimage and mission. It is impossible to know exactly what inspired him to embark on such a journey; perhaps it was the popularity of the study of Arab texts that coursed through Florence’s intellectual climate at the time, or perhaps his reading of scripture, especially one particular line in Psalm 119. Whatever the case may have been, Riccoldo’s Dominican education and missionary training made him a transmitter of textual ideas as he spread his book-based knowledge far and wide across the East. Yet he did not only transmit textual content through his missionary work, for Ric- coldo himself states that it was a common practice for Dominicans to take multiple volumes with them while traveling, thus also making them physical conveyers of texts on their journeys. Riccoldo’s Letters also attests to intense textual transmission, both physically and linguistically, in the late thirteenth-century Middle East among diverse peoples and confessions. He does not appear to have had much trouble at all finding multiple copies of the gospels in a number of languages, although he does note that the ready availability of Christian texts increased the opportunities for non-Christians to mock and abuse them publicly. It is also clear that the maltreat- ment of Christian texts, whether personally witnessed or not, alarmed and deeply saddened Riccoldo, but it was much worse if these texts ended up in Muslim hands. In fact, a theme to which he frequently returns in his Letters is that having Christian texts in the possession of Muslims is tantamount to their enslavement; these texts are Muslim slaves, just like the Christians who have fallen into Muslim captivity. Therefore, Riccoldo shows himself to be quite motivated to “ransom” these captive texts from their Muslim owners when he can, buying them with his own money when he comes across them at local markets. Finally, it is not surprising that a well- traveled Christian text whose ideas had been transmitted across great distances and time played an important role in responding to Riccoldo’s desire to understand God’s reasons for allowing Christian communities in the East to suffer unending hardships and even massacres. TheFive Letters makes clear that texts were a very important part of Riccoldo’s life, but it is equally clear that they were a major influence on his experiences as a pilgrim and missionary in the East. 111

Notes Riccoldo da Montecroce’s 1. Scholars examining interfaith relations traditionally turned to Riccoldo’s most popular work, “Epistolae V” an anti-Islamic polemic entitled Contra legem Sarracenorum, but have more recently expanded their inquiries to include his other important works as well: Liber peregrinationis (a combination itinerary detailing his experiences while on mission/pilgrimage in the Middle East and ethnography of the different peoples he encountered there); Libellus ad nationes orientales (a treatise describing the Christian sects found in the East); and, of course, his Epistolae ad ecclesiam triumphantem. 2. What is known of Riccoldo’s early life comes from his own references in his works, the necrol- ogy of his home priory, Santa Maria Novella, and a small number of charters, all of which have been gathered together by Emilio Panella, “Ricerche su Riccoldo da Monte di Croce,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 58 (1988): 5–85. For Riccoldo’s biography, also see Johann Christian M. Laurent, “Liber peregrinacionis,” in Peregrinatores medii aevi quattor: Burchardus de Monte Sion, Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, Odoricus de Foro Julii, Wilbrandus de Oldenborg (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1864); Reinhold Röhricht, “Lettres de Ricoldo de Monte-Croce,” Archives de l’Orient latin 2 (1884): 258–96; Antoine Dondaine, “Ricoldi- ana: Notes sur les oeuvres de Riccoldo de Montecroce,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 37 (1967): 119–70; Jean-Marie Mérigoux, “L’ouvrage d’un frère prêcheur en Orient à la fin du XIIIe s. suivi de l’édi- tion du Contra legem Sarracenorum,” Memorie Domenicane 17 (1986): 1–142; René Kappler, ed., Riccold de Monte Croce, Pérégrination en Terre Sainte et au Proche Orient: Texte latin et traduction; Lettres sur la Chute de Saint Jean d’Acre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997); Thomas E. Burman, “Riccoldo da Monte di Croce,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History; Volume 4 (1200–1350), ed. David Thomas and Alex Mallett (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 678–91, esp. 678–79; and Rita George-Tvrtković, A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 2–4. 3. “O beate Francisce, cui ab infancia mea et usque nunc fui devotus . . . ad te clamito et flebiliter ingemisco.” Riccoldo’s Five Letters on the Fall of Acre survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, located at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (ms Vat. Lat. 7317, fols. 249r–267r). The only complete Latin edition of Riccoldo’s text is that of Röhricht, “Lettres,” 258–96. I will thus identify all following references to the Latin text of his Letters in terms of Röhricht’s edition (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 278). 4. Popolo refers to the non-noble working classes, which gained a great deal of influence in thirteenth-century Italian towns. Over time the category was divided into two groups: the popolo grasso, those wealthy and influential professionals and guild members who controlled civic administration and trade, and the popolo minuto, those laborers, craftsmen, and artisans who were forbidden to organize into guilds. Guild membership was a prerequisite for political office in many communes, so thepopolo minuto were effectively excluded from participation in civic government. 5. George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 4; Daniel R. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence: The Social World of Franciscan and Dominican Spirituality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 64; also, for more general information on Santa Maria Novella and its milieu, see M. Michele Mulcha- hey, “First the Bow Is Bent in Study”: Dominican Education Before 1350 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998), xi, 34–35, 184, 185, 276, 323, 338, 424–25, 433, 435–36, 442, 471–72, 538, 547. 6. M. Michele Mulchahey, “Education in Dante’s Florence Revisited: Remigio de’ Girolami and the Schools of Santa Maria Novella,” in Medieval Education, ed. Ronald B. Begley and Joseph W. Koterski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 143–81, esp. 144–46. 7. Orlandi’s edition of the house’s 1489 inventory also reveals that the library housed nearly 950 volumes at that time. See Stefano Orlandi and Tommaso di Matteo Sardi,La biblioteca di S. Maria Novella in Firenze dal sec. XIV al sec. XIX (Firenze: Ed. Il Rosario, 1952), 10 and 13. 8. For a summary of the holdings of Santa Maria Novella’s library at the time of the 1489 inventory, see ibid., 15–24. 9. Scholars generally accepted that Riccoldo composed the Letters in the East, and not long after the fall of Acre to the Mamluks in 1291, thus making it the earliest of his five extant texts. See John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 245–46; Burman, “Riccoldo da Monte di Croce,” 678; George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 34. 10. Compare with the following: “For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe even this: that unless I believe, I shall not understand.” Anselm 112 of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (Minneapolis: The Arthur J. Banning Press, 2000), 93. 11. Riccoldo’s text reads, “ipse Machometus mendacissimus dixit se missum esse a Deo in virtute Texts in armorum” (the most deceitful Muhammad himself said that he had been sent by God in the force of Transit arms), while Aquinas expresses the following in book I, chapter 6 of his Summa contra Gentiles: “dixit se in armorum potentia missum” (“He [Muhammad] said he was sent in the power of his arms”), and also “alios armorum violentia in suam legem coegit” (“He [Muhammad] forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms”) (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 272; Thomas Aquinas,Summa contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis, vol. 1 (New York: Hanover House, 1955–57), 6. 12. “[S]ua potentia et doctrina pestifera iam incipit confirmari miraculis” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 287). 13. “Yet it is also a fact that, even in our own time, God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith. . . . On the other hand, those who founded sects committed to erroneous doctrines proceeded in a way that is opposite to this, the point is clear in the case of Muhammad. . . . He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth” (Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 1:6). 14. Isaiah 28:13, as noted by Kappler (Kappler, Riccold de Monte Croce, 248). Onomatopoeia is a literary form often used in many languages, including biblical Hebrew, by which a written phrase, when spoken aloud, is meant to embody the sound of the reality it communicates. In this case, Riccoldo is referring to a verse in which Isaiah prophesies that, because the people of Judah responded contemptuously to his message, God’s message will henceforth reach them through prophets speaking strange, foreign words. These words will sound like gibberish to the people, and thus will not be understood and go unheeded: “Tsaw latsaw tsaw latsaw, qaw laqaw qaw laqaw, zeʾer sham, zeʾer sham’ ” (“Order upon order, order upon order, rule upon rule, rule upon rule, a little here, a little there”). Riccoldo’s implication here is twofold. First, the invasion and downfall of the Crusader States at the hands of Muslim forces have fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy that a foreign power speaking a foreign language will be God’s judgment upon a Christian people who spurned clear and straightforward calls to repentance. Second, Riccoldo’s own insensitivity to God’s message must explain why his personal prayers for heaven’s aid against the Muslims in the East remain unanswered; in other words, the prayers of people deemed unworthy in the eyes of God must sound like unintelligible gibberish, and thus do not warrant a response. 15. Tolan, Saracens, 245. His superior’s approval of Riccoldo’s request to missionize among the Ilkhanid Mongols in particular is not unusual, because they had a history of changing religious affinities. Ilkhan Öljaytü (r. 1304–16), for example, was raised as a Nestorian Christian. 16. “Et ego sicut presumptuosus intra memetipsum longo tempore cogitavi, quod possem illum in tua virtute deicere et eius doctrinam pestiferam evacuare. Quamobrem assumpta voluntate commissa michi a tuo vicario obediencia veni ad profundas partes istas orientis” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 268). 17. For a brief but very good discussion of Italy’s “Arabophilia” at this time, see George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 5–6. 18. María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Phil- adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 121–22; George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 6. 19. George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 6. One indication of Frederick’s proficiency in Arabic is the relationship he developed with Emir Fakhr al-Dīn al-Shaykh, who led Sultan al-Kamil of Egypt’s 1227 embassy to Frederick’s court in Sicily. The emir quickly became impressed with Frederick’s ability to discuss with him, in Arabic, a wide range of topics such as politics, warfare, and falconry, which led to a fast friendship. See Richard F. Cassady, The Emperor and the Saint: Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Francis of Assisi, and Journeys to Medieval Places (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 237. 20. Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy, trans. Harold Sunderland (London: Cass, 1968); George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 6. 21. Jean Richard, “The Eastern Mediterranean and Its Relations with the Hinterland (11th–15th Centuries),” in Richard, Les Relations entre l’Orient et l’Occident au Moyen Âge (London: Variorum, 1977); Menocal, Arabic Role, 116, 121–22, as quoted in George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 6. 22. This seems also to have been the case with the Qurʾan itself, which was translated into Latin 113 in its entirety at least three times between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, and also survives to this day in some forty Latin and Arabic manuscripts known to have been read by Latin-Christian scholars. See Thomas E. Burman,Reading the Qurʾān in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University Riccoldo of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1. For the assertion that a work surviving today in more than thirty man- da Montecroce’s uscripts was a great success, see Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’occident médiéval “Epistolae V” (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1980), 249–58. 23. Burman, Reading the Qurʾān, 8. 24. Burman notes that there is surprisingly little evidence to suggest that Latin translators of the Qurʾan intentionally distorted the text for polemical ends, and that any problems with their translations were more likely the result of their lacking the skill to create an accurate and effective translation (ibid., 8). 25. For discussions of the Dominican approach to mission, see Mulchahey, “First the Bow Is Bent in Study,” 344–50; George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 8–11. 26. George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 9. 27. “Ibi substitimus per medium annum et predicabamus eis per turchimannum in lingua arabica” (Kappler, Riccold de Monte Croce, 118, as quoted in George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 9 n. 44). Yet it is unclear exactly why Riccoldo would have thought Arabic to be the best language for a missionary in the city of Tabriz, where Persian predominated. 28. Riccoldo boasts that he has read the Qurʾan in its original language no fewer than nineteen times over the course of his five letters. 29. Psalm 119:59: “Et prius michi occurrit, quod cum ex multis iam precedentibus annis cogitavi vias meas et converti pedes meos in testimonia filii tui, obstitit inimicus humani generis, ut me retrahere obiciens multa et gravissima pericula in tali peregrinacione, que importabilia essent fragilitati mee” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 271). 30. Riccoldo da Montecroce, “Liber peregrinationis,” in George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 176. 31. He clearly means “pilgrimage” in both instances, because he uses the same word, “peregrinatio” (George-Tvrtković, Christian Pilgrim, 146 n. 19). 32. “Set eciam sollicitor circumspiciens inter captives, si forte aliquos ex meis fratribus predica- toribus invenirem, et nullum invenio. Invenio tamen tunicas et paramenta, libros eciam et breviaria inter Sarracenos. O fratres predicatores, quo ivistis sine tunicis et breviariis? Non est enim vestre con- suetudinis, ut fratres vestri sine tunicis et breviariis vadant in viam longinquam” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 277–78). 33. “. . . mirabar quam plurimum, quia inveniebam paramenta, tunicas, libros et breviaria et non inveniebam fratres. Sciebam enim nostri moris non esse, quod fratres vadant absque tunicis et breviariis” (ibid., 289). 34. “. . . non miror, si breviaria et libros et tunicas dimisistis. Non enim amplius indigetis, quia in omnibus divites facti estis in illo, in omni verbo et in omni scientia, sicut testimonium Christi confir- matum est in vobis” (ibid., 290). 35. “Ita enim legi in alchorano capitulo lxi dicit Iesus, filius Marie: ‘Ego sum nuncius Dei, o filii Israel, et sum nuncius verax, ego evangelizo vobis, quod legatus veniet post me et nomen eius Machome- tus’ ” (ibid., 282). Riccoldo is here referring to Qurʾan 61:6, which states, “And when Jesus son of Mary said, ‘Children of Israel, I am indeed the Messenger of God to you, confirming the Torah that is before me, and giving good tidings of a Messenger who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad.” See The Koran Interpreted, trans. A. J. Arberry (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 2:274. It is interesting to note that Riccoldo’s version of this passage varies from the Qurʾan’s actual text in two significant ways. First, he fails to include the phrase in which Jesus says that the Qurʾan confirms the Torah. Second, he also substitutes “Muhammad” for “Ahmad,” which is the name clearly stated in the Qurʾanic text. These errors are indeed puzzling, considering the pride Riccoldo took in his knowledge of Arabic and his ready access to a copy of the Qurʾan; indeed, he makes a point of recording many times in his Letters that he has read the preceding passage in the Qurʾan in Arabic. It is of course impossible to conclude with certainty why Riccoldo altered the above passage as he did, but it may very well be an example of his self-expressed and well-documented ambivalence about the Qurʾan. In his works, Riccoldo evinces both sincere admiration for the rhythm, verse, and poetic language of the Qurʾan and sincere disdain 114 for its message. It is possible that here he is demonstrating his command of the Arabic language to his readers while shielding them from a Muslim claim that he found particularly objectionable, namely, that Jesus would admit that the Qurʾan confirms the Torah. The reason for Riccoldo’s substitution of Texts in “Muhammad” for “Ahmad” is equally elusive, but, given that Ahmad means “one who is highly praised” Transit in Arabic, perhaps he is choosing to deploy Muhammad’s actual name rather than acknowledge the complimentary manner in which Jesus refers to him. 36. “Ego vere ista non invenio in evangelio, nec in latino, nec in caldeo, nec in arabico, quod quidem diligentissime in oriente perlegi” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 282). 37. “Disperse sunt epistole tue inter Sarracenos et eas contemptibiliter dividunt quia dixisti, quod Iesus Christus est Deus et Dei filius. Nam ipsi pro efficaci argumento in alchorano inducunt, quod Deus nullo modo potest habere filium, quia non habet uxorem. Et hec dicens prevalent contra nos, ymmo dicunt, quod hec est causa, quia Deus affligit nos, quia habet pro malo, quod damus ei filium” (ibid.). 38. “Calices et palle et alia ornamenta altarium spiritualibus ministeriis consecrata de mensa Christi et de ministerio corporis et sanguinis Domini transeunt ad mensas Sarracenorum, libri prophetarum et evangeliorum canibus exponuntur” (ibid., 272). 39. “Ecclesie christianorum destruuntur et meschite Sarracenorum edificantur, libri sancti evan- gelii comburuntur et proiciuntur in mare et lex et perfidia Sarracenorum exaltari cernitur usque ad nubes” (ibid., 280–81). 40. “O utinam vel in tanta reverencia esset evangelium apud christianos, in quanta est alchoranum apud Sarracenos et Tartaros! Ego autem librum missale inveni quasi sclavum portatum de spoliis christianorum de Accon in Nynive, civitate grandi, ubi erant epistole et evangelia. Quem librum interdice- bant Sarraceni, volebant destruere et cartas eius radere ad faciendum cartas pro tympanis et tamburis quibus orientales multum utuntur” (ibid.). 41. “Et postquam destruxerunt Accon, librum tuum Moralium portaverunt usque prope Ninivem, civitatem grandem. Ibi enim librum tuum quasi captivum sclavum redemi, qui distabat a christianitate ex omni parte plusquam quinquaginta dietas cameli ” (ibid., 280). 42. “Tunc vero a redeuntibus de exidio michi oblata est tunica lancea vel gladio perforata, que eciam modico cruore rosea erat. Et tunc eiulans et plorans dixi: ‘tunica fratrum meorum est, tunica ordinis mei est!’ Redemi eam modico precio” (ibid., 278). 43. See footnote 41 above for the Latin text (ibid., 280). 44. It is unclear exactly how these merchants had acquired this merchandise, but, presumably, Eastern Christians had originally owned much of it. 45. “. . . et maxime cum desiderarem audire, ex qua causa percusserit nos Dominus plaga inimici tam crudeli castigatione, et ad quem finem perducet ipsa dura oppressio, et qua ratione percusserit nos Dominus per Sarracenos, per homines habentes tam perfidam fidem, qui totam curiam celestem tam manifeste blasphemant” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 295). 46. “Et cum non responderent michi per alium certum nuncium, cogitavi de Dei bonitate confisus, de libris sanctis a Deo michi responsionem mee admirationis expetere” (ibid.). 47. “O Sancte Gregori, postquam non vultis michi per certum nuncium respondere aut per novas literas, rogo te, ostende vel per antiquam doctrinam tuam, quare Deus michi non respondeat, maxime cum sim in tanta amaritudine anxius etiam divine responsionis” (ibid.). 48. This references the famous phrase “Tolle, lege” from chapter 12 of Saint Augustine’sConfessions . 49. Job 33:13–14. 50. “Pro responsione denique theorica gratias ago, practicam vero nichilominus affectuose atque indesinenter expeto” (Röhricht, “Lettres,” 296).

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Riccoldo da Montecroce’s “Epistolae V” Seven

The Wheat and the Barley

Feminine (in)Fertility in Eve and Adam Narratives in Islam

Zohar Hadromi-Allouche

According to Alan Dundes, a myth is a “sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form.”1 The present chapter aims to explore how certain such sacred narratives came to be in their present form. Modern scholarship tends to identify many of the Islamic religious texts as corresponding to the Judeo-Christian milieu, in which Islam emerged and developed. This chapter argues that alongside such developments, correspondence with other Near Eastern traditions should also be considered, such as Greek and Zoroastrian texts. An intertextual reading of works from these two traditions reveals an additional—and so far hardly noticed—level of meaning to the Islamic texts. In what follows, I aim to demonstrate the possible advantages of such a reading through the analysis of a motif that is unique to Islamic texts concerning Eve, Adam, and the fruit of Paradise. The first part of this chapter begins with a short presentation of the Eve and Adam narratives in the context of medieval Islamic sources. It will then focus on the unique identification of wheat/barley as the fruit of Paradise. The second part will discuss the limited value of parallels from Jewish and Christian sources for understanding the origins and role of this motif. The last part will then suggest possible links between the Islamic narratives and other Near Eastern traditions, namely, Zoroastrian texts concerning the first human couple and Greek texts concerning the goddess Demeter. I will argue that these texts can be helpful alternatives for appreciating the polemical role of barley and wheat in medieval Islamic narratives concerning Eve and Adam. Wheat and Barley in Medieval Islamic Narratives of Eve and Adam

Eve and Adam in Medieval Islam In the Qurʾan, the Expulsion from Paradise is related in three chapters. According to Q 2:35–38 and Q 7:11–24, Adam and his spouse, whom the Qurʾan does not name, were tempted simultaneously by Satan (whom the Qurʾan substitutes for the biblical snake). According to Q 20:115–27, Satan only tempted Adam. In all three references the same consequences are related: Adam and his spouse concurrently consume the forbidden fruit, and as a result, they are expelled from Paradise. These concise narratives neither name Adam’s spouse nor consider her a main cause for the Fall. Extra-Qurʾanic literature, on the other hand, such as tafsīr (commentaries to the Qurʾan), hadith (compilations of prophetic traditions), or qiṣaṣ al-anbiy āʾ (stories of the prophets’ collections), tends to elaborate on the Adam and Eve theme. These sources often include motifs that are not part of the Qurʾanic Paradise narratives but can be paralleled with the Paradise narratives of Genesis 3 and post-biblical literature. For example, all of these sources give the name Ḥawwāʾ (Arabic for the biblical Ḥava, or Eve) for Adam’s spouse.2 Similarly, Muslim sources tell us that immediately after God created Eve, He married her to Adam (thus keeping her under a continuous male domination). Only then did God put the couple in the Garden. This motif can be found in Genesis Rabba.3 The Islamic sources also refer to Eve’s excessive pun- ishments for eating the forbidden fruit and feeding it to Adam,4 a theme that exists in the Talmud and midrash sources as well.5

Wheat and Barley in and out of Paradise However, other motifs that are found in the Islamic sources in relation to Eve and Adam are hardly known from earlier Jewish or Christian sources. This is the case with wheat and barley. In the extra-Qurʾanic Islamic sources, wheat, barley, and the production of bread constitute a recurring motif in the Eve and Adam narratives. As shown elsewhere, in these narratives wheat and barley constitute one of many motifs which together serve to maintain the myth of superior fertility potential for the male.6 So far this motif has attracted little scholarly attention. Barbara Stowasser briefly notes that wheat is among “some speculation on the species of the tree” in 117 al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr, before her discussion turns to the question of temptation. Jane Smith and Yvonne Haddad also mention wheat-related texts, but do not treat it as a 7 The Wheat and theme. Denise Spellberg and Catherine Bronson do not refer to wheat (or barley). the Barley Here, I will focus first on the wheat/barley motif and its use within the Islamic narratives of Eve and Adam. Possible backgrounds for the emergence of this motif in Islam will then be examined. Muslim sources often identify the forbidden fruit of Paradise as wheat. Although Islam also knows other identifications for the forbidden fruit, wheat remains by far the most prominent among these.8 As will be discussed below, this identification of wheat as the essence through which the first feminine transgression took place, by means of the stalks that Eve unlawfully took from the forbidden tree, is rarely found in Judaism or Christianity. It thus remains a particularly Islamic trait of the Paradise story.9 Islamic texts also regard the transgression in Paradise as explaining the origin of barley. A report that is recorded in Ibn Bābawayhi’s (d. 381 a.h . /991 c.e.) Maʿānī al-Akhbār informs us that wheat as we know it originated from the tree of Paradise. However, the place from which Eve and Adam took the forbidden fruit was transformed; instead of wheat, this part of the tree started growing barley.10 The origin of barley is thus regarded as a mutilation of the divine creation, emerging from Eve and Adam’s disobedience to God. The inferiority of barley is also evident from a report that regards its origins in the bran that was left after Adam had sifted flour for the first time.11 Indeed, the cultural perception of wheat’s superiority over barley is also demonstrated through the Arabic idiom “They present us with wheat and sell us barley” (yaʿriḍūna ʿalaynā ḥinṭa wa-yab īʿūnahu shaʿīr). Another report, recorded in al-Kisāʾī’s (d. sixth century a.h./eleventh century c.e.) Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiy āʾ, adds the theme of stealing. Here it was Eve alone who approached the wheat tree, from which she picked seven stalks. One stalk she ate, another one she kept for herself, and the remaining five stalks she gave Adam to eat.12 Eve’s transgression had a double impact: by taking the fruit, she disobeyed the divine command and appropriated to herself the authority of fertilization (sowing). The theft and hiding of the stalk represent the acquisition of a more general potential of nourishment, beyond the private case of her feeding the stalks to Adam. This potential, while rejected in the narrative as illegitimate, can also be understood as Promethean, since Eve’s theft transfers essential knowledge from the divine realm to the human sphere. Other reports combine the couple’s stealing with the origin of barley. Ibn Bābawayhi records a report that dates the origin of barley after the Expulsion from Paradise. Since God commanded Adam to cultivate the earth, the angel Gabriel brought Adam some wheat grains to sow. Eve, unlawfully, took some of these. Adam forbade her to sow them, but she did so anyway. The grains sowed by Adam produced wheat, whereas Eve’s grains produced barley.13 The prohibition in this report on Eve’s sowing might reflect an attempt to prevent 118 her from engaging in nurturing activities, such as the one that resulted in the Expul- sion. Indeed, the transition of dominance over wheat (fertility and nourishment) Texts in from Eve (in Paradise) to Adam (on earth) might be considered the moral of the Transit incident in Paradise. Just as in Paradise, here too Eve’s illegitimate activity results in the mutilation of God’s creation. Eve’s activity as a fertility agent is thus regarded as inferior, forbidden, and transgressive. Even when legitimate, Eve’s activity as a fertility agent remains inferior. A report recorded in al-Thaʿlabī’s (d. 427 a.h . /1035 c.e.) Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiy āʾ informs us that after the descent from Paradise, the angel Gabriel gave Eve and Adam wheat grains for sowing, so that they wouldn’t starve. But whereas Adam received two grains, Eve only received one.14 Other reports tell us that the grains were given to Adam alone.15 Eve’s deficient nature and inferiority are indicated here through quantity. In the context of the post-Expulsion period, the wheat/barley motif in the Islamic Eve and Adam narratives also serves to portray fertility and nourishment as masculine domains. Food production, especially the production of bread, is related to Adam alone, from ploughing to baking.16 Baking, in particular, is traditionally considered a feminine task, and its ascription to Adam is not self-evident. A single report that is recorded in al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310 a.h./923 c.e.) Taʾrīkh relates baking bread to Eve, among other “things that women do.”17 This last phrase emphasizes the singularity of Adam’s dominance over the production of bread in the aforementioned reports. Furthermore, al-Ṭabarī records these details as part of a narrative that describes Adam’s death. It is thus not clear whether these were Eve’s chores throughout her post-Fall life, or only after Adam has died. Collecting stalks after the harvest is also perceived as a traditionally feminine task (see, for example, Ruth 2:1–8). According to a report recorded by al-Kisāʾī, Adam took care of most phases of bread production, whereas Eve gathered the stalks after the harvest.18 This act emphasizes that the feminine activity of nurturing is only legitimate as long as it remains within the prescribed limits: the collection of preharvested stalks depends on and is governed by the harvester, Adam. This depiction of Eve is an antithetical parallel to her unauthorized activity in Paradise, where it was she who picked the wheat (forbidden fruit) and fed it to Adam. In the current context, Adam is in the lead, harvesting and feeding (producing the bread). The significance of domination over the wheat grains is further emphasized through reports that use the above descriptions—such as Gabriel’s giving Adam two grains for sowing and Eve only one, or Adam’s consuming more grains from the tree in Paradise—in order to legitimize Muslim inheritance law, which only allows women half the share afforded to men.19 Such reports also demonstrate the significance of the Eve and Adam narratives in the shaping of gender hierarchy and relationship in societies that are familiar with such stories. In light of the above reports, medieval Muslim sources seem highly interested in wheat, barley, and gender in the context of Adam and Eve. Notably, barley is unique in that it is only referred to in Shiite sources, such as Ibn Bābawayhi and al-Jazāʾirī, and always in a negative manner. In what follows I will examine the use of the wheat 119 and barley motif in other Near Eastern traditions, to which the above Islamic texts might respond. The Wheat and the Barley Wheat, Barley, and the Jewish and Christian Sources20

In the Bible, barley’s inferiority to wheat is evident. For example, in 2 Kings 7:1, Elisha prophesied that “tomorrow a seah of finely-sifted [wheat] flour [will be sold] for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel.” Maimonides (d. 1204 c.e.) extends this hierarchy to gender by arguing that a “man’s offering precedes a woman’s offering; an offering of wheat precedes an offering of barley.”21 Still, very few references to wheat or barley exist in Jewish and Christian narratives regarding Paradise. Although Ibn Kathīr (d. 774 a.h./1373 c.e.) notes that the identification of the Paradise fruit as wheat was made by the Jews,22 only one identification of the tree of Paradise as wheat (alongside other possibilities, such as fig and wine) is related in the Babylonian Talmud.23 Among the Sages, fig is the common identification of the Paradise tree, possibly in linkage with Genesis 3:7.24 The Apocrypha contains descriptions of angelic agricultural guidance to Adam after the Fall, but these descriptions are not judgmental in their view of wheat and its use, or abuse, by Eve and Adam.25 Certain similarities to the corrupted wheat motif do exist in Jewish and Christian sources. In Midrash Tanḥuma (fifth–ninth centuries c.e.), we find that, following the transgression in Paradise, for many generations after Eve and Adam’s time the sowing of wheat would only produce thistles. It was not until Noah was born that the natural order was reestablished, and people would harvest whatever they had sown: the sowing of wheat would produce wheat, and the sowing of barley would produce barley.26 This narrative relates to the corruption of sown grains in connection with the transgression. However, the transformation into thistles (probably reflecting Genesis 3:17–18) is of cereals in general, and not limited to wheat. Other elements of the Islamic narratives, too, such as the unlawful plucking (or sowing), the theft, the angel, and the personal responsibility of Eve, are not present here. A later Jewish text is recorded by Louis Ginzberg, who narrates from Baʿalei ha- Tosafot (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) the view that, due to the curse on the earth (Genesis 3:17–18), from Adam’s time until Noah was born, the sowing of wheat would produce oats. This text does appear to refer to wheat as being transformed into an inferior kind of grain (as in the tenth-century Islamic narratives). However, Ginzberg comments that the text’s verification and origin are problematic.27 It is indeed possible that this is a misinterpretation of the above midrash, with its references to the mutilation of crops during the Adam–Noah period, and to wheat and barley as symbols of the reinstatement of the natural order. In a Christian context, a closer parallel to the idea of wheat turning into barley in the context of the Paradise transgression is found in a Welsh poem that Andrew Breeze dates to the late twelfth century.28 This poem, which relates to Eve, Adam, and the corruption of the paradisiacal wheat, describes how the angel Michael brought 120 Eve some wheat grains, so she gave them to Adam. But Eve kept one-tenth of the grains for herself and secretly sowed them. Adam, too, sowed his grains. Adam’s Texts in grains grew as wheat; Eve’s stolen grains were turned into black rye. Brian Murdoch Transit sees this poem as a warning against theft, whereas Andrew Breeze suggests that it is a warning against the nonpayment of tithes.29 The similarity of this poem to the abovementioned Ibn Bābawayhi report is quite straightforward. Both texts tell more or less the same story of the unfavorable consequences of Eve’s stealing and sowing grains from an angelic source. At the same time, other than this obvious similarity, the poem is of little help in terms of further understanding the meaning of the wheat/barley motif in the Islamic context. Chronologically, the suggested dating of the Welsh poem is significantly later than Ibn Bābawayhi (d. 991 c.e.), who records the Islamic version of this narrative. One can perhaps imagine that this story had travelled between the Near East and Europe, during or following the Crusades. The variations in detail between the two texts do not seem to have a significant effect on the message of the story. The angel’s name (Gabriel/Michael) can be explained: in Islam, Gabriel is the angel of Revelation; in Western Christianity, Michael is associated with crops and harvest.30 Barley and rye are both considered second-rate cereals: in medieval Europe, barley and rye bread were peasant food, whereas wheat was preserved for the upper classes. As in the Islamic text, in the Welsh poem, the transformation of the divinely originated wheat grains into rye confirms the destructive outcome of Eve’s transgressive fertility initiatives. It can therefore be concluded that there is some correspondence between the Islamic and Christian, or Jewish, texts in regard to the wheat/barley motif. This correspondence, however, is of limited value in explaining the motif and understanding its function in the Islamic context, where the motif seems to have first appeared. One is therefore encouraged to look further, into the realms of other Near Eastern traditions.

Barley in Other Near Eastern Traditions

Zoroastrianism: Barley and the First Human Couple One possible reading of the above Eve and Adam narratives would be as an Islamic polemic against the Zoroastrian tradition. In the Dēnkard, a ninth- or tenth-century work that summarizes earlier Zoroastrian texts, barley is described as a gift from God (Ohrmazd) to the “parents of the entire world,” Mashī and Mashiyānī. According to the text, Ohrmazd showed both of them how to sow barley, but Ohrmazd’s words are directed at Mashī (the male) alone: “This, Mashī, is your ox, and this is your barley, and these are your other tools, which from now on you should know well!” Ohrmazd then sends the guardian spirit Hadish to bless the bread that was made of barley, that “this barley go out from you to your descendants, to keep off the Adversity coming from the demons.”31 The parallels and contrasts between this myth and the Islamic text are quite 121 evident. Barley is a divine gift to the first couple—parents of humanity, who are commanded to sow it into the ground. Barley is regarded as a blessed, rather than The Wheat and mutilated, cereal. Although chronologically it is given to Mashī and Mashiyānī after the Barley their fall (due to their declaration that the world was created by the Evil Spirit),32 the two events are not presented as related to each other, and no causal linkage is made between them. Keeping in mind that in the context of Eve and Adam, barley is only referred to in Shiite sources; the strong Shiite presence in Persia; and that the date of the Dēnkard corresponds to that of Ibn Bābawayhi’s work (tenth century c.e.), it seems likely that the Shiite tradition emerged as a polemical response to the Zoro- astrian myth. At the same time, it is also notable that the gender element, which is highly prominent in the Islamic texts, is quite minor in the Zoroastrian myth. Although sowing instructions are only given to Mashī, the male, the narrative presents no explicit hierarchy between male and female. Thus, whereas a parallel between the Zoroastrian and Islamic texts explains the negation of barley, the strong antifemi- nine element in the Islamic texts might nevertheless reflect a response to another tradition—that is, the Greek myth of Demeter, where both gender and barley play a prominent role.

Grapes and Pomegranates, Eve and Persephone The Demeter rituals were highly dominant around the Near East from the tenth century b.c.e. to the sixth century c.e., and paganism was still active throughout the sixth-century Near East and later, in particular in the Sassanid Persian Empire, soon to become Islamic territories.33 According to Averil Cameron, Greek was still an important language throughout the Near East during the sixth century. This enhances the probability of Greek themes being present in early Islamic literature. Indeed, both Suleiman Mourad and Walid Saleh argue for parallels between particular Greek and Qurʾanic narratives.34 The discussion below will highlight the parallels, and antithetical parallels, between certain Eve and Adam narratives in Islam and the Demeter myths. It will also demonstrate how the wheat/barley motif in the Muslim texts could have emerged as an Islamic polemical reaction toward the Greek myths. A linkage between the Demeter myth and the wheat/barley motif in the Islamic tradition is indicated through the following report, recorded by al-Kulaynī (d. 329 a.h./941 c.e.). At first glance, this text might not seem highly relevant for the current discussion. However, a closer reading discloses additional implications, connecting the Eve and Adam stories in (Shiite) Islamic sources to the Greek Demeter. The text reads as follows:

After the Expulsion from Paradise, God commanded Adam to plough and gave him plants of fruitful trees from the Garden. Satan asked Adam to feed him some of these fruits, but Adam refused. Satan then came to Eve, saying that he was dying of hunger and thirst, but she said that Adam had forbidden her to feed him. Satan asked that she squeeze some juice into his palm, but 122 Eve refused. Eventually she agreed to let him suck a grape in his mouth, which she then took away from him. The following day, the same happened with a Texts in date. After Adam died, Satan urinated on the roots of the grapevine and the Transit palm tree. It is thus that God forbade the consumption of intoxicating drinks made of grapes and dates, since the juice of these fruits has become mixed with Satan’s soul and urine.35

At first glance, it seems almost evident that in its current Islamic context, this story serves as an etiological myth that aims to explain the prohibition in Islam on the consumption of intoxicating drinks. Further, from a biblical (as well as Islamic) perspective, it also parallels the midrash about Noah, Satan, and the vineyard that they shared.36 In relation to the biblical Paradise story, there seems to be a reverse parallel: Adam is here the lawgiver; Satan, the consumer of the forbidden fruit; and Eve acts as herself, disobeying the divine and masculine commands as she feeds a forbidden fruit to a masculine being. Her illegitimate nurturing activity abuses the divine fruit and causes irreversible damage to humanity as a whole. It is also notable that Islamic (as well as Jewish) sources sometimes identify the tree of Paradise as a grapevine.37 Moreover, the depiction of Satan as sucking the fruit serves as a rather obvious sexual symbol, which correlates to the role of the snake and the forbidden fruit in Paradise; it is also reminiscent of the midrash regarding Cain as the offspring of Eve and Satan.38 The granting of divine plants to Adam following the descent is also known from the Jewish and Christian sources.39 However, these sources do not relate to the corruption of the fruit, as is evident both here (divine fruit turns demonic, due to Eve) and in the wheat/barley traditions (supreme grain becomes mutilated by Eve). On another level, this report is highly reminiscent of a text from a different religious tradition—namely, the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter (goddess of fertility and crops). Hades, god of the underworld and of the dead, abducted Persephone and made her his queen. In response, Demeter went down to the earth. She stopped fertilizing the earth and would not resume it until her daughter was returned to her. Eventually, Zeus asked Hades to send Persephone back. Hades agreed, but tricked Persephone into eating one grain of a pomegranate before she left. As a result, each year she must spend some time in the underworld. During this period, nothing grows, as Demeter awaits her daughter’s return.40 Like the aforementioned Islamic tradition, here, too, a single grain of a forbidden fruit is enough to cause an irreversible, though not total, transformation: some of Persephone belongs to Hades, and some of the fruit belongs to Satan. The line between the upper and lower worlds is blurred and transgressed—divine and human, this world and the underworld (or the fruit above the ground and the roots under the ground), life and death, Paradise and Satan. Like grapes, pomegranates, too, symbolize fertility. Through the above report about Eve and Satan, a parallel between the Eve and Adam stories and the Persephone myth becomes visible. Such a relation has been 123 detected, for example, by Tamar Ben Shoshan, who suggests a psychological analysis of the parallels between Persephone and Eve in terms of the development of self- 41 The Wheat and consciousness. However, I would like to suggest a further relationship between the the Barley two episodes, which are connected both on the textual and intertextual levels. This relationship is mediated through the figure of Persephone’s mother, Demeter.

Wheat and Barley, Eve and Demeter In Greek mythology, most great gods are Olympians, such as Zeus, Hera, Athena, and so on. Only two of the terrestrial gods are as significant as the Olympian gods, and these are Demeter and her brother Dionysus, god of wine. The story of Demeter is related in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, dating back to the seventh century b.c.e.42 Demeter was the goddess of crops, earth, and bread. Her name was derived from gê mêtêr (Mother Earth) or from the Cretan word dêai (barley)—mother, or giver, of barley (or food in general). Her sanctuaries were the crop fields and threshing plots. Stalks had a major role in the worship of Demeter, which came to be known as the Mysteries of Eleusis, a place northwest of Athens where her main temple was situated. Dionysus, too, was part of these rituals. Barley drink was considered Demeter’s holy drink, and part of the rituals of her mysteries. The major celebration of Demeter took place every five years in September. Women had a major part in her worship. According to the hymn, once Demeter learned what had happened to her daughter, she disguised herself as an old woman and started wandering among the humans. Metaneira, the wife of King Keleos of Eleusis, and her daughters invited the old woman into their home, where she refused to consume anything but water mixed with barley and mint leaves. This drink became part of the Demeter rituals in Eleu- sis. Demeter then became the nanny for Queen Metaneira’s new baby. In gratitude for the kindness of her hosts, she decided to make the child immortal; she would thus put him in the fire to burn his mortality off him. But one night Metaneira saw Demeter do that, and she started screaming. The irritated goddess dropped the baby to the floor; he survived, but never became immortal. Demeter then revealed her true identity and required that a sanctuary be built so as to appease her. Demeter stayed in the sanctuary until her daughter returned from the underworld. As a sign of grace, she gave the king’s other son, Triptolemus, a stalk and sent him in a winged chariot to teach humans how to cultivate the land.43 In this myth we find a feminine goddess of crops and nurturing who gave wheat to humanity. Her rituals, which were quite popular, were dominated by women and involved stalks of grains, barley, cultivation, and bread. Another element was wine, the symbol of Dionysus. In the context of the Paradise story, it is also notable that her granting humanity the stalk and the knowledge of cultivation was a sign of grace, done out of pity for human ignorance rather than as a punishment resulting from the human quest for knowledge, as in Genesis 3 and the related literature in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, all these Demeter-related elements are present in the Islamic literature 124 of Eve and Adam. Muslim tradition, however, turns land from a symbol of a fertility goddess into a symbol of male dominance. It depicts elements such as feminine Texts in control over productivity as negative. Barley is presented as the mutilated form of Transit a divine fruit, the result of feminine disobedience and unlawful acts of fertilizing (sowing) and transgression, rather than a sacred crop that is dedicated to a feminine deity. Crops and cultivation are only legitimate as long as they are dominated by men. Read in light of the Greek myths, the wheat and barley motif in the Islamic Eve and Adam stories seems to reflect a polemical discourse with the Greek tradition, through a reverse transformation of the wheat/barley motif and its broader gender- related context of domination over land and fertility. Although it is possible to argue that these sources reflect the result of knowledge transmission—that is, that the Greek myths were simply misinterpreted—the multiple cases in which this motif occurs in the Muslim sources, always reinterpreted in the same negative manner, suggest that this was indeed a defiant reaction toward the Demeter tradition.

Summary

This study of Islamic traditions concerning Eve and Adam has identified a certain motif in the texts—that of wheat and barley—apparently unique to the Muslim tradition (in the case of barley, it is typical of Shiite sources). This motif hardly appears in the Jewish and Christian Paradise narratives, but Greek and Zoroastrian texts seem to suggest other possible parallels. Both religious traditions regard barley as meaningful and positive. It thus seems that the negative presentation of this cereal in the Islamic (mainly Shiite) Eve and Adam texts is likely to reflect a polemical discourse between Islam and earlier Near Eastern traditions.

Notes

1. Alan Dundes, “Introduction,” in Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 1–4; see 1. 2. The name Ḥawwāʾ is found in sources as early as Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150 a.h . /767 c.e.), Al-Mubtad aʾ fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiy āʾ, ed. Muḥammad Karīm al-Kawwāz (Beirut: Arab Diffusion Company, 2006), 61–62, and Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 150 a.h . /767 c.e.), Tafsīr Muqātil bin Sulaymān, ed. Aḥmad Farīd (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2003), 1:213 (sūra 4). 3. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiy āʾ, ed. Isaac Eisenberg (Leiden: Brill, 1922), 31; Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī , Tafsīr al-Ṭabarī (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 1405 a.h . /1984 c.e.), 1:230 (sūra 2:35). For a similar idea in Jewish midrash, see Genesis Rabba 18:1, 18:12, quoted by Mishael Caspi and Mohammad Jiyad, Eve in Three Traditions and Literatures: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 54 and 137. 4. Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Naysābūrī al-Thaʿlabī (d. 427 a.h./1035 c.e.), Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ al-musammà ʿArāʾis al-majālis, ed. Muḥammad Sayd (Cairo: Dār al-fajr li-ʾl-turāth, 2001), 48–52, 64–65; al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ, 42–43; Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-Ṭabarī, ed. Ṣadīq Jamīl al-ʿAṭṭār (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 1998), 1:78, 93–94; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:235 (sūra 2:36). 5. Eric Ottenheijm, “Eve and ‘Women’s Commandments’ in Orthodox Judaism,” in Out of Par- adise: Eve and Adam and Their Interpreters, ed. Bob Becking and Susan Hennecke (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 160–61, quoting Aboth de-Rabbi Nathan, version b 9; Midrash Tanḥuma ʿim perush ʿEtz Yosef ve-ʾAnaf Yosef (Vilnius, 1833), http://www.hebrewbooks.org/14123, accessed 24 June 2013, parashat Noaḥ (beginning), Yalquṭ Shimʾoni, 3.31 [Hebrew]. 125 6. Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, “Creating Eve: Feminine Fertility in Medieval Islamic Narratives of Eve and Adam,” in In the Arms of Biblical Women, ed. John T. Greene and Mishael M. Caspi, Biblical The Wheat and Intersections 13 (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2013), 35–72. the Barley 7. Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Qurʾan, Traditions, and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 29; Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad, “Eve: Islamic Image of Woman,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5, no. 2 (1982): 135–44; Denise A. Spellberg, “Writing the Unwritten Life of the Islamic Eve: Menstruation and the Demonization of Motherhood,”Interna - tional Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 3 (1996): 305–24; Catherine Bronson, “Imagining the Primal Woman: Islamic Selves of Eve” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012). 8. The Paradise tree produced wheat: Ibn Isḥāq, Al-Mubtadaʾ, 62; al-Kisāʾī , Qiṣaṣ, 39; al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 46; Niʿmatallāh al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1112 a.h . /1701 c.e.), Al-Nūr al-mubīn fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ wa-ʾl-mursilīn (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, n.d.), 39; Muqātil, Tafsīr, 1:42 (sūra 2), 1:386 (sūra 7:19); Abū al-Fidāʾ Ismāʿīl Ibn Kathīr, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 1992), 21; al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 1:88; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:231–232 (sūra 2:35); Muḥammad Fakhr al-Dīn b. Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Rāzī (d. 606 a.h . /1209 c.e.), Tafsīr al-Fakhr al-Rāzī (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 2005), 3:7 (sūra 2); Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Abū Bakr b. Faraḥ, Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Qurṭubī (d. 671 a.h . /1273 c.e.), Tafsīr al-Qur ṭubī, ed. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-ʿAlīm al-Bardūnī (Cairo: Dār al-Shaʿb, 1372 a.h./1952 c.e.), 1:305 (sūra 2); Abū al-Fidāʾ Ismāʿīl Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr Ibn Kathīr (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 1401 a.h./1980 c.e.), 1:80 (sūra 2). According to another version, the tree produced both wheat and grapes—another symbol of fertility. Quṭb al-Dīn Saʿd b. Hibatallāh Al-Rāwandī (d. 573 a.h . /1178 c.e.), Qiṣaṣ al-anbiy āʾ, ed. Ghulām Riḍā ʿIrfanyān al-Yazdī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-mufīd, 1989), 44; al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 39. Other suggestions include, for example, camphor (al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 39, and al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 46), fig (al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 39; Ibn Kathīr, Qiṣaṣ, 21; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:232 [sūra 2]; al-Rāzī, Tafsīr, 3:7 [sūra 2]; al-Qurṭubī, Tafsīr, 1:305 [sūra 2]), or vine (al-Rāzī, Tafsīr, 3:7 [sūra 2]; al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:232 [sūra 2]; al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 46; Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr, 1:80 [sūra 2]; al-Qurṭubī, Tafsīr, 1:305 [sūra 2]). 9. Al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ, 39. 10. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Bābawayhi al-Qummī, Maʿānī al-akhbār, ed. ʿAlī Akbar al-Ghaffārī (Beirut: Dār al-maʿrifa, 1979), 109. See also Muḥammad Bāqī al-Majlisī (d. 1110 a.h . /1698 c.e.), Biḥār al-anwār (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-anwār, n.d.), 26:321–322; Al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 42. 11. Al-Th aʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 57–58. 12. Al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ, 39. 13. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Bābawayhi al-Qummī, ʿIlal al-sharāʾiʿ (Beirut: Dār al-murtaḍá, 2006), 2:560; al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 27. 14. Al-Th aʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 57. 14. E.g., al-Kisāʾī, Qiṣaṣ, 64–65. 16. Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 1:87; al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 58. 17. Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, 105–106; Smith and Haddad, “Eve: Islamic Image,” 140. 18. Al-Kis āʾī, Qiṣaṣ, 65. 19. Maḥmūd Abū al-Fa ḍl al-Alūsī (d. 1044 a.h . /1634 c.e.), Rūḥ al-m aʿānī fī tafsīr al-Qu rʾān al-ʿaẓīm wa-ʾl-sa bʿ al-mathānī (Beirut: Dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1270 a.h./1853 c.e.), 4:217; al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 58; al-Jaz āʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 40 (where also another version is recorded, which speaks of eighteen grains, twelve eaten by Adam and only six by Eve). 20. I would like to thank Prof. Brian Murdock and Dr. Andrew Breeze for their valuable advice in tracking down barley and other cereals in the granaries of Jewish and Christian sources. 21. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, ed. Yoḥay Maqbili et al. (Haifa: Or Vishua Torah Centre, 2009), Sefer ʿAvodah, Hilkhot Temidim u-Musafim, chap. 9, sec. 16 [Hebrew]. 22. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr, 1:80 (sūra 2); Ibn Kathīr, Qiṣaṣ, 21. 23. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 8:70b; see also a reference to the same saying, related to Rabbi Yehudah, in Berakhot, 6:40a. See also Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 90 (giving a reference to Sanhedrin, 70a). 24. Caspi and Jiyad, Eve in Three Traditions, 61. 25. In the Life of Adam and Eve literature, there are several references to Adam’s tilling the ground so as to grow food. However, these references are mostly general and do not refer to specific kinds 126 of cereals. See Michael E. Stone, Adam’s Contract with Satan: The Legend of the Cheirograph of Adam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 26–33. 26. Midrash Tanḥuma, Genesis, sign 11. Texts in 27. Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold and Paul Radin (Philadelphia: Jew- Transit ish Publication Society, 2003), 2nd ed., 1:134. In note 6 to this narrative, Ginzberg cites the thirteenth/ fourteenth-century Daʿat Zeqenim and Hadar Zeqenim as its sources. However, Ginzberg also adds that, whereas the Hadar gives Pesiqta de-Rabbi Eliʿezer as its source, neither Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliʿezer nor the Pesiqta de-Rabbi Tobiah b. Elīʿezer contains this text. Ginzberg, Legends, 1:135, note 6. 28. Breeze attributes this poem to Master John of St. David’s, who was active in the third quarter of the twelfth century. Andrew Breeze,The Mary of the Celts (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2008), 131. 29. Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 62; Breeze, Mary of the Celts, 131. Breeze believes that Master John, the supposed author (who was also a canon of St. David’s cathedral), would have had an interest in the payment of tithes. 30. For example, the Western Christian celebration of Michaelmas on 29 September. 31. Prods O. Skjærvø, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the International Sacred Literature Trust, 2011), 11–13. David Winston indicates parallels also between the Mashī and Mashiyānī story and 2 Enoch, both texts considering the sin of the primal couple as being an “error of judgement” rather than disobedience. David Winston, “The Iranian Com- ponent in the Bible, Apocrypha, and Qumran: A Review of the Evidence,” History of Religions 5, no. 2 (1966): 198–205. 32. John R. Hinnells, Persian Mythology (New York: Hamlyn, 1975), 60. 33. See, for example, Edward Watts, “Justinian, Malalas, and the End of Athenian Philosophi- cal Teaching in a.d. 529,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 168–82, http://www.jstor.org/stable /4135014, accessed 26 June 2013; Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37; R. Hoyland, Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), xiii–xiv. 34. Suleiman A. Mourad, “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam: The Origin of the Palm Tree Story Concerning Mary and Jesus in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Qurʾān,” Oriens Chris- tianus 86 (2002): 206–216; Walid Saleh, “The Etymological Fallacy and Qurʾānic Studies: Muhammad, Paradise, and Late Antiquity,” in The Qurʾan in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 649–98; Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, ad 395–600 (London: Routledge, 1993), 184. 35. Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī, Al-Kāfī: al-Uṣūl, al-Furūʿ, al-Rawḍa (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-fajr, 2007), 6:246; al-Jazāʾirī, Qiṣaṣ, 51. 36. Midrash Tanḥuma, Noaḥ, 13. Indeed, al-Kulaynī gives both narratives (Satan and Eve; Satan and Noah) consecutively: Al-Kāfī, 6:246. 37. For example, Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrīn, 8:70a–b; al-Rāzī, Tafsīr, 3:7 (sūra 2); al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, 1:232 (sūra 2); al-Thaʿlabī, Qiṣaṣ, 46; Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr, 1:80 (sūra 2); al-Qurṭubī, Tafsīr, 1:305 (sūra 2). 38. “Ba eleyha rokhev naḥash ve-ʿibrah, ve-a ḥar kakh Ba eleyha Adam ve-ʿibrah et Hevel.” Pirqei de- Rabbi Eliʿezer—“Ḥorev,” 21:4–5; Zohar, 1:28b; J. L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1997), 86–87; Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, Publica- tions of the Perry Foundation in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 147 [Hebrew]. 39. For example, the Slavonic Life of Adam and Eve. Stone, Adam’s Contract, 31. 40. Edith Hamilton, Mythology, trans. Ella Amitan (Tel Aviv: Modan, 1996), 37 [Hebrew]. 41. Tamar Ben Shoshan, “On Education and Initiation: Demeter and Persephone,” New Acropolis, http://www .newacropolis .org .il /site /articleDetails ?articleId = HGR23U7J061A , accessed 24 June 2013 [Hebrew]. 42. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, ed. N. J. Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 6. 43. The Homeric Hymns, trans. Jules Cashford (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 5–26; Sir William 127 Smith, ed., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (London: James Walton, 1870), 959–61; Hamilton, Mythology, 35–40; Gerhard Fink, Who’s Who in der Antiken Mythologie, trans. Hana Livnat (Or Yehuda, Israel: Sifriyat Maariv, 1998), 105 [Hebrew]. The Wheat and the Barley Eight

Shiite Underground Literature Between Iraq and Syria

“The Book of Shadows” and the History of the Early Ghulat

Mushegh Asatryan

The Early Ghulat and Their Literature

In the early history of Islam, the eighth century was the time when a distinct Shiite religious identity emerged.1 It was mainly centered on the idea of the divinely bestowed right of some representatives of the Prophet Muhammad’s family, the imams, to be leaders of the Islamic community. This basic tenet found numerous modifications and interpretations, some of which later acquired the status of religious orthodoxy while others, gradually pushed to the margins of the religious mainstream, were branded as heterodox and heretical. One of the chief disagreements between various factions within Shiism was the nature of the imam. While some of the Shiites viewed the imams as merely learned men who, due to their knowledge, could be the community’s spiritual guides, others saw them as divinely inspired superhuman beings, or even God’s manifestations in human flesh. As a reflection of their theological differences, the two factions named each other, respectively, muqaṣṣira, that is, “those who fall short” (of comprehending the imams’ true divine nature—henceforth “moderates”), and Ghulat (ghulāt), that is, “extremists,” who take their devotion to the imams to the extreme.2 The two groups were by no means homogeneous theological entities; along with the general ori- entations toward the imams’ nature, they held numerous other beliefs. The extremists, for example, believed in the transmigration of souls

I am grateful to Hermann Landolt, Saïd Arjomand, Hussein Abdulsater, and Bella Tendler for their careful reading of an earlier draft of the paper and for their incisive comments; my thanks go to Matthew Melvin-Koushki for his help with rare books, to Shah Hussain for his help in procuring manuscripts, and to Evyn Kropf, Dagmar Riedel, and Julia Bray for their advice regarding research materials. (tanāsukh), the transformation into subhuman forms (maskh, masūkhiyya), the idea of God’s manifestation in human flesh ḥ( ulūl), and the notion that humans could in their turn attain the divine realm, becoming free of formal religious duties.3 Despite the theological differences, the two factions were not distinct socially, and in the eighth century, representatives of the Ghulat freely mixed with their religious opponents, while the imams had followers from both groups. Tensions did exist, to be sure, and the excessive veneration of some of the extremists could at times cause the imams a great deal of anxiety, leading them to curse or banish some of their most fervent followers.4 During the ninth century, the tensions were exacerbated as each group tried to overcome its opponents, declaring them unbelievers.5 The line of the twelve imams ended in 874 with the death of the eleventh imam, Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, and the disappearance of his infant son and twelfth imam, Muḥam- mad. The ensuing crisis of leadership was solved by electing his representatives safīr( , “deputy”) to govern the community on behalf of the hidden twelfth imam.6 The authority of some of these deputies (four in all) was disputed by several representatives of the Ghulat.7 The best known among them, and the most relevant to this study, was Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr (d. after 868), who for his claims to be a representative of the hidden imam was excommunicated in a letter allegedly sent by the hidden imam himself.8 Still, despite the opposition from the moderates, in the late ninth–early tenth century, several high-ranking Shiites had Ghulat tendencies, such as members of the family of Banū l-Furāt or the family known as Karkhiyyūn, whose several members held high governmental posts, while one of them served as wazīr in the courts of caliphs al-Rāḍī (d. 940) and al-Muttaqī (d. 968).9 Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s figure gave rise to a separate group of followers, called after him Nuṣayriyya. Perhaps due to mounting pressures, one of the successors of Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr and the alleged founder of the Nuṣayrī sect, Ḥusayn b. Ḥam- dān al-Kha ṣībī (d. 957 or 96910), transplanted it to Syrian soil, where it enjoyed the patronage of the Ḥamdānid ruler Sayf al-Dawla (d. 967). Here the Nuṣayrīs firmly established themselves as a religious minority with a distinct religious worldview. They preserved many elements of the teachings of the early Iraqi extremists, further elaborating on their theological themes in their own literature, but also preserving some precious remains of original Ghulat writings. The paucity of original Ghulat texts has hitherto been the main obstacle in 129 understanding their worldview. The reports of the heresiographers, Shiite as well as Sunni, have been often viewed as polemically skewed,11 while the historical reports Shiite contain only small fragments of their teachings, largely focusing on their political Underground activity.12 What little survives of original Ghulat works is extremely difficult to date Literature and contextualize, all the more so in that some of them appear to be compilations of many textual layers. One of these works is the Umm al-kitāb , a multilayered text whose main part probably dates back to the late ninth or early tenth century, surviving in a Persian translation.13 Two other works form part of the “Mufaḍḍal tradition,” a number of writings of diverse contents and origins attributed to a companion of the sixth and seventh imams, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765) and Mūsā al-Kāẓim (d. 799).14 One of them is Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, a work written somewhere toward the end of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century.15 Along with other themes, it elaborates on the sev- enfold hierarchy of believers and on the possibility that the believers might ascend this path and become close to God. The second work, titled variously asKitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla or Kitāb al-haft al-sharīf , is a multilayered compilation written between the eighth and eleventh centuries in Iraq and Syria.16 Along with topics already found in Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, it also discusses the idea of “shadows” and “phantoms” (aẓilla wa- ashbāḥ), which are most relevant to this study and will be discussed later in more detail. The third text, finally, is Kitāb al-usūs , probably written during the time of ʿAlī al-Ri ḍā (d. 818)17 and discussing such topics as God’s manifestation on earth and the seven degrees of the spiritual hierarchy of believers. The Ghulat have no doubt written much more, but most of it has been lost. The Shiite bio-bibliographic collections list a number of individuals of extremist tendencies who composed books, which do not survive.18 Some Ghulat material has made it into the Shiite hadith collections.19 Still, despite the survival of these hadith and the several original texts, the study of the theology and cosmology of the Ghulat has been a daunting task due not only to the paucity of textual remains but also to the fact that what survives is often of uncertain authorship and dating. A new avenue for studying the literature and teachings of the early Ghulat has been opened by the publication of the twelve-volume series of primary Nuṣayrī sources entitled Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī. It was published in Lebanon during 2006– 13 by Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā, and along with several previously known Nuṣayrī and Ghulat works, such as al-Khaṣībī’s al-Hidāya l-kubrā and the aforementioned works attributed to Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī, it contains a wealth of hitherto unpublished Nuṣayrī texts.20 What makes them valuable for the study of early Shiite “extremism” is that many of them are replete with quotations from earlier Ghulat writings, including passages from ones that have been published (such as Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal’s Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla 21), ones that are known only by their title (such as Isḥāq al-Aḥmar al-Nakhaʿī’s Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ22), and ones that have been altogether unknown.23 The extremist Shiites and their literature thus followed similar routes. Having become prominent on Iraqi soil in the eighth century, the Ghulat were initially part and parcel of the Shiite population, freely mixing with their theological opponents as well as with the imams while producing works such as Kitāb al-haft . Stiffening 130 opposition during the next century forced one part of the Ghulat, the Nuṣayrīs, to leave Iraq and establish a community in Syria. Their literature followed a similar Texts in trajectory; during the eighth and ninth centuries, the extremists wrote works that Transit did not make it (but for a few exceptions in the form of hadith) into the Twelver Shiite canon. The Nuṣayrīs, however, preserved much of this literature, took it along with them to Syria, and made abundant use of it; hence the numerous quotations of earlier Ghulat writings in the works of tenth- and eleventh-century Nuṣayrī authors. Some of these works, furthermore, survived in their original forms in the private collections of Syrian Ismailis,24 who had had extensive contacts with the Nuṣayrīs in the Middle Ages and thus acquired many of their manuscripts.25 Still, the use of the Ghulat material found in these sources presents certain difficulties. First, the authorship and dating of the quoted passages are often problematic. Second, quotations from one and the same text are sometimes scattered throughout different works, or even appropriated by still other Ghulat texts without acknowledgment, which in their turn are quoted in the Silsila. Therefore, finding the identity of the Ghulat fragments preserved in Nuṣayrī literature requires extensive philological groundwork. This chapter is a study of one such text, entitledKitāb al-aẓilla (The Book of Shadows, henceforth KA), which, written in the Ghulat milieu of Iraq in the eighth and ninth centuries, has partially survived in several passages and is scattered around four different Nuṣayrī works. Its study is interesting from several points of view. It is, first of all, a genuine piece of Ghulat literature, thus providing a firsthand account of the teachings of the extremists and allowing us to complement what we already know from other texts. Secondly, KA is textually related to other Ghulat writings and may help us shed light on the history of other Ghulat texts. Finally, the history of KA presents a snapshot of the Ghulat literature in miniature, and its study, viewed in the context of other Ghulat texts of similar fate, can provide valuable insights into the transmission and circulation of Ghulat texts among the Ghulat and Nuṣayrīs in the ninth to tenth centuries. In the following pages I will study KA from several angles, beginning with a close philological study of its fragments, and with each following step broadening my perspective and putting it in a larger historical context. I will first reconstruct, to the extent possible, KA’s initial text from the surviving fragments, determining its relationship to Kitāb al-kursī —the intermediary text into which it is anonymously embedded. I will then discuss its possible dating and authorship. Next I will situate the theological themes it discusses in the broader context of early Shiite Ghulat thought. I will conclude by viewing it in the context of the movement of Ghulat texts from Iraq to Syria, and, still more broadly, of the early history of the Syrian Nuṣayrī community.

The Chronology of Kitāb al-a�illa’s Fragments

KA is scattered throughout four different texts. Only in two of these are its pas- 131 sages quoted independently, that is, under the title Kitāb al-a ẓilla; some of them are also anonymously embedded into yet another Ghulat text entitled Kitāb al-kursī Shiite (The Book of the Throne), which is quoted fragmentarily in all four works. In what Underground follows, I will discuss the chronology of KA’s fragments and its relationship to Kitāb Literature al-kursī , arguing for its primacy over the latter. The earliest work that quotesKA —both under its own title and anonymously, as part of Kitāb al-kursī —is Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra,26 attributed to Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr.27 It next occurs almost a century later, in a treatise attributed to the Nuṣayrī author Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jillī, who probably died after the year 1008–9.28 In his Ḥāwī al-asrār, the author quotes both versions of KA, the one occurring independently under its own title, and the one incorporated into Kitāb al-kursī.29 Next, a larger number of passages of KA, both under its own title and as part of Kitāb al-kursī, occurs in Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn, attributed to al-Jillī’s younger contemporary Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī.30 Finally, in Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, ascribed to Ḥasan b. Shuʿba’s relative31 ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, it is quoted as part of Kitāb al-kursī only.32 Establishing the authorship of early Ghulat and Nuṣayrī texts is a difficult task, as their self-attributions leave much room for speculation. Despite Friedman’s rather trusting attitude toward the nominal authorship of many of the Nuṣayrī works published in the Silsila,33 the attribution of many of them is far from certain, and the authorship of each individual text must be carefully examined. Still, the relationships among the four texts that quote KA allow for a reconstruction of its chronology and, moreover, show that their authorships can largely be trusted. The oldest of the four texts to make mention ofKA is Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra. In this case, the book’s self-attribution can be trusted, as it is quoted in two of the other three works, Ḥāwī al-asrār34 and Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn35— both naming the author as well as the work. Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s alleged work itself contains reference to the famous tenth-century extremist Isḥāq al-Aḥmar al-Nakhaʿī,36 who died in 899. If all of this does not prove that Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr wrote Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra, at least it squarely places this work in the second half of the tenth century, the period when its alleged author lived. It is impossible to determine which one of the two texts that quote Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra was written first, as neither quotes the other. But it is certain that both Ḥāwī al-asrār and Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn were written no earlier than the tenth century, as they mention al-Khaṣībī,37 the famous Nuṣayrī leader who died in 969. Further- more, the fact that the relative (and probably younger contemporary) of Ḥaqāʾiq’s alleged author, ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, mentions Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn as Ḥasan’s book38 makes his authorship likely—despite the absence of this title in later Imami sources. We do not know the exact dates of Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī’s life, but he was a contemporary of Ibn Bābūya (d. 991), which places him and his work roughly in the second half of the tenth century.39 Interestingly, the longest passage of KA both in al-Jillī’s and Ḥasan b. Shuʿba’s texts is followed with the same passage from Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla. This could 132 indicate that either one of the two authors copied the passage of KA from the other, together with copying the fragment from the mentioned book. It is also possible, Texts in however, that they both copied from yet another intermediary text, which had the Transit fragments from both books copied in the same order. The youngest text of the four, finally, is ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī’s Ḥujjat al-ʿārif. The only clue in the text as to its dating and attribution is the mention of Ḥasan al-Ḥarrānī’s book, setting a terminus post quem. However, if the editors of the text are to be trusted, it can be attributed and dated with much more certainty than the remaining three texts. In the usual fashion of the Silsila, the text is prefaced with a short introduction by the editors stating that the book was written by ʿAlī b. Ḥamza b. ʿAlī b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī in the year 408 of the Hijra/ a.d. 1017, and was dedicated to Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Jaʿfar.40 If the attribution of all four texts quotingKA can more or less be trusted, their dating is even more certain. For the purposes of this analysis, I will therefore treat their authorships as firmly established. What remains is to find out the relationship between KA and Kitāb al-kursī —namely, which of the two is earlier and which copies the other. While there are no firm indicators, two small passages in the two texts show that the “thief” is the author of Kitāb al-kursī , who incorporated a passage of KA into his book without acknowledgment. Let us first see how the two texts overlap. Both the longer fragment ofKA (summarized in the appendix) and the surviving fragment of Kitāb al-kursī tell a creation story. The overlap between the two texts begins when the process of creation inKA is well under way; thus, after a chain of transmitters ending with Yūnus b. Ẓabyān’s name, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq begins telling how God began the process of creation. Nearly half a page later,41 the overlap with Kitāb al-kursī begins. After another page,42 the two texts part ways, and each continues its own story.43 Although the overlapping part of the two texts is not identical—with differences in the phrasing and in the order of some of the sentences—the similarities are such that the identity of the two fragments is beyond doubt. The differences, then, provide clues as to the relationship between the two texts. There are two passages that inKA are more coherent with the larger context of the text and make more sense than they do in Kitāb al-kursī , which suggests that the latter’s author tried to copy the former but could not flawlessly incorporate those parts into his narration. Let us compare how both passages read in KA and Kitāb al-kursī :44

KA: أقام األظلة قددا وجعلها لنفسه نسبة وجعل نفس األظلة التي عقلوا بها نفخة منه، واألظلة التي أجريت فيها النفخة األوىل سبع طرائق وسبعة صفوف.

He made the shadows into factions and made them related to His breath;45 He then made the breath of the shadows—by which they became known [?]—a breath [coming] from Him; and those shadows through whom the 133 first breath blew are [divided into] seven types and seven ranks.46

Shiite Kitāb al-kursī: Underground Literature وأقام به األظلة وجعلها لنفسه نسبة فقال: “أحد صمد مل يلد ومل يولد ومل يكن له كفوا أحد”، وأشهد األظلة عىل نفسها ثم قال يف تفسري النفخة األوىل أنها سبع طرائق وسبع صفوف.

He made the shadows by it47 and made them related to Himself;48 then He said “One, eternal, He begot no one nor was He begotten, no one is comparable to Him.”49 He made the shadows testify upon themselves, then said in the interpretation of the first gust that it [the gust] consists of seven types and seven ranks.50

Comparing the two versions, the one from KA appears to be more logically coherent, while the passage in Kitāb al-kursī does not make much sense. In KA, God creates intelligence (ʿaql), then makes the shadows, then divides those shadows “through whom the first breath blew” into seven types and seven ranks; a description of these types and ranks then follows. In the Kitāb al-kursī version, the passage is also preceded with the creation of intelligence, but its ending is incoherent. The “first gust” is not mentioned earlier and appears here out of the blue; more puzzlingly, this one first gust is then said to consist of “seven types and seven ranks,” a point that is never addressed later. In the KA version, meanwhile, it is the multiple shadows that are divided into seven types and ranks, and the identity of the shadows with the ranks is confirmed later in the text.51 The second passage shows similar inconsistencies and automatic copying on the part of Kitāb al-kursī ’s author.

KA: فأقام سبعة صفوف، َكل صف قام يف كل يوم بكلمة حتى متت سبعة صفوف يف سبع كلامت يف سبعة أيام، بني األول والثاين نعسة وبني الثاين والثالث سنة وبني الثالث والرابع فرتة وبني الرابع والخامس نسية وبني الخامس والسادس غفلة وبني السادس والسابع سكرة.

He made seven ranks, each rank was made in each day with one word, until seven ranks were completed with seven words in seven days; between the first and the second days there is swoon, between the second and the third slumber, between the third and the fourth drowsiness, between the fourth and the fifth oblivion, between the fifth and the sixth ignorance, and between the sixth and the seventh inebriety.52

Kitāb al-kursī: ثم أغىش الطرائق السبع والصفوف السبعة ٍبغواش، فأول يوم إىل الثاين غشوة وبني الثاين والثالث سنة وبني الثالث والرابع نعسة وبني الرابع والخامس نسيان وبني الخامس والسادس غفلة وبني السادس والسابع سكرة. 134

Texts in Then He sent calamities upon the seven types and seven ranks; from the first Transit day to the second there is swoon, between the second and the third slumber, between the third and the fourth drowsiness, between the fourth and the fifth oblivion, between the fifth and the sixth ignorance, and between the sixth and the seventh inebriety.53

In the KA version, the passage follows the enumeration of the seven types and logically complements it by showing the number of days in which the types were Table 8.1 A chronology of the attestations ofKitāb al-a ẓilla in later literature Period Place Author and work Second half of the ninth century Iraq Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr, Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra (as KA and as part of Kitāb al-kursī ) Second half of the tenth century Syria Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jillī, Ḥāwī al-asrār (as KA and as part of Kitāb al-kursī ) Second half of the tenth century Syria, Ḥarrān Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn (as KA and as part of Kitāb al-kursī ) Second half of the tenth century Syria, Ḥarrān ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥujjat al-ʿārif (as part of Kitāb al-kursī ) (after Ḥasan b. Shuʿba)

made, and by describing what separates the seven days from one another. It is then followed by a description of the seven ranks. In Kitāb al-kursī the passage is pasted slightly after the description of the ranks, with no logical connection to the preceding; they appear out of place, immediately following the mention of the calamities sent upon the seven ranks and types. One wonders whether Kitāb al-kursī ’s author chose to insert them here for the lexical (and acoustic) affinity between the Arabic ghawāshin (calamities) and ghāshiyya (swoon). After establishing the relationship betweenKitāb al-kursī and KA as well as the chronology of the latter’s physical manifestations in later literature, the following picture emerges: sometime before the second half of the ninth century, the author of Kitāb al-kursī copied part of KA54 into his book, without acknowledging his source and trying to make it look as if it were an organic part of his text. In the latter part of the ninth century, Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr had access to both KA and Kitāb al-kursī , quoting them in his Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra. Nearly a century later, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jillī incorporated a passage from the original KA (the one quoted by Ibn Nuṣayr as well as a shorter one) into his Ḥāwī al-asrār. And around the same time, but perhaps slightly later, the same two passages of KA, together with several others, cropped up in Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī’s Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn. Finally, Ḥasan al-Ḥarrānī’s relative ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Jillī quoted a shorter version of the same fragment of Kitāb al-kursī in his Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, which he probably wrote in 1017.

135 Dating and Authorship

Shiite Four out of the five fragments ofKA quoted in Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn , and both frag- Underground ments quoted in Ḥāwī al-asrār, are related on the authority of Yūnus b. Ẓabyān from Literature Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. A contemporary of the sixth imam and a well-known extremist of his time, Yūnus is described in al-Najāshī’s bio-bibliographic compendium as an unre- liable transmitter of hadith whose books are full of “confusion.”55 Al-Najāshī does not name any of his books; however, he lists four other individuals who have written books with the title Kitāb al-a ẓilla. Two possibilities thus present themselves here: either Yūnus is indeed the author of KA, and the other four books with the same title are distinct from it, or KA is one of those four, while Yūnus is merely a (real or imaginary) narrator of some of its passages. Yet a third possibility would be to reject both of the above. Let us begin with the first possibility. The only real indication of Yūnus’s authorship of KA is the attribution of some of the fragments to him. His image as presented both in Imami and Nuṣayrī literature is quite in keeping with who KA’s author would be. Yūnus was indeed known for his extremist views56 and mixed with other Ghulat, such as Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī,57 from whom he narrated numerous traditions.58 He was also held in high esteem by the Mukhammisa Ghulat and was considered by them as one of the aytām of Mufaḍḍal,59 a high rank in the Ghulat spiritual hierarchy.60 An interesting point worth mentioning is that the Shiite theologian Faḍl b. Shādhān al-Naysābūrī (d. ca. 874–75) called Yūnus—together with Abū l-Khaṭṭāb, Muḥammad b. Sinān, and two others61—“the famous liars.”62 Faḍl b. Shādhān was known for his polemics against the Mufawwiḍa and other Ghulat,63 and specifically against a group in Nishapur who ascribed supernatural abilities to the Prophet. He even wrote a book titled Kitāb al-radd ʿalā al-ghāliyya al-muḥammadiyya (The book of refutation of the Muḥammadiyya extremists).64 KA, on the other hand, contains elements of the teachings of the so-called Mufawwiḍa or Muḥammadiyya Ghu- lat, who extolled the Prophet and attributed to him a quasi-divine role (discussed in more detail below). If Yūnus were indeed the author of KA, this would explain Faḍl’s dislike for him; at present, however, this is impossible to prove. The second possibility—that KA is one of the four Kutub al-a ẓilla mentioned by al-Najāshī—is even less provable. All of them were written by Kufans who lived in the eighth and ninth centuries. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Kathīr al-Hāshimī (d. 802) was a mawlā who is said to have invented hadith, while his Kitāb al-a ẓilla is reportedly “of corrupt doctrine.”65 Abū Ṣāliḥ Muḥammad Abū l-Ḥasan, nicknamed Buzurj, was a Kufan66 who probably lived during (or slightly after) the lifetime of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.67 Al-Najāshī wonders whether he himself was the author of this book or whether he only transmitted it, which seems likely since the list of his books includes another one also common with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Hāshimī’s.68 The youngest of the authors to write a Kitāb al-a ẓilla was the Kufan Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā, a contemporary of the imams Muḥammad al-Jawād (d. ca. 835) and Abū l-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (d. 868).69 The fourthKitāb al-a ẓilla, which has some chance of being our KA, finally, is by 136 Muḥammad b. Sinān al-Ẓāhirī (d. 835). He was also Kufan and a well-known extremist whose name frequently appears in the isnāds of Ghulat traditions.70 Incidentally, Texts in his name appears in the transmission chain of KA in Ḥasan b. Shuʿba’s variant.71 This Transit could, of course, be a coincidence, and the two books could be unrelated. Other- wise, two possibilities arise; if Yūnus were the author of KA, this would indicate that Muḥammad b. Sinān had a copy of it in his possession, which became known as his own to al-Najāshī, but was also transmitted down to the Nuṣayrīs who preserved its true transmission chain. It might also mean that our KA is Muḥammad b. Sinān’s work. With the current state of knowledge, none of the three hypotheses regarding Muḥammad b. Sinān’s authorship is better than the others. Nor is the authorship of Yūnus b. Ẓabyān, or the other three (or two) authors of Kutub al-a ẓilla, any more plausible. The picture becomes even more complicated with the existence of the well-known Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla of Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal and Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l- aẓilla surviving in two manuscripts and partially cited in al-Ḥarrānī’s Ḥaqāʾiq and al-Jillī’s Ḥāwī.72 Rather than trying to solve this puzzle, then, a more fruitful approach is to situate KA in the broader religious milieu in which it was composed and initially circulated. To do this, I will trace three of its main ideas to their parallels in early Shiite beliefs.

“KA” and the Early Islamic Milieu KA’s surviving fragments contain three main ideas that bear clear traces of earlier Islamic teachings, while echoing the doctrines of other religious groups of the Late Antique Near East. The most prominent is the notion of “shadows” a( ẓilla), both appearing in the title and figuring in the longest surviving fragment.73 The second is the image of the Prophet Muhammad, who in one of the shorter fragments appears as a creator figure entrusted with the welfare of the world. (In the longer fragment, a rather cryptic passage refers to him as God’s first creature.) The third idea to be discussed, finally, is the story of the creation of intelligence ʿa( ql), widely attested in Sunni as well as Shiite hadith. The shadow image has antecedents in the teachings of the Platonists, Gnostics, and Zoroastrians,74 while in Islam its earliest recorded instance dates from the earlier half of the eighth century. It is attributed to extremist Mughīra b. Saʿīd al-ʿIjlī, who rebelled in 737 in Kufa but was defeated and killed. Mughīra taught that in the beginning, God, who was a man of light, was alone with nothing else in existence; when He decided to create the world, He uttered His greatest name (another Ghulat motif with possible Gnostic roots75), then

wrote with His finger on His palm men’s deeds of obedience and disobedience, and he was angered by the [deeds of] disobedience and he sweated, and two seas were formed from His sweat, one salt and dark and the other bright and sweet. He then gazed into the sea and saw His shadow. And He went forth to seize it, but it flew away. He then plucked out the eye of His shadow and from it created the sun. He then annihilated the shadow and 137 said: “There should not be another God besides me.” He then created all creation from the two seas. He created the unbelievers from the salt, dark sea Shiite and the believers from the bright, sweet sea. And He created the shadows of Underground men. The first shadow he created was that of Muhammad. . . . He then sent Literature Muhammad who was [still] a shadow to all mankind.76

The first shadowẓ ( ill) that appears in this passage, the one which God saw in the sea and annihilated, is used in the conventional sense. It is the second mention of shadows that echoes its usage in KA. Here, the shadows appear to be spiritual entities that are later to assume the physical bodies of men to populate the material world; this idea comes across more clearly in the description of the Mughīriyya’s teachings by al-Baghdādī, who states that according to them, God “created men before their bodies, and first among them—the shadow [ẓill] of Muhammad.”77 Several years after al-Mughīra, ʿAbdallāh b. Muʿāwiya staged in Kufa a more successful but short-lived rebellion. His followers, who came to be known by the term Ḥarbiyya or Ḥārithiyya, also believed in the aẓilla.78 The teaching about shadows is amply attested in Shiite hadith literature, where the term aẓilla is used with a similar meaning, denoting luminous spiritual entities that were created before the material world.79 They are sometimes said to stand for all people,80 but more often just for the believers81 and, still more specifically, for the Prophet and the imams.82 According to a saying attributed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the latter, when still aẓilla, “were near our Lord—with no one else near Him—in a green tent, praising, worshipping, glorifying, and extolling Him, with no angel drawn close to him83 and no living being apart from us nearby; until He decided to create the things, and He created whatever He wished and however He wished, angels and others, then gave the knowledge of that to us.”84 In another hadith, his father, Muḥammad al-Bāqir, says that while still aẓilla “they were light before God, before He had created the creation.”85 In some cases, the discussion of aẓilla appears in the context of the primordial covenant (mīthāq) that God took from the Shiites (or from Adam’s progeny). In the beginning of creation, the story runs, while they were still shadows, God took a covenant from them, mandating that they should believe in God, be faithful to the imams, and accept Muhammad’s mission.86 Closely connected with the notion of aẓilla is that of ashbāḥ (sg. shabaḥ, “phan- tom”). The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but sometimes with a distinct, though similar, meaning. Thus, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq allegedly once told one of his associates that “the first thing that God created is Muhammad and his rightly guided and guiding family; they were phantoms of light [ashbāḥ nūr] before Him.” When asked about what the phantoms were, the imam said, “shadow of light [ẓill nūr], luminous bodies.”87 The hadith material presented above is difficult to date, but some of it was recorded as early as the end of the ninth century, with possible origins in a much earlier period. The belief in aẓilla and ashbāḥ was still alive among some groups in the tenth century. Writing in the late ninth to early tenth century, Shiite heresiographer 138 Saʿd b. ʿAbdallāh al-Qummī stated that the Mukhammisa Ghulat believed that God had become manifest in five phantoms ashbā( ḥ): Muhammad, ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan, Texts in and Ḥusayn.88 Around half a century later, this same belief was held by members of Transit the aforementioned Karkhiyyūn family.89 In the twelfth century, finally, Abū Fatl- ḥ al-Shahrastānī wrote that the Nuṣayrīs and the Isḥāqīs believed that the imams were “shadows at the right hand of [God’s] throne.”90 Nothing is known of the writings of the Isḥāqīs, with only several excerpts from the works of their leader Isḥāq al-Aḥmar available to us, and they probably ceased to exist in the thirteenth century. The Nuṣayrīs, on the other hand, preserved the teaching about shadows and phantoms along with many other Ghulat ideas.91 All the different teachings about shadows and phantoms discussed to this point either come from outsider (heresiographic) accounts or from hadith, where the presentation is brief and sketchy. There are, however, two surviving texts that discuss the idea in much greater detail, both bearing titles suggestive of its centrality for their authors. One is the abovementioned Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla and the other is Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla. And although the discussion of the shadows and phantoms in the two works is not identical with that of KA, there are enough similarities to suggest a common religious milieu. As mentioned earlier, the former text consists of several textual layers spanning in their chronology anywhere from the eighth century to the eleventh, and widely attested in fragments in Nuṣayrī literature.92 The shadows and phantoms are discussed in its first (and possibly earliest) layer, which could have been composed as early as the eighth century (although a later date is also possible). The story proceeds as follows:93 the first thing that God created from His will was a shadow ẓ( ill), which He made after His own image. He then divided it into numerous shadows a( ẓilla); then He praised Himself, and they praised Him for seven thousand years. From their praise God created the highest veil (ḥijāb)—one of the human forms that He assumed to appear to His creation—and the phantoms (ashbāḥ). This is followed by the creation of the world, comprising seven heavens, seven Adams, and the progeny of each of these Adams, and concludes with the creation of the devil from the transgressions of the believers. Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla survives in its entirety in two twentieth-century manuscripts and is partially attested under its own title inḤ asan b. Shuʿba’s Ḥaqāʾiq and al-Jillī’s Ḥāwī, and anonymously in the selfsame Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla.94 Its appearance in al-Jillī’s and al-Ḥarrānī’s works shows that the text was among the Ghu- lat books circulating among the Nuṣayrīs; the terminology and ideas, however— comprising, like Kitāb al-haft , the teaching about the seven Adams, seven heavens, and transformation into nonhuman forms—might take its origin back well into the eighth century. As in the Kitāb al-haft , but in a reverse order, God here first creates the believers in the form of ashbāḥ, then praises Himself and they praise Him, and afterward He makes thea ẓilla. Then He praises Himself and theashbā ḥ respond to Him, while the aẓilla respond to the ashbāḥ and not to the Lord, which becomes their transgression. Then follows a lengthy discussion of the creation of the devil and 139 his progeny, the seven heavens and Adams, and so on.95 In many of the abovementioned instances, the belief in aẓilla came hand in hand Shiite with belief in ashbāḥ. The surviving fragments ofKA contain no mention of the latter Underground term, but the lost fragments might very well have also touched upon the ashbāḥ as Literature well as on the aẓilla, for one of the passages of KA is quoted under a longer title of Kitāb al-a ẓilla wa-l-ashbāḥ.96 Let us now turn to the second major theological theme of KA, namely, the superhuman role of the Prophet Muhammad. In a passage in KA, Muhammad is explicitly called God’s first creature, to whom He delegated (fawwaḍa) the affairs of the world.97 The same is stated in a rather cryptic way in the passage that opens the creation story: “The first thing that He created are the names of letters, invisible, whose sounds cannot be heard, in a person who cannot be perceived by the senses, with a will [mashīʾa] that is not spelled out [manṣūṣ], and in a color that is uncreated; he has no boundaries and no borders. He is hidden from the senses; he [can only be] imagined [mutawahham], and is hidden from all hidden things. [God] made him into a complete word [kalima] of four letters, none of which comes before the others.”98 That “the first thing that He created” is Muhammad we learn first from the mentioned fragments, which openly state this. Second, this is implied by the internal clues found in the passage: Muhammad’s name, as spelled in Arabic, does consist of four letters, as the last sentence of the passage states; and it is apparent that the “first created thing” in the author’s mind was masculine singular, despite the fact that the grammatical object of the first sentence is plural (names of letters,asm āʾ al-ḥurūf). After stating that God first created the “names of letters,” the author uses all the adjectives and pronouns referring to them in the masculine singular, which “Muhammad” would grammatically require, instead of the feminine singular, as would be required by the inanimate plural.99 The lettrist symbolism of the passage is hard to trace with any precision to earlier precedents. In the context of the early Abbasid Iraqi religious milieu, it calls to mind the ideas of Jewish letter mysticism100 and the teachings of the eighth-century Shiite extremist Mughīra b. Saʿīd, who taught that God is a man of light whose limbs correspond to the letters of the alphabet.101 Furthermore, chapter 59 of Kitāb al-haft states that God’s first creation consisted of the letters of the alphabet. (Interestingly, the chapter is almost identical with the fourth epistle of Kitāb al-kashf , a treatise which is attributed to the tenth-century Ismaili Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman, but has possible Ghulat origins.)102 The description of Muhammad as the first being created to whom God delegated the affairs of the world is easier to connect to a broader milieu. It closely dovetails with how the heresiographers have described the beliefs of the Mufawwiḍa Ghulat. Rather than deifying the imams or the Prophet, they are said to have taught that God created the world and delegated to them the care for the world and its affairs.103 The Mufawwiḍa were probably not a unified group and variously believed the delegated person to be either ʿAlī, Muhammad, or these two plus Ḥasan, Ḥusayn, and Fāṭima 140 (the usual pentad of the Mukhammisa). In eighth-century Kufa, Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar al-J uʿfī is said to have held views reminiscent of Mufawwiḍa teachings, claiming that Texts in the imams “determine the sustenance of men.”104 In the tenth century, Muḥammad Transit b. al-Muẓaffar Abū Dulaf al-Azdī al-Kātib is portrayed by al-Ṭūsī as a madman who adhered to the teachings of the Mufawwiḍa and the Mukhammisa.105 Some of the Mufawwiḍa believed only in the delegation of the Prophet.106 In a telling passage from his Kitāb al-tanbīh , Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s contemporary and rival Isḥāq al-Aḥmar says, “al-makān is the creator of things, he is His servant, listen- ing [and] obedient to God, who created him unlike He created men, nay, He created him from light.”107 The identity of Muhammad withal- makān—both a creature of God and the creator of things—becomes apparent in the abovementioned passage of KA; the only difference is that inKA , Muhammad is only delegated with the management of the world, while creation is still God’s work. The motif of Muhammad as God’s first creature brought forth to create the world on His behalf, together with his moniker al-makān, is amply attested in Nuṣayrī writings. The tenth-century epistle Risālat al-fatq wa-l-ratq,108 for example, is entirely dedicated to the explanation of Muhammad’s special role in the creation. It presents him as light made of God’s essence, who by virtue of this is coeternal with Him. The author writes an entire paragraph explaining why Muhammad is called al-makān, alluding to his role as a creator on God’s behalf.109 The third topic that connectsKA to a broader early Islamic (and indeed Neo- platonic110 ) context is the description of the creation of intelligence (ʿaql): having created Muhammad, the names, the throne, and its pillars, God creates intelligence.111 What follows is a peculiar scene, where God commands it to turn toward Him, to turn away from Him, and then addresses it by saying, “by you I reward and by you I punish.”112 The motif of the creation ofʿa ql in the early Islamic religious milieu and its later trajectories have been studied by Douglas Crow. According to Crow, one of the most widespread narratives, dating from the seventh century and with its various iterations recorded in hadith collections in the ninth and tenth centuries and later, is what he calls the “aqbil! adbir! Report,”113 the description of the creation of ʿaql as God’s first creature. In almost all of its versions, it consists of four parts, which Crow calls (1) the “setting,” (2) the “testing” ofʿa ql, (3) the “encomium,” and (4) God’s “listing” of the reasons why He values it so much. A typical example of such a report would thus be the following hadith recorded by al-Barqī:114

إن الله خلق العقل فقال له: أقبل! فأقبل، ثم قال له: أدبر! فأدبر. ثم قال له: وعزيت وجاليل! ما خلقت شيئا ّ أحب ّإيل منك، لك الثواب وعليك العقاب.

(1) Truly, God created al-ʿaql, (2) and then He said to him, “Come forward!” so he drew near. Then He said to him, “Go back!” so he retreated. (3) Then He said to him, “By My power and My majesty! I did not create a thing dearer to me than thee. (4) The reward is thine and the penalty is against thee.”

141 TheKA passage about the creation of intelligence reproduces, almost verbatim, parts 2 and 4 of the report: “fa-qāla lahu bi-l-amri: aqbil! fa-aqbala, thumma qāla Shiite adbir fa-adbara” and “thumma qāla lahu: bika uthību wa bika uʿāqibu.” Despite these Underground close similarities to the report, the rest of the story is completely different. Parts 1 Literature and 3 are missing, and the story begins with the creation of ʿaql from four things: “thumma khalaqa bi-l-amri l-ʿaqla min al-ʿilmi wa-l-qudrati wa-l-nūr-i wa-l-mashīʾati” (then [God] created by His command intellect, from knowledge, power, light, and will). It ends with the following: “fajaʿalahu ḥayyan bi-l-māʾi qāʾiman bi-l-ʿilmi dāʾiman bi-l-malakūti,” that is, God made it “live with water, possessed of knowledge,115 eternally in the realm.”116 Thus,KA ’s author seems to have “plagiarized” the well-known hadith on ʿaql and woven parts of it into his narrative. Woven into it is another narrative of the creation of ʿaql, reflected in a single hadith recorded inIkhti ṣāṣ, which is attributed to Shaykh Mufīd (d. 1032):117

خلق الله العقل من أربعة أشياء، من العلم والقدرة والنور واملشيئة باألمر فجعله قامئا بالعلم دامئا يف امللكوت.

God created intelligence of four things by [His] command: knowledge, power, light, and will; He then made it possessed of knowledge, eternally in the realm.118

Given the popularity of the aqbil adbir report in the eighth and ninth centuries, as demonstrated by Crow, it is highly unlikely that the urtext of the ʿaql tradition would have been KA’s version, with the two separate versions then branching off from it. It is more likely that KA’s author took the two different narratives about intellect then current in the Shiite milieu and blended them together to create his own story. The passage on the creation ofʿa ql contains several more elements missing in the original versions of the two traditions, such as the ḥayyan bi-l-māʾi (live with water) passage missing in Mufīd’s hadith. While some of them could be of the KA’s author’s making, some of them could very well be remnants of their alternative variants existing before the end of the ninth century. Theʿaql story in KA thus amalgamated two stories current in the early Islamic milieu. Dating from the first century of Islam, one of them, theaqbil adbir report, underwent considerable editing in the second and third centuries in various Islamic circles, including the Iraqi Shiite milieu, where KA’s author must have heard it.119 The narrative continued to circulate and be recycled later on, and in the tenth century found its esoteric interpretation in al-Jillī’s Risālat al-fatq wa-l-ratq.120 The second narrative, about the creation of ʿaql from four things, is attested, according to Crow, in just one hadith around a century later than the earliest fragment of KA. What its occurrence there demonstrates, then, is that Mufīd’s variant goes back to a much earlier story circulating in the Iraqi Shiite environment. As discussed in the previous section, it is impossible to determine the exact time and place of KA’s composition at this stage; it is possible, however, to situate it in its 142 religious milieu within a broad historical time frame by looking at the geography of the beliefs and religious motives that it absorbed. Both the idea of shadows and the Texts in teaching about divine delegation are products of the Iraqi Ghulat milieu of the eighth Transit and ninth centuries, chiefly centered in Kufa but spread in the main Shiite centers of the time in Iraq and Iran. The earliest recorded instance of the teaching about shadows goes back to the early eighth century, the rebellions of Mughīra and ʿAbdallāh b. Muʿāwiya in Kufa. The rich hadith material containing references to shadows and phantoms is difficult to date with any precision. Some of it might likewise go back to the eighth century, but some of it might be later; the near absence of hadith with multiple strands of transmission121 does not allow for the application of the isnād criticism techniques developed in the recent decades.122 However, the places and dates of the authors who compiled these traditions can tell us when and where they circulated. Aḥmad al-Barqī (d. ca. 894), Ṣaffār al-Qummī (d. 902–3), and ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī were all from Qum and wrote in the second half of the ninth and early tenth centuries; their contemporary Furāt al-Kūfī probably lived in Kufa, and al-Kulaynī (d. 941) wrote his major compendium in Baghdad in the early decades of the tenth century. These Iraqi scholars supply the majority of traditions, while a much smaller number are recorded in eastern Iran by al-ʿAyyāshī around the same period,123 and much later by Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī (d. 991), who wrote his Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh in Balkh toward the end of the tenth century.124 Further, Saʿd b. ʿAbdallāh al-Qummī wrote about the belief in phantoms among the Mukhammisa in the late ninth to early tenth century, while a few decades later the same belief was attested among the Karkhiyyūn, hailing from Basra’s Karkh quarter. Finally, al-Shahrastānī in the twelfth century mentioned the belief in aẓilla among the Syrian Isḥāqīs and Nuṣayrīs. Mufawwiḍa beliefs were spread in the same geographical area. In the eighth century, the Kufan Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī is reported to have held delegationist beliefs, followed a century later by another Kufan, Isḥāq al-Aḥmar, and there are reports showing the existence of Mufawwiḍa in eastern Iran.125 The so-called aqbil adbir report had its origins, according to Crow, among the seventh-century followers of Muhammad. It broadly circulated in various Muslim circles and Iraq and Syria. It is among Shiites, however, that one should expect the author of KA to have heard it, and all of the Shiite renditions of this report lead us to Kufa and Qum,126 the main Shiite centers of the eighth and ninth centuries. The study of the religious ideas attested inKA shows clear traces of the eighth- and ninth-century Shiite Ghulat teachings. A look at the geographic distribution of these beliefs points, unsurprisingly, chiefly to Iraq, but also to the Shiite town of Qum, and to a smaller extent to Iran’s eastern frontier. As such, then, KA is the product of the eighth- and ninth-century Ghuluw (“extremism”), mainly centered in Kufa but with representatives in other parts of Iraq and in parts of Iran. It creatively blended Islamic symbols with elements from Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Zoroas- trianism, and Jewish esotericism.127 It is this religious environment that produced the aforementioned Kitāb al-ashbāḥ wa-l-aẓilla, the earliest layers of Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla, and other works with similar titles. By the second half of the ninth cen- 143 tury, KA was already “plagiarized” by the author of Kitāb al-kursī , and both works were known to Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr. They continued to circulate independently Shiite in Nuṣayrī circles for at least another century, and perhaps even longer. It is to this Underground part of KA’s history that we now turn. Literature

Men and Texts Between Iraq and Syria in the Tenth Century

Having reconstructed (as much as possible) the form and content of KA, and having situated it in the context of the early Shiite religious milieu, let us step back and look at the story of KA within the broader context of the movement of men and texts from Iraq to Syria in the tenth century. KA was not alone in its wanderings; together with it, a plethora of other texts on similar themes were initially in circulation in the Ghulat milieu of Iraq in the eighth and ninth centuries. Many of these texts were lost, but many were also rescued by the Nuṣayrīs, who left Iraq in the early tenth century for a more tolerant north Syria. They kept these books in their private collections and read and circulated them until at least the eleventh century, and perhaps even later. Hence the scores of fragments from Ghulat texts preserved in the works of tenth-century Nuṣayrī authors. The earliest textual fragment ofKA , as discussed earlier, is found in the work of Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr, who died in the second half of the ninth century. It is quoted here under its own title and anonymously, as part of yet another Ghulat treatise titled Kitāb al-kursī . Its later attestation in works of Nuṣayrī authors indicates that it was well known among Ibn Nuṣayr’s contemporaries and later Ghulat, along with the many other extremist writings he quotes. The titles and fragments that he mentions in his Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra reveal a rich religious literature in circulation among the Ghulat of his time. A fragment from his contemporary Isḥāq al-Aḥmar’s Kitāb al-tanbīh, for example, speaks about al-makān ’s creator role, harking back to the Mufawwiḍa’s teachings, while Kitāb al-marātib wa-l-daraj elaborates on the notion of God’s asmāʾ (“names”) and the seven degrees of belief and unbelief,128 both themes widely attested in Ghulat writings.129 A passage from Kitāb al-taw ḥīd, attributed to the well-known Ghali Muḥammad b. Sinān (d. 835), speaks about God’s names, qualities, and His veil (ḥijāb),130 and a fragment from a Risālat al-taw ḥīd speaks about God’s purpose in creating the letters of the alphabet.131 Another book attributed to Muḥammad b. Sinān is mentioned in Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s other alleged work, Kitāb al-akwār al-nūrāniyya wa-l-adwār al-rū ḥāniyya.132 Its title, Kitāb al-kawr wa-l- dawr, is the only thing that survives, but it in itself is suggestive of its Ghulat provenance, pointing to the Shiite extremists’ ideas of cyclical history, described in terms of “turns” (akwār, sg. kawr) and “cycles” (adwār, sg. dawr). In the first half of the tenth century, Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s followers established their center in Syria, taking with them the Ghulat books that they had inherited, including the KA. While some of these texts are only preserved in fragments in Nuṣayrī texts, others have resurfaced in their original forms. The Nuṣayrī community 144 of Iraq did not cease to exist, and proselytizing activities continued in other regions as well, but Syria henceforth remained as the main Nuṣayrī center.133 The rather thin Texts in source material does not reveal why this happened, but comparison of the religious Transit situations in Iraq and Syria in the late ninth century and throughout the tenth may suggest their motives. After a period of a more or less peaceful coexistence, in the ninth century the relations between the extremists and the moderates were becoming increasingly strained. The tensions between the two camps, which in some places became violent, are described in detail by Hossein Modarressi, who notes that scholars of Qum tried to banish transmitters who spread reports containing Ghulat material, while actual belief in such ideas could even be punished by death.134 And although the Ghulat remained influential throughout the ninth century and later, the moderate tendency during this period was becoming crystallized into a Twelver orthodoxy with its centers in Qum and Baghdad, gradually marginalizing the extremists.135 Meanwhile, in north Syria, far from the centers of the emerging Shiite orthodoxy (and from the Abbasid center of power), Ibn Nuṣayr’s followers found a safe haven in the Ḥamdānid principality of Aleppo. Their leader, Ḥusayn b. Ḥamdān al-Kha ṣībī (d. 969), became an esteemed member of the circle of scholars and poets in the court of the Ḥamdānid ruler Sayf al-Dawla al-Ḥamdānī (916/9–967). Himself a Twelver Shiite, Sayf al-Dawla apparently had no scruples regarding divisions within Shiism,136 and throughout his reign the Nuṣayrīs were able to flourish in his domain. Even after the decline of the Ḥamdānids in the second half of the tenth century, and during the Fāṭimid hegemony over the region, the Nuṣayrī community did not decline and continued to grow and produce religious literature. The pro-Shiite policies of the Ḥamdānids were followed by the tolerant attitude of the Fāṭimids, whose chief beneficiaries were the Christians but included other minorities as well.137 In fact, it is from among Christians (and Jews) that the Nuṣayrīs recruited a large number of their followers in this region,138 and proximity (and perhaps dialogue) with Christianity has echoes in Nuṣayrī literature. Most notably, al-Jillī—in whose Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra we find one of the fragments ofKA , and who was active in this very period (d. after 1009139)—has written an entire epistle calledal- Risāla al-masīḥiyya (The Christian epistle), where he describes the nature of Christ using both Islamic and Christian imagery.140 Al-Jillī further engages Christian ideas in his al-Risāla al-nuʿmāniyya, where he states that Christ’s apostles (al-ḥawāriyyūn) are in reality the nuqabāʾ (sg. naqīb),141 which is one of the degrees in the Ghulat spiritual hierarchy. Christian imagery is used in the work of his disciple Maymūn b. Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī (d. 1034–35), who in his collection of legal responses accords them a high value.142 Finally, an eleventh-century anonymous work discusses why the Christians are closer to being believers than the Jews are.143 KA’s fragments are next attested in the works of al-Jillī and Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī. Let us begin with the former. A look at the titles quoted in al-Jillī’s work alongside the KA and its encircling Kitāb al-kursī reveals a rich Ghulat literature in the possession of this Nuṣayrī leader. Four of these, Kitāb al-taw ḥīd, Risālat al-tawḥīd, 145 Kitāb al-marātib wa-l-daraj, and Kitāb al-tanbīh, already occur in Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra, which in turn is also quoted by al-Jillī. 144 There are Shiite fragments from seven other works, however, which do not appear in works of earlier Underground authors; three of these have survived in their original forms. The best known among Literature the latter three isKitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla .145 Next is Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla, which thematically is closely related to Kitāb al-haft .146 Finally, Ḥāwī quotes several passages from Kitāb al-usūs , which tackles such Ghulat themes as transformation into nonhuman forms, the seven Adams, and God’s manifestation in human form.147 The previously unquoted fragments in al-Jillī’s work are from Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, which because of its divergence from Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal’s work with the same title, is probably Isḥāq al-Aḥmar’s, and speaks of the truth of God’s unicity in Ghulat terms.148 Three other works areKitāb maʿrifat al-bāriʾ, Kitāb ādāb al-dīn , and Kitāb al-maḥmūdīn wa-l-madhmūmīn, and they all address Ghulat ideas, such as the evil of the moderates (muqaṣṣira), and God’s veils (ḥujub) and names (asmāʾ), and use Ghulat terminology, such as calling God with the term al-m aʿnā (the meaning).149 The next incarnation ofKA , both under its own title and as part of Kitāb al-kursī, occurs in the writings of two members of the Nuṣayrī family of Banū Shuʿba of Ḥarrān. During Abbasid times, Ḥarrān was an important center of culture and scholarship and home to the famous Ṣābians of Ḥarrān.150 During the Ḥamdānid dynasty’s heyday, it was under their influence and had a sizable Shiite population.151 The Ḥamdānids’ patronage for the Imami Shiites as well as the Nuṣayrīs, discussed earlier, could account for the establishment of the family in this town.152 Several of its members produced theological writings, some of which demonstrate high levels of sophistication. First and foremost, however, the Ḥarrānīs were keepers of the Ghulat and Nuṣayrī heritage and possessed a sizable library of their writings, as demonstrated by the inventory of titles they quote, along with a testimony by Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī. Ḥasan b. Shuʿba was highly valued by the Imami authors for two of his works written in the mainstream Imami tradition,153 but his Nuṣayrī heritage has remained unknown to outsiders. Meanwhile, his Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn reveals his good command of Nuṣayrī and Ghulat literature and his adherence to Ghulat ideas. In a revealing paragraph in the opening section of his book, he states that in his library he had around 150 titles154 of Nuṣayrī books, and around 250 books of “pentadism” (takhmīs), “divine delegation” (tafwīḍ), “moderation” (taqṣīr), and “exoteric knowledge” (ʿilm al-ẓāhir).155 The types of books that al-Ḥarrānī enumerates are rather telling. As one would expect, the largest group were Nuṣayrī works; then there were books by the Mukhammisa and Mufawwiḍa Ghulat (note the words takhmīs and tafwīḍ), abundantly quoted in the Ḥaqāʾiq. With Ḥasan b. Shuʿba’s Twelver writings in mind, the books on taqṣīr probably refer to Twelver Imami ones. And by the “books of exoteric knowledge,” he must have referred to works of nonreligious sciences, whose existence in Ḥasan’s library probably accounts for the references to Aristotle and other Greek sages in the works of some other members of his family.156 146 When Ḥasan b. Shuʿba spoke of the collection, he used the expression “reached me” (intahā ilayya), which does not clarify whether he personally owned the books Texts in or had access to them on some kind of communal basis. In any case, given that Transit most of them were Nuṣayrī and Ghulat works, the collection was unlikely to have been used outside the Nuṣayrī community, and some contemporary and later figures suggest that it was of considerable size for its time. Against the nearly 400 titles in al-Ḥarrānī’s collection, an eleventh-century Būyid wazīr’s private library had 10,000 volumes;157 in the thirteenth century, the mosque library of Qayrawān had 125 titles, 1,500 titles were in the collection of a scholar from Baghdad, 761 were in the collection of a Damascene, and the library of the Ashrafiyya Mausoleum held 2,100 titles; in the sixteenth century, a Cairene endowment had 182 titles, and the endowment of a wealthy scholar had 263.158 The quotations in theḤ aqāʾiq show that Ḥasan made good use of the Ghu- lat part of his collection. Thus, aside from the abovementionedKitāb al-haft, Kitāb al-ashbāḥ, and Kitāb al-usūs ,159 Ḥaqāʾiq contains quotations from several works cited by al-Jillī, three works by Isḥāq al-Aḥmar,160 numerous passages from Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr’s Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra,161 a certain Kitāb al-risāla by al-Khaṣībī,162 and a number of previously unmentioned texts of likely Ghulat provenance.163 Ḥasan b. Shuʿba’s library must have been shared by the entire family, as some of its younger representatives also cite passages of a number of Nuṣayrī and Ghulat works. It is in the work of one of them, ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, that the latest attestation ofKA as part of Kitāb al-kursī, along with passages of other Ghulat and Nuṣayrī works, is found. Together with the author of Kitāb al-u ṣayfir and Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn, Muḥammad b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, he also quotes fragments of several Ghulat and Nuṣayrī works.164

Summary

In the foregoing, I studied the origin and later trajectory of a text written in the Ghulat milieu of the eighth and ninth centuries in Iraq, transported to Syria by the Nuṣayris, and preserved in fragments in their writings. Through the study of this text, I sought to understand the larger picture of the transmission of Ghulat literature from Iraq to Syria by the survivors of the Iraqi Ghulūw, the Nuṣayrīs. I further tried to show that this transmission and the later preservation of Ghulat literature by the Nuṣayrīs illustrates a larger process still, that of the migration of the survivors of the Ghulat to Syria—and their ability to preserve their written heritage and to build upon it.

Appendix: Translation of the Surviving Passages of KA165

[Creation Myth] [1]166 The first thing that He created are the names of letters, invisible, in a person 147 unperceived by the senses, who has no sides [aqṭār] and no boundaries. He is hidden from the senses. God made him into a complete word of four letters. From it He then Shiite manifested three Names [asmāʾ, sg. ism] for the creation’s need for them, hiding one Underground of them which is concealed and hidden in these three names. Literature

[2]167 Each one of the Names has four pillars, hence there are twelve pillars. For each of the pillars He created thirty Names. ʿAlī is related to them [i.e., the pillars?], he is the Compassionate, the Merciful [al-ra ḥmān al-ra ḥīm], the Creator [al-khāliq], the Maker [al-bāriʾ]. These names, and whatever there is of God’s most beautiful names [al-asm āʾ al-ḥusnā] add up to 360 names; they are related to those three names. These three names are the pillars and veils [ḥujub] of the one first name which is hidden in these three names.

[3]168 Then He created a word of four letters, four boundaries, and four parts, and these parts are: truth [ḥaqq], justice [ʿadl], truthfulness [ṣidq], and mercy [raḥma]. Then your Lord’s name became complete tammat[ ] with truthfulness and justice in the first name. Then He created seven more words, until the eighth word was completed, then He said: {on that Day, eight of them will bear the throne of your Lord above them} (Q 69:17).169 The concealed name is hidden in the eighth complete word, and the seven words are veils [ḥijāb] for each other.

[4]170 He then created His throne on water, and made His words into His signs [āyāt], His covenant [mīthāq], His agreement [ʿahd], His wishes [amānī, sg. umniyya], His protection [dhimma], His decision [ʿazm], His command [amr]. He made four spirits as pillars for His throne: the Holy Spirit [rūḥ al-qudus], the faithful spirit [rūḥ al-amīn], the spirit of he who ascends [rūḥ dhī l-maʿārij]171—who descends and ascends—, and the spirit of command [rūḥ al-amr ]. His names became equal172 [istawat] in His words, and His words became173 in the spirits [arwāḥ, sg. rūḥ] above His throne.

[5]174 Then God spread His light, and from that light He created an image. Then from knowledge [ʿilm], power [qudra], light [nūr], and will [mashīʾa] He created by His command intelligence [ʿaql]. He then commanded, “turn toward me!” and intelligence turned toward Him, then He commanded “turn away!” and it turned away. God then told it, “by you I reward and by you I punish,” and made it live with water, possessed of knowledge, eternally in the realm.175

[6]176 Then He made the shadows a[ ẓilla] in factions and made them related [nisba] to His breath.177 He then made the breath [nafas] of the shadows—by which they became known [?]178—a breath [nafkha]179 [coming] from Him; and those shadows through whom the first breath blew nafkha[ ūlā180 ] are [divided into] seven types and seven ranks; the first type is light, the second air, the third is darkness, the fourth is fire, the fifth wind, the sixth water, and the seventh is the breathnafkha [ ]. 148 [7]181 He made seven ranks, each rank was made in each day with one word, until Texts in seven ranks were completed with seven words in seven days; between the first and the Transit second days there is swoon, between the second and the third slumber, between the third and the fourth drowsiness, between the fourth and the fifth oblivion, between the fifth and the sixth ignorance, and between the sixth and the seventh inebriety.

[8]182 The first rank of shadows, and the closest to God, are the rank of apostles [rusul], the second rank are the prophets [anbiyāʾ], the third rank are the angels [malāʾika], the fourth rank are the believers [muʾminūn],183 the fifth rank are the unbelievers [kuffār], the sixth rank are the Pharaohs [farāʿina], and the seventh rank are the devils [abālisa] and demons [ṭawāghīt].

[9]184 They stood in rows, then God dispersed them and made them into sects and groups [ṭarāʾiq wa-qidad], of which He has said, {we follow different paths} (Q 72:11). The prophets, messengers, and the legatees aw[ ṣiyāʾ, sg. waṣī] stand to the right hand of the throne; then stand the shadows of the believers among the jinn. [For each of them He created] two shadows, which are alike and similar. God created the shadows in twos for He is one, and it is unbecoming of His greatness that something else should also be one. Then God created two accursed shadows to the left of His throne. After them [He created] the shadows of tyrantsjabābira [ ], then the shadows of idolaters, then the shadows of devils [abālisa] and satans [shayāṭīn], and after them the shadows of the unbelievers among the jinn. And all these shadows He created in pairs, which are alike and similar.

[10]185 God placed the shadows at the top [dhurw]186 of creation;187 He then made likeness in the first shadow and similarity in the second, making them related in their birth—birth after birth; He said in His book: {And We created you in pairs} (Q 78:8), meaning “alike and similar,” likeness in the first, similarity in the last. God also said: {and We created pairs of all things} (Q 51:49), the pair to be saved on the right hand of the throne, and the pair that is doomed on the left hand of the throne. And God spoke of the believers thus: {they and their pairs—seated on couches in the shade} (Q 36:56); and of the unbelievers He said: {gather together those who did wrong, and others like them, as well as whatever they worshipped beside God, lead them all to the path of Hell} (Q 37:22–23). By the “pairs” He means the ones that are alike and similar.

[11]188 When God wanted to create Ādam, he sent Jabraʾīl, who took a handful of soil from each of the heavens with his right hand, and took a word [kalima?] from the earth with his left hand, and kneaded them. Then God told him, “divide the earth into two halves,” then He created something from the earth and something from the heaven189 and told them: “Obey My word and My command”; these words were addressed to those who stood to the right of His throne, such as the prophets, the apostles, and all those upon whom God had bestowed His grace and to whom He 149 had given His love. He then told the second half, whom Jabrāʾīl had divided from the first following His command190—those who stood to his left, such as the tyrants, the Shiite idolaters, the unbelievers, the devils, and all those whom God wishes to disgrace: Underground obey me in what I say to you; He says:191 {[It is God who] splits open the seed and Literature the fruit stone}(Q6:95). The “seed” is the clay ṭ[ īna] of which the believer in made, upon which He has cast His love, while the fruit stone [nawā, sg. nawātun] is the clay of the unbeliever, who is removed from any good and from Him.192

[12]193 When God created Ādam and when the soul [nafs]—which is the spirit of life—entered him, He made him sleep for a thousand years before He would breathe His spirit [rūḥ] into him.194 Then He created Ḥawwāʾ from him, and Ādam woke up and saw her. If He had already breathed His spirit into him, he would not have slept, for the spirit does not sleep and the soul does; if the spirit slept, man would see no dreams. The first breath comes before the intelligence [ʿaql], hence youths do not err until they understand, and they only begin to understand when they mature. After God divided Ādam’s soul and spirit,195 and after He breathed his spirit into him, the angels worshipped him as He had ordered them. Satan, however, refused to worship him as he thought himself superior to the clay from which Ādam was made. The accursed one did not know that the angels worshipped Ādam’s spirit, and not his body of clay.

[Scattered Passages] [13]196 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq said: “In the beginning there was God and no space [makān]. Then He created space and delegated [fawwaḍa] the affairs to him.” I asked: “What is space?” He [Jaʻfar] responded: “Muhammad, peace upon him.”

[14]197 God’s Messenger said: “I am Ādam in the esoteric [meaning] [bāṭin] of the Qurʾan, I am God’s first creation.”

[15]198 Then God created knowledge ʿi[ lm] and power [qudra] together, none of them precedes the other, nor do they separate. Therefore, it is not appropriate to say “He knew what He could” or “He could what He knew” because it is impossible that one of the two precedes the other. Afterwards, by His command He created will [mashīʾa] and decree [qaḍāʾ].

[16]199 God revealed to Hibat Allāh Shīth b. Ādam that he should not fight Qābīl and should worship in secret. Thus,taqiyya continues until the known time.

[17]200 When Jabrāʾīl descended upon Ādam to show him what to do, and when Ādam had reached the place of stoning [jimār], Iblīs appeared to him and told him, “Oh Ādam, where are you headed?” Jabrāʾīl then told Ādam, “do not talk to him and throw seven pebbles at him and say allāhu akbar [kabbir] with each pebble.” Ādam did this until he finished throwing pebbles.

150 [18]201 Iblīs is Dulām [i.e., ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb202 ], and because of that Dulām and his friend [i.e., Abū Bakr?] are crucified every year in order for them to be stoned. Texts in Transit Notes

1. Marshall Hodgson, “How Did the Early Shîʿa Become Sectarian?,” JAOS 75, no. 1 (1955): 9–10; Hossein Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shīʿite Islam (Princeton: The Dar- win Press, 1993), 4; Najam Haider, “Prayer, Mosque, and Pilgrimage: Mapping Shīʿī Sectarian Identity in 2nd/8th Century Kūfa,” Islamic Law and Society 16 (2009): 151–74; Ron Buckley, “On the Origins of Shīʿi Ḥadīth,” The Muslim World 88, no. 2 (1998): 180–82; Maria Dakake, The Charismatic Community: Shiʿite Identity in Early Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). 2. On the significance of the term “Ghulat” in early Islamic polemical writings, see Wadād al-Qāḍī, “The Development of the TermGhulāt in Muslim Literature with Special Reference to the Kaysāniyya,” in Akten des VII. Kongresses für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, ed. Albert Dietrich (Göt- tingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1976), 295–319. 3. On the eighth- to ninth-century Ghulat, see William Tucker’s Mahdis and Millenarians: Shīʿite Extremists in Early Muslim Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Modarressi, Cri- sis, 19–51; Heinz Halm, Die Islamische Gnosis (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1982), 199–217; Halm, “Ḡolāt,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica [EIr] (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985–); Hodgson, “How Did the Early Shîʿa,” 4–10; Hodgson, “Ghulāt,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. [EI2], ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bian- quis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2015); Wilferd Madelung, “Khaṭṭābiyya,” in EI2; Madelung, “Manṣūriyya,” in EI2; Alessandro Bausani, Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Bahaʾullah, trans. J. M. Marchesi (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000), 130–43. On the beliefs of the “moderates,” see Tamima Bayhom-Daou, “The Imam’s Knowledge and the Quran According to al-Faḍl b. Shādhān al-Nisābūrī (d. 260 a.h . /854 a.d.),” BSOAS 64, no. 2 (2001): 188–207. 4. The sixth imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, for example, famously cursed and dissociated himself from Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Asadī (killed ca. 755), who had declared the imam an incarnation of the divinity, while claiming prophecy for himself; see Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980), 10–11; for studies on the Khaṭṭābiyya, see Madelung, “Khaṭṭābiyya”; Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, “Ḵaṭṭābiyya,” in EIr; Hassan Ansari, “Abū al-Kha ṭṭāb,” in Encyclopaedia Islamica, ed. Farhad Daftary and Wilferd Madelung (Brill Online, 2015); Tucker, Mahdis, 113–15. 5. For a detailed account of this opposition, see Modarressi, Crisis, 29–49. 6. Hussein Abdulsater, “Dynamics of Absence: Twelver Shiʿism During the Minor Occultation,” ZDMG 161, no. 2 (2011): 305–34; Saïd Arjomand, “The Crisis of the Imamate and the Institution of Occultation in Twelver Shiism: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” IJMES 28, no. 4 (1996): 491–515. 7. Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, al-Ghayba, ed. Āghā Buzurg al-Ṭahrānī (Najaf: Maṭbaʿat al-Nuʿmān, 1385/1965), 244–52. 8. Another such claimant was Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shalmaghānī, a Shiite jurist who later in his life veered toward extremism; he also claimed to be the safīr of the twelfth imam, thus making an enemy of the Hidden Imam’s then deputy. See Abdulsater, “Dynamics of Absence,” 316–18. 9. Shihāb al-Dīn Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-buldān , vol. 4 (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1397/1977), 447–48; Abdul- sater, “Dynamics of Absence,” 312–13; cf. Louis Massignon, “Les origines Shiʿites de la famille vizirale des Banuʾl Furat,” in Opera minora, ed. Youakim Moubarac, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 484–87; Massignon, “Recherches sur les Shiʿites extrémistes à Baghdad à la fin du troisième siècle de l-Hégire,” in ibid., 523–26; Andrew Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shīʿism: Ḥadīth as Discourse Between Qum and Baghdad (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000), 17–19; Dominique Sourdel, Le vizirat ʿabbāside de 749 à 936, vol. 2 (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1960), 514–15. 10. On his death dates, see Yaron Friedman, The Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History, and Identity of the Leading Minority in Syria (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 32–33. 11. For a discussion of the heresiographic accounts of the Ghulat, see Ron Buckley, “The Early 151 Shiite Ghulāh,” Journal of Semitic Studies 42, no. 2 (1997): 301–10; Halm, Die Islamische Gnosis, 27–31; Wilferd Madelung, “Bemerkungen zur imamitischen Firaq-Literatur,” Der Islam 40, nos. 1–2 (1967): 37–52; for a study of the Islamic heresiographic literature as a genre, see Josef van Ess, Der Eine und das Shiite Andere: Beobachtungen an islamischen Häresiographie, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011); Mohammad Underground Ali Amir-Moezzi, “Savoir c’est pouvoir: Exégèses et implications du miracle dans l’Imamisme ancien,” Literature in Miracle et Karama: Hagiographies médiévales comparées, ed. Denise Aigle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 268; for a skeptical treatment of heresiographic writings on the Ghulat, see Tamima Bayhom-Daou’s “The Second Century Shīʿite Ġulāt: Were They Really Gnostic?”Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 5 (2003–4): 13–61. 12. For a discussion of the treatment of the Ghulat by medieval Muslim historians, see Buckley, “Early Shiite Ghulāh,” 311–13. 13. Published by Wladimir Ivanow in Islam 23 (1936): 1–132; for the most up-to-date analysis of Umm al-kitāb , and for a discussion of the scholarship about it, see Sean Anthony, “The Legend of ʻAbdallāh ibn Saba’ and the Date of Umm al-Kitāb ,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 21, no. 1 (2011): 18; see also Halm, Die Islamische Gnosis, 113–98. 14. On the “Mufaḍḍal tradition,” see Mushegh Asatryan, “Heresy and Rationalism in Early Islam: The Origins and Evolution of the Mufaḍḍal Tradition” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2012); Asatryan, “Mofażżal al-Joʿfi,” EIr; Hossein Modarressi, Tradition and Survival: A Bibliographical Survey of Early Shīʿite Literature (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 333–37. 15. The work has been published three times, the first two from the same manuscriptms ( Arabe 1449, Bibliothèque nationale de France), by al-Munṣif b. ʿAbd al-Jalīl (Beirut: Dār al-madār al-Islāmī, 2004), and by Leonardo Capezzone as “Il Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ attribuito a Mufaḍḍal ibn ʿUmar al-J uʿfī,” Riv- ista degli studi orientali 69 (1995): 295–416; a third one was published by Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā in al-Majmūʿa l-mufa ḍḍaliyya, Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 6 (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 95–166; the manuscript of the latter edition is not identified. 16. It was first published by Arif Tamir and Ignace Khalifé in Beirut in 1960 under the titleKitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla , and again by Tamir from different manuscripts in Beirut in 1981 (reprinted in 2007). Muṣṭafā Ghālib published his first edition in Beirut in 1964 (reprinted in 1977). Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā reprinted the book in their al-Majm ūʿa l-mufa ḍḍaliyya, 289–423. The very few studies on this book will be discussed later in the chapter. 17. I owe this insight to a private communication by Annunziata Russo, to whom I am grateful for generously sharing her knowledge of the text. Kitāb al-usūs was first edited by Jaʿfar al-Kanj Dandashī in Madkhal ilā al-madhhab al-ʿalawī al-nu ṣayrī (Irbid: al-Rūznā, 2000), 73–156, and by Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā in Kutub al-ʿalwawiyīn al-muqaddasa, Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 9 (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2008), 45–139. 18. E.g., Muḥammad b. Baḥr al-Ruhnī, ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Qāsim al-Ḥaḍramī, Muḥammad b. al-Ḥusayn b. Saʿīd (see Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Najāshī, Rijāl [Beirut: al-ʿĀlamī, 2010], 367, 594, 322), and Khaybarī b. ʿAlī (ibid., 151; Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī, Rijāl, ed. Muḥammad Riḍā al-Jalālī [Qum: Dār al-ḥadīth, 1422/2002], 56). Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Mahrān’s numerous writings include three titles openly reminiscent of Ghulat themes (al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 334). Thus, hisKitāb maqtal Abī l-Khaṭṭāb (The book of Abū al-Khaṭṭāb’s killing) and Manāqib Abī al-Khaṭṭāb (The virtues of Abū al-Khaṭṭāb) clearly refer to the famous extremist Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Asadī, while his title Kitāb al-qibāb (The book of cycles) probably refers to the notion of historical cycles (qubba, pl. qibāb) found in early Ghulat texts and later accepted by the Nuṣayrīs (cf. Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, 203). Another extremist, Muḥammad b. Jumhūr, is said to have written poetry allowing the forbidden (Ibn al-Gha ḍāʾirī, Rijāl, 92), which harks back to the accusa- tions that the Ghulat were antinomians. One of the tenth-century Ghulat authors was Abū al-Qāsim ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Kūfī (d. 963), who adhered to the doctrine of the Mukhammisa Ghulat (Ibn Shahrāshūb, Maʿālim al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. ʿAbbās Iqbāl [Tehran: Fardīn, 1353/1934], 57; Ḥasan b. Yūsuf b. ʿAlī b. Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī, Rijāl, ed. Muḥammad Ṣādiq Āl Baḥr al-ʿUlūm [Qum: al-Khayyām, 1402/1981], 233). 19. See, e.g., the examples quoted in Modarressi, Crisis, 47, and Modarressi, Tradition, 61, 189. 20. For brief descriptions of the series, see Bella Tendler, “Concealment and Revelation: A Study of Secrecy and Initiation among the Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs of Syria” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2012), 4–5, and Friedman, Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 2–3. 152 21. See, e.g., Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn , ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 60, 63–64, 108, 147–48, 150–56. 22. Several early authors have attributed to Isḥāq al-Aḥmar (d. 899) a work with the title Kitāb Texts in al-ṣirāṭ. See ʿAli b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab , ed. Barbier de Meynard, vol. 3 (Paris: Transit Imprimerie Impériale, 1864), 265–66; Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Lisān al-mīzān, ed. ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ Abū Ghadda, vol. 2 (Beirut: Dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmiyya, 2002), 83; Ibn Ḥazm, Kitāb al-fi ṣal fī l-milal wa-l- ahwāʾ wa-l-niḥal, English trans. Israel Friedlaender, “The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presenta- tion of Ibn Ḥazm,” JAOS 28 (1907): 66; this has led Leonardo Capezzone (“Il Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ,” 303) and Yaron Friedman (Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 244) to think that this is the same Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ as the one attributed to Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī. The passages of Isḥāq’s Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, however, reveal that it is not identical with Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal’s book. Isḥāq al-Aḥmar is an interesting case in point, showing the usefulness of the Silsila for the study of early Ghulat thought and literature in general. While two of his works listed in biographical dictionaries, Kitāb akhbār al-sayyid and Kitāb majālis Hishām, are missing, the newly published Nuṣayrī texts have revealed excerpts of four other works allegedly authored by him and expounding Ghulat themes—Bāṭin al-taklīf, Kitāb al-ṣalāt, Kitāb al-tanbīh , and Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ. For a full discussion of Isḥāq’s legacy and for the references to quotations of his works, see Mushegh Asatryan, “Esḥāq Aḥmar Naḵaʿi,” in EIr. 23. Although the editors of the series never list the manuscripts of the edited works, the corre- spondences of titles, terminology, and ideas with earlier extremist and Nuṣayrī writings are such that they leave no doubt as to the authenticity of these texts; some of the relevant titles will be discussed below. 24. Tamer and Khalifé do not identify the manuscript of their 1960 edition of Kitāb al-haft , nor does Muṣṭafā Ghālib identify his (it is now part of the manuscript collection of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, no. 175/1030, but its origin is still unknown; see Delia Cortese, Ismaili and Other Arabic Manu- scripts: A Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of The Institute of Ismaili Studies [London: I. B. Tauris, 2000], 124). However, in his introduction to the first edition of the work (reprinted in the 1977 edition, 7), the Syrian scholar states that he had in his personal collection several copies of the treatise; he also describes his correspondence with Rudolph Strothmann, who, he says, had acquired a copy of it in the Syrian city of Homs (ibid.). In the introduction to his 1981 edition (reprinted in 2007, 5), Tamir states that it is based on a manuscript from the Qadmus region in Syria, copied by a resident of Misyaf in the year 1117/1705. The only extant manuscript ofKitāb al-ṣirāṭ was brought to Paris, also from Syria, and copied in Tripoli in 1791–92 (for a note on the history of the manuscript, see Asatryan, “Heresy and Rationalism,” 63). 25. As noted above, the manuscript of Tamir’s second edition of Kitāb al-haft came from Qadmus and was copied by a resident of Misyaf. Both Qadmus and Misyaf were acquired by the Ismailis in the first half of the twelfth century; see Nasseh Mirza,Syrian Ismailism: The Ever Living Line of the Imamate, ad 1100–1160 (Richmond: Surrey, 1997), 14. They were apparently populated by Nuṣayrīs; hence— whether for political purposes or out of personal conviction—the ruler of Qadmus and Misyaf, chief Nizārī dāʿī Rāshid al-Dīn Sinān (d. 1193), reportedly flirted with Nuṣayrī ideas about metempsychosis. See Farhad Daftary,The Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2007), 371–72; René Dussaud, “Influence de la religion noṣairî sur la doctrine de Râchid ad-Dîn Sinân,” Journal Asiatique 16 (1900): 61–69. More than a century later, Syrian Ismailis were still said to believe in the transmigration of souls. See Shihāb al-Dīn al-ʿUmarī, Masālik al-ab ṣār fī mamālik al-am ṣār, ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid (Cairo: al-Maʿhad al-faransī li al-āthār al-sharqiyya, 1985), 77–78. 26. See Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [1], Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 1, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 210 (quoted as KA), and 227–29 (quoted as Kitab al-kursī ). 27. Yaron Friedman, “Moḥammad b. Noṣayr,” EIr; with regard to the death dates of Nuṣayrī authors, I will also rely on Friedman’s Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, unless otherwise indicated. 28. Bruno Paoli states that al-Jillī died in 1007 or 1009, without identifying the source of his information. See his “La diffusion de la doctrine nusayrie au IVe/Xe siècle d’après le Kitāb Ḫayr al-ṣanīʿa du cheikh Ḥusayn Mayhūb Ḥarfūš,” Arabica 58 (2011): 22. However, Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Daylamī’s Kitāb majmaʿ al-akhbār contains a passage where al-Jillī appears in Aleppo in the Islamic year 399/ad 1008–9; see Majmūʿat al-aḥādīth al-ʿalawiyya, Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 8, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2008), 158. 153 29. See Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya [2], Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 2, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 207–9 (as KA), and 181–82 (as part of Kitāb al-kursī ). 30. Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 41, 45, 71–74, 168, 173 (as KA), and 80–81 (as embedded in Kitāb Shiite al-kursī ). Underground 31. Probably a nephew. For a genealogy of the two authors, see Friedman, Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 46. Literature 32. Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 273. 33. Friedman, Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 248, 254, 264, 266. True, Friedman does state in his appendix (248) that Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra is “attributed” to Ibn Nuṣayr, but otherwise he treats it as if its authorship—together with the authorship of the other similar texts—is well established. 34. See Rasāʿil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 165, 200, 214. 35. Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 23, 77, 95, 98. 36. See Rasāʿil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 211. 37. Ibid., 167, 184; Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 114. 38. Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 273. 39. For a summary of the Imami views of al-Ḥarrānī and his works, see Muḥsin al-Amīn, Aʿyān al-sh ī ʿa (Beirut: Dār al-taʿāruf li-l-maṭbūʿāt, 1403/1983), 5:185–86. 40. Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 239. Friedman (Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 46) states that the introduction is by ʿAlī b. Ḥamza himself, but this is not certain. 41. See the appendix, paragraphs 1 through the midpoint of 4. 42. Appendix, paragraph 9. 43. Interestingly, after the overlap ends,Kitāb al-kursī begins to overlap with chapter 62 of Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla of Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal—yet another instance of anonymous textual borrowing. 44. The minor corrections that I made to the original are not noted. .see the footnote to paragraph 6 of the appendix ,نفسه For an explanation of this reading of .45 46. Appendix, paragraph 6; the transcription is based on the version in Ḥaqāʾiq, 72–73; but for a few errors, the one in Ḥāwī, 208, is almost identical with it. 47. Here “it” could refer to ʿaql (intelligence) from the preceding sentence. in this variant are read nafasihi and nafasihā to refer to “breath,” this will نفسها and نفسه If .48 make even less sense. 49. Corruption (or variant?) of Q 112; my rendering is based on Abdel Haleem’s translation of the Qurʾan. 50. The transcription is based on the version inḤ aqāʾiq, 80, which appears to be more complete. The other two are corrupt and make less sense. 51. See the appendix, paragraph 9. 52. See the appendix, paragraph 7; the transliteration is based on the version of Ḥāwī, 208. 53. The passage is transcribed from the version ofḤ aqāʾiq, 81; the one in Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra, 228, is almost identical with it. The beginning of the version inḤ āwī is corrupt, but in two places I have preferred its readings over the other two. 54. Or still another text containing quotations from it. 55. Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 429. 56. Ibid.: “He is a mawlā, very weak, his sayings are not trustworthy, and all of his books are confusion [takhlīṭ].” See also al-Kashshī, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. Jawād al-Qayyūmī al-Iṣfahānī (Qum: Muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 2006), 305, “Yūnus b. Ẓabyān is accused [muttaham] and an extremist [ghālin].” The same author quotes a tradition where Yūnus calls Abū l-Khaṭṭāb “God’s messenger” (306), and another one where Yūnus claims to have heard God’s voice and is cursed for that by the imam Riḍā (305). 57. Al-Ṭūsī, al-Ghayba, 33; al-Kashshī, Rijāl, 275; Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār, Baṣāʾir al-darajāt, ed. Muḥsin Kūchabāghī al-Tabrīzī (Qum: Maktabat Āyat Allāh al-ʿUẓmā al-Ma rʿashī al-Najafī, 1404/1984), 374. 58. See, e.g., Ibn Bābūya, al-Khiṣāl, ed. ʿAlī Akbar al-Ghaffārī (Beirut: al-ʿĀlamī, 1410/1990), 47, 328; Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī , ed. ʿAlī Akbar al-Ghaffārī (Beirut: Dār ṣaʿb, 1980), 1:537, 4:575, 8:373–4; al-Ṭūsī, al-Ghayba, 33. 59. Al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq, 58–9, 145. Yūnus frequently appears in Nuṣayrī texts, e.g., Maymūn b. Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī, Kitāb al-m aʿārif, ed. Meir Bar-Asher and Aryeh Kofsky (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 154 141–43; Rudolf Strothmann, Esoterische Sonderthemen bei den Nusairi (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1958), 6; al-Jillī, Ḥāwī al-asrār, 190, 198; Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq, 49, 169; Ḥusayn b. Ḥamdān al-Khaṣībī, Fiqh al-risāla al-rastbāshiyya, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 146; Mufaḍḍal al-J uʿfī (attr.), Texts in Kitāb al-ḥujub wa-l-anwār, in al-Majm ūʿa al-mufaḍḍaliyya, 52–53, 63–64. Transit 60. Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī (attr.),Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, 74, 78; Saʿd al-Qummī, Kitāb al-maqālāt wa-l-firaq, ed. Muḥammad Jawād Mashkūr (Tehran: Muʾassasa-yi maṭbūʿātī-yi ʿaṭāyī, 1963), 57. 61. They are Yazīd al-Ṣāʾigh and Abū Sumayna Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ṣayrafī. On the latter, see al-Kashshī, Rijāl, 451. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 448–49; see also Bayhom-Daou, “Imam’s Knowledge.” 64. Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 295. 65. Ibid., 225; Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Zurārī, Risālat Abī Ghālib al-Zurārī, ed. Muḥammad Riḍā al-Ḥusaynī (Qum: Markaz al-buḥūth wa l-taḥqīqāt al-islāmiyya, 1411/1990), 175. 66. Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 247. 67. His son ʿAlī narrated from someone who narrated from Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s contemporary Muḥam- mad b. ʿAwwām al-Khalqānī. See ibid., 340. 68. Al-Kashshī (Rijāl, 316) lists another “transmitter” of aKitāb al-a ẓilla, ʿAlī b. Ḥammād al-Azdī; according to a footnote by the editor, this is the same person as ʿAlī b. Muḥammad, the son of Buzurj Abū Ṣāliḥ Muḥammad, which would indicate that his transmitted book would be the same as his father’s. In al-Kāfī (1:441) he narrates a tradition about aẓilla from Mufaḍḍal; if authentic, the hadith would indicate ʿAlī’s continuous preoccupation with the subject of shadows. 69. Al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 79–80. 70. On him and his works, see Halm, Die Islamische Gnosis, 242–43; al-Najāshī, Rijāl, 313–14; al-Zurārī, Tārīkh, 175. Halm contends that Muḥammad b. Sinān’s Kitāb al-a ẓilla is the same as Pseudo- Mufaḍḍal’s Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla ; see his “Das ‘Buch der Schatten’ II,”Der Islam 58 (1981): 67. How- ever, the large number of surviving books with similar titles and contents, such as our KA, or the Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla, shows that the picture is much more complicated. 71. Ḥaqāʾiq, 71. 72. mss 140 and 511 of the collection of the Institute of Ismaili Studies; the text will be discussed in greater detail below. For a study and critical edition of the text, see Mushegh Asatryan, “An Early Shiʿi Cosmology: Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla and Its Milieu,” Studia Islamica 110 (2015): 1–80; Ḥaqāʾiq, 74–77; Ḥāwī, 209–12. 73. See the appendix, paragraphs 6–10. 74. For a discussion of the possible pre-Islamic roots of the image, see Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 213–14. 75. Fritz Meier, Die Fawāʾiḥ al-jamāl wa-fawāti ḥ al-jalāl des Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (Wiesbaden: Fritz Steiner Verlag, 1957), 82. 76. Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 7–8; the translation is from Tucker, Mahdis, 62–63, with slight modifications. 77. ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī, Farq bayn al-firaq (Beirut: Dār al-āfāq al-jadīda, 1402/1982), 230; cf. Abū l-Fatḥ Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal wa-l-niḥal, ed. Aḥmad Fahmī Muḥammad (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1413/1992), 1:180–81. 78. Al-Nāshiʾ al-Akbar, Masāʾil al-imāma, in Josef van Ess, Frühe muʿtazilitische Häresiographie (Beirut: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981), 37 (Arabic pagination); Ḥasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-sh īʿa, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul: F. A. Brockhaus, 1931), 31; cf. Halm, “Das ‘Buch der Schatten’ II,” 16–17; Crone, Nativist Prophets, 208–15. 79. Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:441, 442, 8:6; Muḥammad b. Masʿūd al-ʿAyyāshī, al-Tafsīr, ed. Hāshim al-Rasūlī al-Ma ḥallātī (Tehran: Maktabat al-ʿilmiyya al-islāmiyya, 1411/1991), 2:126; cf. Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār (Beirut: Dār al-iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1403/1983), 52:309; Ibn Bābūya, Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh, ed. Ḥasan al-Mūsawī al-Kharsān (Tehran: Dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1390/1970), 4:254. It is interesting to note that section fourteen of the second part of al-Ṣaffār’s Baṣāʾir, 83–86, is entitled “Bāb fī rasūl Allāh annahu ʿarafa mā raʾā fī al-aẓilla wa-l-dharr wa-ghayrih” (A chapter about 155 the apostle of God, that he knew what he saw in the shadows, particles, and so on). The traditions contained in the section all discuss the time before the creation of the world, and although the term aẓilla is not used in any of them, its use in the title of the section is rather telling (provided this is not an Shiite editorial addition). On the “particles” (dharr), see Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Underground Early Shiʿism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam, trans. David Streight (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 16. Literature 80. Al-ʿAyyāshī, Tafsīr, 1:282. 81. Al-Ṣaffār,Ba ṣāʾir, 131; al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī , 1:438, 6:256. 82. Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī , 1:441, 4:256, 6:576; Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, Tahdhīb al-a ḥkām, ed. Sayyid Ḥasan al-Mūsawī al-Kharsān (Tehran: Dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1390/1970), 6:55; Furāt al- Kūfī, Tafsīr, ed. Muḥammad al-Kāẓim (Tehran: Muʾassasat al-ṭabʿ wa-l-nashr, 1990), 338; al-ʿAyyāshī, Tafsīr, 1:181. 83. This is a translation of the Arabicmalak muqarrab; for a discussion of the term, see Stephen Burge, “Cherubim. IV Islam,” Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 5 (2012), cols. 64–66. I am grateful to the article’s author for referring me to it. 84. Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī , 1:441. 85. Rajab al-Bursī, Mashāriq anwār al-yaqīn (Beirut: al-ʿĀlamī, n.d.), 40–41. 86. For the various iterations of the story, see al-ʿAyyāshī, Tafsīr, 2:207; ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī, al-Tafsīr, ed. Ṭayyib al-Mūsawī al-Jazāʾirī (Najaf: Maktabat al-hudā, 1387/1967), 2:391; al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:438; Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad al-Barqī, Kitāb al-ma ḥāsin, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī (Tehran: Dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1331 Sh./1951), 135; Furāt, Tafsīr, 146, 509. For the idea of the primordial covenant in Shiite hadith, see Amir-Moezzi, Divine Guide, 16, 33; Amir-Moezzi, “Cosmogony and Cosmology V,” in “Twelver Shiʿism,” EIr. 87. Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī , 1:442, 531; Furāt, Tafsīr, 74, 372, 552; Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (attr.),Tafsīr , ed. ʿAlī ʿĀshūr (n.p.: Muʾassasat qāʾid al-ghurr al-mu ḥajjalīn, 1426/2005), 177; al-Bursī, Mashāriq, 41. See also Uri Rubin, “Pre-existence and Light: Aspects of the Concept of Nūr Muḥammad,” Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1975): 99–100. 88. Al-Qummī, Maqālāt, 56; on the date of this book, see Madelung, “Bemerkungen,” 38. 89. Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-buldān , 4:447–48. 90. Milal, 1:193. 91. A number of passages, too many to list here, are scattered throughout Nuṣayrī literature; for some examples, see al-Janān al-Junbulānī, Īḍāḥ al-mi ṣbāḥ al-dāll ʿalā sabīl al-najā ḥ, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [1], Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 1, 248; Ḥusayn b. Ḥamdān al-Kha ṣībī, al-Risāla al-rastbāshiyya, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya [2], Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 2, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 30, 45. 92. For a discussion of the fragments of Kitāb al-haft found in Nuṣayrī literature, see Asatryan, Heresy and Rationalism, 146–147. 93. Mufaḍḍal al-Juʿfī (attr.),Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla (1981 ed.), 16–32. 94. See Ḥaqāʾiq, 74–77 and Ḥāwī, 209–12. 95. Asatryan, “Early Shiʿi Cosmology,” paragraphs 1–10. 96. Al-Jillī, Ḥāwī, 203. 97. Paragraphs 12–13. Incidentally, the passage where this idea is expressed is almost identical with al-Ashʿarī’s description of Hishām b. al-Ḥakam’s teaching on God’s creation of space, according to which, God “was in no space, then space emerged”: “kāna Allāh wa-lā makān thumma khalaqa al-makān” (KA), “kāna lā fī makān thumma ḥadatha al-makān” (Hishām). See al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 32; Van Ess, Theologie, 1:363, 4:72). It is difficult, however, to find any connections between the two passages. This image was borrowed by several Nuṣayrī authors, e.g., al-Jillī, Risālat al-fatq wa-l-ratq, Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya [2], 315; ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 240. 98. Appendix, paragraph 1. 99. E.g., “ghayr manẓūr” (invisible), which is masculine singular, should have been “ghayr manẓūra”; “mubʿad ʿanhu al-aqṭār,” literally “boundaries are removed from him,” should have been “mubʿad ʿanhā al-aqṭār”; “mustatir ʿan kull mastūr” (hidden from all hidden things) should have been “mustatira ʿan kull mastūr.” 100. Steven Wasserstrom, “Sefer Yeṣira and Early Islam: A Reappraisal,” Jewish Thought and Philos- 156 ophy 3 (1993): 1–30. 101. Steven Wasserstrom, “The Moving Finger Writes: Mughīra b. Saʿīd’s Islamic Gnosis and the Myths of Its Rejection,” History of Religions 25, no. 1 (1985): 16. Texts in 102. Edited by Muṣṭafā Ghālib (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus), 91. I am grateful to Rodrigo Adem for Transit kindly informing me of the commonality between the two texts; on Kitāb al-kashf and its possible origins, see Wilferd Madelung, “Das Imamat in der frühen ismailitischen Lehre,” Der Islam 37 (1961), 53; Fârès Gillon, “Aperçus sur les origines de l’ismaélisme à travers le Kitāb al-Kašf , attribué aud âʿî Ğaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman,” Ishraq 4 (2013): 91–93; Gillon, “Une version ismaélienne de ḥadīṯs imamites: Nouvelles perspectives sur le traité II du Kitāb al-Kašf attribué à Ğaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman (Xe s.),” Arabica 59 (2012): 486–87. 103. Modarressi, Crisis, 21–29. 104. Al-Kashshī, Rijāl, 271. 105. Al-Ṭūsī, al-Ghayba, 254–56. 106. Al-Qummī, Maqālāt, 60–61; al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 16. According to al-Baghdādī (al-Farq , 238), the Mufawwiḍa believed that Muhammad in his turn delegated the management of the world to ʿAlī. 107. Incidentally, it is quoted by Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr himself in his Kitāb al-mithāl, 211; see also al-Jillī, Ḥāwī, 203, for a similar usage, and see Ḥamza b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, 240. 108. Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 309–19; according to the editors, it is composed by al-Jillī (see also Louis Massignon, “Esquisse d’une bibliographie Nusayrie,” in Opera Minora 1, ed. Youakim Moubarac [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969], 643), and although the authenticity of the epistle is not beyond doubt, it does probably date from al-Jillī’s period, as it is mentioned in the work of a younger member of the al-Ḥarrānī family—Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Shuʿba’s Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn (Majmūʿat al-Ḥarrāniyyīn, 296)—without, however, mentioning al-Jillī’s name. On Muḥam- mad b. Shuʿba, see Friedman, Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 46. 109. Risālat al-fatq wa-l-ratq, 315. The prominent role ofal- makān is discussed in ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī’s Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, 240, where the entire opening paragraph is dedicated to his praise, presenting him as imperceptible to the senses, unimaginable for the minds, and as the creator of things; for other examples, see Ḥusayn b. Ḥamdān al-Kha ṣībī, al-Risāla al-rastbāshiyya, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 37, 56; al-Khaṣībī, al-Hidāya al-kubrā (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-balāgh, 1411/1991), 230; Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jillī, al-Risāla al-nuʿmāniyya, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 304; al-Jillī, Waṣiyyat al-Jillī li Abī Saʿīd, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya [3], Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 3, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2006), 42–43; Maymūn b. Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī, Kitāb al-dal āʾil fī al-masāʾil, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [3], 125. 110. Cf. Ignaz Goldziher, “Neuplatonische und gnostische Elemente im Ḥadīṯ,” Zeitschrift für Assyr- iologie 22 (1908): 318–19. 111. Ḥaqāʾiq’s fragment has al-f iʿl instead of al-ʿaql (p. 72), but given the context and the similarity of the two words when spelled in Arabic, it becomes apparent that this is a scribal (or a typographical) error. 112. Appendix, paragraph 5, which is a direct translation of the Arabic as quoted in the Ḥaqāʾiq. 113. Douglas Crow, in his 1996 McGill dissertation, “The Role of al-ʿAql in Early Islamic Wisdom with Reference to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, 1996), 5–6. 114. Ibid., 29–30; al-Barqī, Maḥāsin, 192. The English translation of the hadith is Crow’s. 115. Or, “sustained with knowledge.” 116. Or, “enduring with sovereignty.” 117. Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 202–3. 118. The translation of the Arabic is mine; it differs from Crow’s translation mainly in that I have viewed bi-l-amri (by [His] command) as describing khalaqa llāhu l-ʿaqla (God created intelligence), whereas he views bi-l-amri as describing mashīʾa (will). Although syntactically the construction I propose is awkward, as the verb and its adverbial clause are separated by the verb’s several subjects, in the context of early Islamic ideas about God’s creation by His command, this translation in my view makes more sense. On the meanings of amr in early Islamic usage, see Gregor Schwarb, “Amr (Theology),” EI3. Crow’s translation is as follows: “God created al-ʿaql consisting of four things: Knowledge, Power, Light, and the Volition of the Affair [? The causing to be by God’s amr/command?]. Thus, (God) made him performing knowledge [? undertaking/overseeing knowledge] eternally in the Celestial Kingdom” 157 (“Role of al-ʿAql,” 203). 119. Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 4. 120. Al-Jillī, Risālat al-fatq wa-l-ratq, 310–11. Shiite 121. Save for the one in al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:437–8; al-Barqī, Maḥāsin, 135; al-ʿAyyāshī, Tafsīr, 1:181; Underground and al-Ṣaffār,Ba ṣāʾir, 89, where the “common link” is Ḥasan b. Maḥbūb (d. 224/839). See Modarressi, Literature Tradition, 132. 122. E.g., G. H. A. Juynboll, Muslim Tradition: Studies in Chronology, Provenance, and Authorship of Early Ḥadīth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); for a critique of recent hadith scholarship, see Kevin Reinhart, “Juynbolliana, Gradualism, the Big Bang, and Ḥadīth Study in the Twenty- First Century,” JAOS 130, no. 3 (July–September 2010): 413–44. 123. Newman, Formative Period, 51, 67, 96; Meir Bar-Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imāmī Shiism (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 29, 33–34, 56–59. 124. Martin McDermott, “Ebn Bābawayh (2),”EIr . 125. Modarressi, Crisis, 39. 126. Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 28–37, 175. 127. On the religious milieu of Iraq in the first centuries of Islam, see Steven Wasserstrom,Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 124–26; Michael Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 277–430. 128. Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra, 216, 230. 129. Most notably, in Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal’s Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ. 130. Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra, 210. 131. Ibid., 225. 132. Kitāb al-akwār al-nūrāniyya wa-l-adwār al-rū ḥāniyya, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [1], 75; the attribution ofKitāb al-akwār al-nūrāniyya to Muḥammad b. Sinān is problematic, as he often is referred to in the third person, which makes it appear to be a book about him rather than by him. Still, in Nuṣayrī circles it was probably known as his product, as al-Ṭabarānī mentions this in two of his works: Kitāb al-dalāʾil fī al-masāʾil, in Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [3], 164, and Majmūʿ al-aʿy ād, in Rudolf Strothmann, “Festkalender der Nusayrier,” Der Islam 27 (1946): 180; see also Massignon, “Esquisse,” 642, no. 14, who attributes to Ibn Nuṣayr a work titled Kitāb al-akwār wa-l-adwār. Despite the uncertainty of its authorship, a terminus ante quem for it can still be established, thanks to a note in the preface to the book, which says that it was narrated on the nineteenth of Ramaḍān 326/25 July 938 (p. 33). 133. Paoli, “La diffusion,” 31–33. 134. Modarressi, Crisis, 32–48. It is interesting to note that due to his missionary activities in Bagh- dad, al-Khaṣībī was once jailed, and the leader of the Iraqi branch al-Jisrī was killed; see Paoli, “La diffusion,” 25–26. 135. Saïd Arjomand, “The Consolation of Theology: Absence of the Imam and Transition from Chiliasm to Law in Shiʿism,” Journal of Religion 76, no. 4 (1996): 548–71. The emerging orthodoxy retained, however, elements of the Ghulat heritage; see Modarressi, Crisis, 43–48. 136. Marius Canard, Histoire de la dynastie des Hʾamdanides de Jazîra et de Syrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 634. 137. Alexander Treiger, “The Arabic Tradition,” in The Orthodox Christian World, ed. Augustine Casiday (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 93; Kamal Salibi, Syria Under Islam: Empire on Trial, 634–1097 (Delmar: Caravan Books, 1977), 86; Stephen Humphreys, “Syria,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, The Formation of the Islamic World: Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, ed. Chase Robinson (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 540; Suhayl Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004–1094 (Bei- rut: Dār al-amāna, 1971), 238–40. 138. Paoli, “La diffusion,” 27–29; Friedman,Nu ṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 37. 139. Paoli states that his death date is 399/1009, but does not mention his source of information; see “La diffusion,” 26. On the other hand, al-Jillī was seen in this same year in Aleppo; see Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Daylamī, Kitāb majmaʿ al-akhbār, in Majmūʿat al-aḥādīth al-ʿalawiyya, Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī 8, ed. Abū Mūsā and Shaykh Mūsā (n.p. [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2008), 158. 140. He says that outwardly Jesus is a prophet and an apostle (ẓāhiruhu nabī wa rasūl), while inwardly he is God, the master of the universes (bāṭinuhu Allāh rabb al-ʿālamīn), and he explains the 158 nature of the crucifix as symbolizing the phraselā ilāha illā llāh (there is no god but God). Rasāʾil al-ḥikma al-ʿalawiyya [2], 289, 291. 141. Ibid., 306. Texts in 142. Maymūn b. Qāsim al-Ṭabarānī, Al-risāla al-jawhariyya, and al-Ḥāwī fī ʿilm al-fatāwī , both in Transit Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya [3], 36 and 91–92. 143. Majmaʿ al-akhbār, in Majmūʿat al-a ḥādīth al-ʿalawiyya, 57. 144. See 210 (Kitāb al-tawḥīd), 211 (Kitāb al-tanbīh), 216, 230 (Kitāb al-marātib wa-l-daraj), 225 (Risālat al-taw ḥīd), 227–29 (Kitāb al-kursī ). 145. Ḥāwī, 160, 172, 176, 177, 214; some of the passages quoted here are not in the surviving original. See ibid., 215–217. 146. Ḥāwī, 203, 209–12. 147. Ḥāwī, 160, 172, 195, 214. 148. The fragment is on p. 200 ofḤāwī al-asrār; for the other fragments of Isḥāq al-Aḥmar’s Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, see Asatryan, “Esḥāq Aḥmar Nakaʿi.” 149. The fragments are quoted on the following pages ofḤāwī al-asrār: 170 (Kitāb maʿrifat al-bāriʾ), 171 (Kitāb ādāb al-dīn), 194, 198 (Kitāb al-ma ḥmūdīn wa-l-madhmūmīn); on the possibility of the latter book being identical with Kitāb al-marātib wa-l-daraj, see Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq, 118. 150. See Géza Fehérvári, “Ḥarrān,” EI2; Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–114. 151. Ibn al-ʿAdīm, Bughyat al-ṭalab fī tārīkh Ḥalab, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Beirut: Dār al-fikr, 1988), 1:60. 152. Friedman’s suggestion that “Ḥarrān was a convenient place to spread the Nusạyrī message because it had long ago been a center of philosophy and mysticism” (Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 45) is too speculative. 153. Al-Amīn, Aʿyān, 5:185–86; the works are Kitāb al-tam ḥīṣ and Tuḥaf al-ʿuqūl. 154. The termkitāb used by al-Ḥarrānī is more likely to refer to individual titles of books rather than the number of volumes, which would be indicated by other terms. See Konrad Hirschler, The Writ- ten Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 128. 155. Ḥaqāʾiq, 12. That by books inal- taw ḥīd al-bā ṭin (esoteric monotheism) Ḥasan refers to Nuṣayrī works can be inferred from the fact that the Nuṣayrīs called themselves al-muwa ḥḥidūn, “the monotheists” (Friedman, Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs, 24), and because it seems to be the largest single group of books. Tafwīḍ and takhmīs refer to the teachings of the Mukhammisa and the Mufawwiḍa. 156. Muḥammad b. Shuʿba l-Ḥarrānī, Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn, 292; ‘Alī b. Ḥamza al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, 243, 268–69. 157. Ribhi Elayyan, “The History of the Arabic Islamic Libraries: 7th to 14th Centuries,”Interna - tional Library Review 22 (1990): 121. 158. Hirschler, Written Word, 129, 146. 159. The pages where the works are quoted inḤ aqāʾiq asrār al-dīn are the following: Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla, 16–17, 60–62, 65–67, 108, 147–49, 150–55, 158–60, 166–67; a passage from a certain Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla wa-l-ashbāḥ al-kabīr (63–64) is not identical with the known text of Kitāb al-haft , indicating that either there was a work with a similar title, or that Kitāb al-haft had a longer version (hence al-kabīr , “large”), and see also pages 64–65; Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla, 68–69, 74–77, 157; and Kitāb al-usūs , 15, 17–20, 40–41, 60, 133, 148, 157. 160. Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ is quoted on pages 22–23, 40–41, 42, 53, 108, 138, 141, 165, 167; Kitāb al-tanbīh on page 45; and Bāṭin al-taklīf on pages 36–37, 172, 174. 161. See pages 23, 77, 95, 98, 108, 157. 162. Which Ḥasan, in his own words, studied with al-Khaṣībī; see pages 114–15. 163. Two titles are attributed to Muḥammad b. Sinān: Kitāb al-taw ḥīd, on pages 25–29, 45, 53, and 62, and Kitāb al-dastūr on pages 46 and 55. The other titles and their page numbers are as follows: Kitāb maʿrifat al-bāriʾ, 29–30, 54; Kitāb al-marātib wa l-daraj, 82–83, 101, 118; Kitāb ādāb al-dīn , 37, 117, 136, 175–76; Risālat al-taw ḥīd, 44–45; Kitāb amīr al-m uʿminīn, 123; Kitāb al-murshid , 145; Kitāb al-anwār , 174, and Kitāb al-ashkhā ṣ, 174–75. 164. Together with Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn , the three treatises are published in the fourth volume of 159 Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī, and the fragments they quote are as follows: Ḥujjat al-ʿārif, 250–51 (Kitāb al-usūs), 250, 281 (Ḥasan b. Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥaqāʾiq), 270–71 (Kitāb al-ibtid āʾ), 273 (Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla), 277 (Kitāb al-muqn iʿ), 279–80 (Kitāb al-sa bʿīn); Kitāb al-u ṣayfir, 196 (Muḥammad b. Nuṣayr, Shiite Kitāb al-mithāl wa-l-ṣūra), 198–202 (Muḥammad b. Sinān, Kitāb al-taw ḥīd); Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn, Underground 290–91 (Kitāb al-marātib wa l-daraj), 293 (Kitāb al-usus ), 295 (Kitāb al-baḥth wa-l-dalāla), 296 (Risālat Literature al-fatq wa-l-ratq), 300 (Kitāb al-ashbā ḥ wa-l-aẓilla). 165. This is a translation of all the surviving passages ofKA . Where possible, I have tried to remain faithful to the original. In some cases, however, the faultiness of all the variants does not allow for a straightforward translation, while the absence of manuscripts (none of the editions mentions them) does not permit for a critical edition. In such cases I have simply paraphrased the Arabic, trying to convey the meaning of the original as much as possible. Where the difference in wording significantly alters the meaning, I use my preferred one, while indicating the other variants in footnotes. 166. Ḥaqāʾiq, 71–72; Ḥāwī, 207. 167. Ḥaqāʾiq, 72; Ḥāwī, 207. 168. Ḥaqāʾiq, 72; Ḥāwī, 207. 169. The translation of the Qurʾanic passages is based on Abdel Haleem’s, with occasional changes to fit the context where needed. 170. Ḥaqāʾiq, 72; Ḥāwī, 207–8. This paragraph is partially also quoted inḤ aqāʾiq, 41 and 45, and Ḥāwī, 203. 171. Three of the four combinations with the word “spirit” are Qurʾanic; see Sidney Griffith, “Holy Spirit,” Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, vol. 2 (Brill, Leiden, 2002), 442–44. “The spirit of he who owns the ascent,” however, is an artificial formation, taken from the combination min Allāh dhī al-maʿārij, “from God, the Lord of the ascent” (70:3), where the word “spirit” only appears in the next verse, but is not connected to dhī al-maʿārij. 172. Or “lined up.” 173. Or “lined up.” 174. Ḥaqāʾiq, 72; Ḥāwī, 208. 175. For alternative translations of the last two phrases, see the section where I discuss the aqbil adbir report. 176. Ḥaqāʾiq, 72–3; Ḥāwī, 208. is vocalized as nafsihi. However, nafasihi (His breath) seems more نفسه Or “to Himself,” if .177 plausible, because later on, the passage speaks of the breath (nafas) of the shadows being related to God’s breath (nafkha). I am grateful to Tzvi Langermann for this insight. .but this could very well be a mistake going back to an earlier variant ,عقلوا Both versions have .178 ;(”khuliqū, “they were created) خلقوا A possible alternative, both graphically and contextually, could be in the context of Q 15:29, Q 32:9, and Q 38:72, where God creates man and breathes into him His soul, this is plausible, for both in said verses and in what immediately follows in KA, God’s breath is called with derivatives of the root n-f-kh. 179. For the translation of nafkha as “breath” of God, and for the possible Qurʾanic roots of the image, see the previous footnote. 180. Here, the reference to the mentioned three verses of the Qurʾan, about Ādam’s creation, continues (see below); however, the notion of the “first (and second)nafkha ” probably refers to the blast of the apocalyptic horn in Q 39:68 (with no consideration for its context, however). 181. Ḥaqāʾiq, 73; Ḥāwī, 208. 182. Ḥaqāʾiq, 73; Ḥāwī, 208. 183. This is according to theḤ āwī. In the Ḥaqāʾiq, the believers come third and the angels fourth; however, Ḥāwī’s hierarchy seems more logical, as the angels are above the believers, and the latter are succeeded by the unbelievers. 184. Ḥaqāʾiq, 73; Ḥāwī, 208. 185. Ḥaqāʾiq, 73; Ḥāwī, 208–9. 186. This isḤ aqāʾiq’s version; in Ḥāwī the word appears as badʾ (beginning). .from the root dh-r-ʾ َوذ َرا الله َالخ ْلق َذ ْرواً: َخ َلقهم (Lisān (s.v. dh-r-ā .187 188. Ḥaqāʾiq, 73–74; Ḥāwī, 209. 189. Ḥāwī only has heaven. 160 190. In the Ḥaqāʾiq the following parts are missing: “these words were . . . His love,” and “whom Jabraʾīl . . . His command.” 191. It is not clear whether the Qurʾanic verse that follows is part of God’s address to those who Texts in stand to His left. Transit 192. Ḥāwī’s version is “who is removed from His knowledge [maʿrifa] and from Him.” 193. Ḥaqāʾiq, 74; Ḥāwī, 209. 194. On the distinction between rūḥ and nafs, see Ian Netton, “Nafs,”EI 2; the paragraph echoes Q 15:29, Q 32:9, and Q 38:72, where God breathes His spirit [rūḥ] into Ādam from the very beginning. It could either be a reinterpretation of the Qurʾanic verses, or an apocryphal story that circulated independently. 195. In Ḥāwī’s version, God divides between Ādam and his consort (zawja); in its Arabic spelling, the latter word is very easily confused withrū ḥ. 196. Ḥaqāʾiq, 45; Ḥāwī, 203. 197. Ḥaqāʾiq: 45; Ḥāwī: 203. 198. Ḥaqāʾiq, 41. 199. Ibid., 168. 200. Ibid., 173. 201. Ibid. 202. Dulām or Adlam was ʿUmar’s derogatory nickname, used in early Shiite circles. See Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī Shīʿī Views on the Ṣaḥāba,” Jerusalem Studies on Arabic and Islam 5 (1984): 162.

161

Shiite Underground Literature Nine

Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts

The Reception of Greek Uroscopic Texts in the Hebrew “Book of Remedies” Attributed to Asaf

Tamás Visi

This study analyzes a group of Hebrew uroscopic texts written between the sixth and twelfth centuries c.e. Since uroscopy is not a widely known subject, I have added some brief introductory sections treating various aspects of the history of uroscopic literature before turning to the main topic of the chapter.

The History of Uroscopy in a Nutshell

Uroscopy, that is to say, the analysis of urine, had been an important method of diagnosis and prognosis in ancient Mesopotamian and Greek medicine by the time the Hippocratic writings treated some aspects of it.1 Uroscopy became the subject matter of a specific branch of medical literature during Late Antiquity.2 Byzantine medical writers, most notably Magnus of Emesa/Homs (sixth century c.e.), Stephen of Athens (sixth–seventh century c.e.), and Theophilus (seventh century?, ninth century? c.e.), composed the first systematic monographs on uroscopy.3 Abridged versions, compendia, and shorter or longer collections of uroscopic rules appeared at the same time and were translated into other languages, such as Latin, Syr- iac, and Arabic, in the Early Middle Ages. Some of these texts were

This paper is based on research I conducted while I was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the group “Jewish Physicians in Medieval Christian Europe: Professional Knowledge as an Agent for Cultural Change” (March–August 2012). I am glad to express my appreciation to the Insti- tute for the excellent working conditions I enjoyed during my tenure. This research was supported by a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant within the Seventh European Community Framework Program. This research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR standard project, n.14–19686S). I am grateful to Y. Tzvi Langermann for comments. eventually attributed to Hippocrates and Galen.4 The influence of Arabic and Persian disseminators of Byzantine uroscopic lore reached as far as Tibet.5 During the ninth century, a Jewish physician, Isaac Israeli, dedicated a monograph to the topic (Kitāb al-bawl, or Book of urine).6 This work was translated into Latin by Constantinus Africanus during the eleventh century and became widely influential among learned Western physicians.7 Slightly later, the uroscopic tractate of the aforementioned Theophilus was translated from Greek into Latin and incorporated into the Articella, a corpus of authoritative medical texts that emerged at the Salerno school.8 A didactic poem in Latin written by Gilles of Corbeil played an important role in spreading the Byzantine uroscopic lore in western Europe.9 Master Mauro, a central figure in the history of the Salerno school, wrote another important treatise on uroscopy during the last decades of the twelfth century. This treatise acquired immense popularity in subsequent centuries; vernacular uroscopic texts were based on it. 10 During the High and Later Middle Ages, learned physicians and professors at medical faculties produced a rich scholastic literature on uroscopy: commentaries on earlier texts, questiones, tractates, and compendia.11 Traditional uroscopy was challenged by William the Englishman in the thirteenth century and much later by Paracelsus and his followers during the sixteenth century.12 Around 1330 a Byzantine physician, Johannes Zacharias Actuarius, wrote an exhaustive monograph on the topic.13 The fate of uroscopy in early modern and modern European medical culture was bound to the fate of Galenism.14

1. Uroscopy in the Hippocratic-Galenic Corpus of Medical Writings

Uroscopic theories were based on few loci classici in the corpus of Hippocratic and Galenic writings. Since these texts were considered authoritative within the medical “literary polysystem,”15 these uroscopic passages determined the content and the style of the discourse on uroscopy to a great extent until the end of the Middle Ages. The most important texts in the corpus of writings traditionally attributed to Hippocrates are the following: Aphorisms 4.69–83; Aphorisms 7.31–35; Prognostics, chapter 12; and Airs, Waters, Places, chapter 9. Theseloci treat different aspects of the topic. The third text attempts to identify some characteristics of urine that help the 163 physician comprehend the patient’s general state of health without diagnosing any particular diseases. In contrast, the first and second offer diagnostic and prognostic Medieval Hebrew rules in the context of specific diseases, especially fevers and diseases of the urinary Uroscopic Texts organs. The last text is a theory of kidney stones and urine. Galen wrote commentaries on all the aforementioned texts. In these commentaries he attempted to identify the principles underlying Hippocrates’s all-too-often enigmatic instructions. In addition, Galen offered a short summary of his views on urine in chapter 12 of the first book in hisDe crisibus. In the Middle Ages, mainstream uroscopic literature treated these texts by Hip- pocrates and Galen as a collection of authoritative statements on uroscopy. For example, Maimonides’s discussion of uroscopy in treatise 5 of his Medical Aphorisms is a series of excerpts mainly from Galen’s commentary on Aphorisms 7.31–35 as well as Galen’s De crisibus 1.12, and a few other texts from Galen treating topics in the texts mentioned above.16 In addition to the loci classici, the Hippocratic corpus contained a number of further uroscopic texts that enjoyed less respect and received less attention; nevertheless, they could be and were sometimes utilized by later medical writers. In Epi- demics I–VI, uroscopic data are often recorded though seldom interpreted explicitly. A number of diagnostic and prognostic rules are transmitted in theCoan Prenotions, a book possibly earlier than Hippocrates’s own writings.17 The Hippocratic and Galenic rules of urine analysis focus on the substance of the urine and on the sediments discernible in it. They pay much less attention to the color of the urine.18 A major innovation of Late Antique Byzantine uroscopy was its increased emphasis on the colors of urine. Magnus of Emesa, for example, distinguished six different colors of urine and described their diagnostic and prognostic values.19 Stephen of Athens received Magnus’s doctrine of the colors and added a solid theoretical basis to it by describing the physiological processes involved in urine formation.20 Theophilus invented a more refined system of twenty colors, which was to become very influential in the Latin West.21 Thus we can distinguish an earlier and a later layer in uroscopic lore. The earlier layer, represented by Hippocratic and Galenic works, focuses on the substance and sediments of urine, whereas the later layer focuses on colors. The two layers were received together in the Middle Ages—and some works representing the later layer were eventually attributed to Galen and Hippocrates, thus attaining authoritative status. Nevertheless, the distinction between the two layers is important. It will help us in reconstructing the early history of Hebrew uroscopic literature.

2. Hebrew Uroscopic Literature: A Brief Overview

More research is needed before a proper history of Hebrew uroscopic literature can be written. In the meantime, we must confine ourselves to some fundamental facts on the basis of Moritz Steinschneider’s monumental Hebräischen Übersetzungen and a few later studies.22 164 The Hebrew version of the Hippocratic-Galenic literary system, if we may call it that, emerged during the thirteenth century through a process of translations of Texts in key medical texts from Arabic and Latin to Hebrew. As the works of Hippocrates Transit and Galen were translated into Hebrew, the loci classici treating uroscopic lore enumerated above became accessible in Hebrew. Two great translation projects that included the classic uroscopic texts can be identified. The first is associated with an anonymous author who called himself “Doeg the Edomite” and worked between 1197 and 1199. He translated a number of medical texts from Latin into Hebrew. Doeg converted to Christianity, learned Latin, and then undertook the project of making Latin medical texts available in Hebrew.23 The corpus he translated covered more or less the Articella, the canon of medical texts that emerged in Salerno. It is not known where he worked; some linguistic traits of Latin terms transcribed in his translation suggest that he may have worked in Provence. In addition to Hippocrates’s Aphorisms, Doeg translated two important uroscopic tractates: that of Theophilus and that of Isaac Israeli.24 The second project was realized in Rome roughly a century later. A Jewish physician called Nathan ha-Meati translated Avicenna’s Canon from Arabic into Hebrew. In addition, he translated a number of other works by Hippocrates from Arabic into Hebrew. These included theAphorisms (it was translated in 1283), the Prognostics, and the Airs, Waters, Places.25 His son, Shlomo ha-Meati, translated Galen’s commentary on the latter work from Arabic to Hebrew in 1299.26 TheAphorisms was translated two more times from both Arabic and Latin into Hebrew by unidentified translators.27 Galen’s De crisibus was translated from Arabic by an anonymous Hebrew translator during the middle of the fourteenth century.28 Isaac Israeli’s Kitāb al-bawl also circulated in a Hebrew version translated from the Arabic.29 This translation has not been dated yet; however, the Hebrew technical vocabulary suggests that it is not earlier than the middle of the thirteenth century. An abridged Hebrew version of Mauro of Salerno’s uroscopic treatise is also extant. Thus, some of the central pieces of mainstream uroscopic literature were available in Hebrew by the end of the twelfth century in translations from Latin. Other important texts were translated from Arabic into Hebrew a century later. However, there are some Hebrew uroscopic texts that seem to predate the aforementioned translations. We will call them early Hebrew uroscopic texts. This earlier layer of Hebrew uroscopic literature includes a few chapters in the Book of Remedies attributed to Asaf; an uroscopic section in Ibn Zarbala’sSefer Shaʿshuʿim composed during the twelfth century in the Iberian peninsula; a short tract entitled The Colors of Urine by a certain Shlomo ben Abin, written probably during the last quarter of the twelfth century in northern France; and some anonymous compendia.30 A most important question is to what degree early Hebrew uroscopic texts reflect uroscopic theories and practices that are different from those in the “classical” texts.

3. Uroscopy in the Book of Remedies Attributed to Asaf

165 3.1. The Enigmatic Nature of the “Book of Remedies” The Hebrew text referred to as theBook of Remedies (Sefer ha-ref uʾot) or Book of Asaf 31 Medieval Hebrew (Sefer Asaf) is probably the earliest piece of Hebrew medical literature. Unfortu- Uroscopic Texts nately, the most fundamental questions about date, provenance, authorship, and cultural context have not been clarified to a sufficient degree yet. Nor do we have a critical edition of the text at this moment. This is a serious drawback, since the Book of Remedies had a complicated textual history. Certain chapters are missing from certain manuscripts; in other cases, there are significant variant readings; and certain sections are transmitted both within theBook of Remedies and outside of it.32 Suessman Muntner printed a Hebrew text of the Book of Remedies in a series of articles published in Korot from 1965 to 1972.33 Muntner’s text is chiefly based on an Oxford manuscript, which he believed to be late and of inferior quality.34 He attributed much greater importance to a Munich manuscript, which he could access only after the Second World War.35 However, Joseph Shatzmiller argues that the Oxford manuscript is much earlier than the Munich manuscript; the former should be dated to the middle of the twelfth century, and therefore, it is probably the eldest of the witnesses.36 Thus Muntner’s basing his edition on the Oxford manuscript was more fortunate than he himself believed. Nevertheless, on the basis of the Munich manuscript, Muntner added to his text some chapters missing from the Oxford manuscript; he noted some variant readings of other manuscripts as well, although the sources of the readings are often not indicated adequately. The present study is based on Muntner’s text despite its shortcomings. Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim is working on a critical edition; when her edition is published, it is possible that the analysis presented here will need revision. TheBook of Remedies is an enigmatic text for several reasons. The most important “enigmas” can be summarized thus.

Authorship. Most of the text is attributed to a certain “Asaf, the physician,” who was “the son of Berakhyahu,” while some chapters are presented as the teaching of “Yoḥannan, the son of Zbdh [Zabda?],” who is sometimes referred to as yrḥni (meaning “from Jericho”? or “the astronomer”?). Despite the opinion of Venetianer, Muntner, and Melzer, it is likely that these names are fictional.37 However, it is not easy to comprehend what exactly the fiction implied is. The name “Yoḥannan ben Zabda” recalls a New Testament character: John, the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve apostles and the four evangelists. But why would anybody attribute a Jewish medical text to a Christian saint? Asaf ben Berakhyahu is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as an author of psalms, and some Muslim traditions claim that he was a vizier of King Solomon.38 But medical expertise was not considered to belong to his profile in either case. Elinor Lieber suggests that “Asaf” may be an obscure or corrupted reference to Josephus Flavius, who was considered a medical expert in some Christian texts; his historical works were paraphrased in Hebrew in tenth- century southern Italy, and thus some authority must have been ascribed to him by Jews living there at that time. If the Book of Remedies was composed 166 in southern Italy during the tenth century, then Lieber’s suggestion is plausible. On the other hand, there are a few references in early medieval Latin Texts in and Syriac texts to astrological books attributed to Asaf.39 Perhaps there was Transit a whole branch of pseudoepigraphical literature transmitted in the name of Asaf in a variety of languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac), and the Hebrew Book of Remedies is the only piece extant today. If this is the case, then it is likely that the biblical sage Asaf is meant by this name.

Introduction. TheBook of Remedies begins with a long mythical narrative about the origins of medical science. This narrative testifies to an intimate familiarity with an ancient para-biblical text, the Book of Jubilees, composed probably during the second century b.c.e.40 As far as we know, the Book of Jubilees was not copied and read by Jews after 70 c.e., and its content was forgotten: almost no trace of it is discernible in the rich Jewish hagiographical literature composed in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The text was translated into Greek, but that translation is also lost; it survives only in an Ethiopic (Geʿez) version. Now the possibility that the author of the Book of Remedies consulted the Book of Jubilees in Ethiopic is fantastic, just as are the attempts to date the book to the third or fourth century c.e., when the Greek version was still available.41 So how could the author access traditions known from the Book of Jubilees? We do not know, but it is worth noting that there is more evidence of a somehow surprising familiarity of some medieval Jewish writers (most notably, Moshe ha-Darshan in eleventh-century Provence) with the “lost” apocryphal literature of the Second Temple period.42 Thus the enigma of the Book of Asaf has some parallels at least in this respect.

Content. Most of the Book of Remedies is based on three Greek sources: (1) Hip- pocrates’s Aphorisms, (2) Hippocrates’s Prognostics, and (3) Dioscorides’s Materia medica. This is not surprising in itself. However, the Hebrew text shows almost no trace of Galen’s influence, and this fact sets it apart from the mainstream of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic medical literature during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.43 Thus, a comparison of the content of the Book of Remedies to the well-known Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic medical compendia or encyclopedias of the age yields no obvious results in respect to dating and provenance. Although the Book of Remedies is certainly based on the Hippocratic tradition, the medical lore it transmits is difficult to contextualize.

Models. Elinor Lieber argues that the structure (though not the content!) of the Book of Remedies is similar to two of the oldest Indian medical encyclopedias, the Caraka Saṃhitā (fourth or fifth century c.e.) and the Suśruta Saṃhitā (third or fourth century c.e.).44 Lieber argues that even stronger is the resemblance to a Tibetan medical encyclopedia entitled rGyud bzhi, which may 167 be based on an earlier Indian text no longer extant.45 Again the question is whether the author of the Book of Medicine attributed to Asaf was indeed Medieval Hebrew influenced by Sanskrit (or Tibetan) texts, and if yes, how he could access Uroscopic Texts them. Lieber argues that a (hypothetical) Persian medical encyclopedia based on Indian models could have been an intermediate work between the Sanskrit and Hebrew texts.

3.2. Syriac Sources of the “Book of Remedies” The great nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewish rabbi and scholar Immanuel Löw observed that most of the medical herbs mentioned in the pharmaceutical part of the book, which is based on Dioscorides, are identified with Syriac plant names transcribed into Hebrew characters. Löw inferred from this fact that a Syriac source must stand behind this part of the Book of Remedies. A Syriac translation of Dioscorides is a natural candidate, and in fact, there is information about such a translation from the middle of the ninth century (unfortunately, this Syriac version of Dioscorides is no longer extant). Consequently, Löw dated the Book of Remedies to the tenth or eleventh century.46 Moritz Steinschneider also suggested that Syriac texts might have been the sources of other parts of the Hebrew book, without mentioning particular cases.47 Jews certainly utilized Syriac medical texts during the Middle Ages. According to a thirteenth-century report by Gregory Bar Hebraeus, a Jewish physician called Māsarjawayh translated a Syriac medical encyclopedia composed by Ahrūn into Ara- bic around 684 c.e. Another important piece of evidence is a Judeo-Syriac (i.e., Syr- iac written with Hebrew characters) fragment of a medical text resembling Galen’s De simplicibus, which has recently been edited by Siam Bhayro.48 Syriac texts may have been accessible to the authors of the Book of Remedies as well. Two passages which possibly evidence the influence of Syriac medical sources are presented below. It should be noted that the exact nature of the relationship between the Hebrew and Syriac texts is not easy to determine, and the importance of these findings cannot be properly evaluated until the publication of Ronit Yoeli- Tlalim’s critical edition. Nevertheless, these parallels confirm Löw’s and Steinschnei- der’s suggestions about a possible Syriac background to the Book of Remedies. The first of these passages concerns the embryology of theBook of Remedies (chapter 13 in Muntner’s edition). The author explains that the medical constitution of the embryo is determined by the constitution of the father’s sperm, which in turn is determined by the organ which dominates the production of the sperm. This depends ultimately on the time of the production of the sperm: different organs are involved in the process in different hours of the night and day. The same theory is expounded in a Syriac medical text. All the essentials are the same, although some details—concerning the physical characteristics of each type and the enumeration of the diseases they are likely to suffer from—are different. The Syriac text in question is a medical compendium of debated authorship edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot in 1965.49 Philip Gignoux attributes the text to 168 Ahudemmeh, who was a bishop of the Church of the East (the “Nestorian church”)50 in Nisibis during the middle of the sixth century.51 This attribution has been ques- Texts in tioned by Gerrit Reinink.52 Grigory Kessel argues that the text may contain extracts Transit from a lost medical work by Shemon de-Taybuteh, an important mystic and monastic author, who lived in the monastery of Rabban-Shabur (in the vicinity of the city of Shushtar in southwestern Iran) during the 680s and 690s.53 The Syriac text reads,

ܐܥܪܙ ܢܛܒܬܢ ܐܝܠܠܕܘ ܐܡܡܝܐܕ ܬܠܬܕ ܘܐ ܢܝܬܖܬܕܵ ܘܐ ܐܬܝܡܕܩ ܐܬܥܫܒ ܢܐ ܐܘܗܘܿ .ܗܠܝܕ ܐܦܠܚܘܫ ܠܥ ܢܝܥܫܵ ܬܠܬ ܢܝܠܗܕ ܐܦܠܚܘܫ ܦܣܘܬܬܢ ܐܥܒܪܡܒ :ܬܠܬܕܘ ܢܝܬܖܬܕܘܵ ܐܬܝܡܕܩ ܐܬܥܫܕ ܠܛܡ .ܐܒܝܛܪܘ ܐܡܝܡܚ ܗܕܠܘܡ ܗܠ ܵ ܿ ܢܝܥܫ ܬܠܬ ܢܝܠܗܒܕ ܠܟܘ .ܢܝܗܒ ܐܓܣ ܘܗܼ ܐܡܕܘ .ܐܡܕܕ ܘܗܼ ܐܦܠܚܘܫ .ܢܘܢܐ ܢܝܥܝܕܝܘ ܢܝܫܝܪܦ ܝܣܘܣܟܘܛܣܐܘܵ ܘܢܘܓܘܵ ܘܒܐܟܵ ܕܠܝܬܡܘ ܢܛܒܬܡ ܢܝܘܗܘܵ .ܐܡܕ ܢܝܠܡܘ ܢܝܒܥ ܝܗܘܥܕܨܕܵ ܐܢܝܖܫܘܵ .ܢܝܪܝܩܝܘ ܢܝܒܥ ]ܝܗ[ܘܢܝܒܓܘܵ .ܐܡܕ ܢܝܠܡ ܗܪܓܦܕ ܐܢܝܖܫܵ ܢܘܗܠܟ ܢܝܘܗܘܿ ܢܫܓܬܫܡܘܵ ܢܛܘܡܥܵ ܝܗܘܢܝܥܵ ܢܝܫܕܓ ܐܒܐܟܵ ܢܝܠܗܘ .ܩܡܘܣ ܗܪܓܦܘ ܝܗܘܡܕܗܵ ܢܝܠܡܘ .ܨܝܒܪ ܗܡܫܘܓܘ ܐܢܝܒܘܥܘܵ .ܐܠܕܩܒܕ ܐܬܪܝܙܚܘ ܐܢܝܥܕܵ ܒܐܟ ܠܟܘ .ܐܖܝܚܢܒܕܵ ܒܐܟ ܠܟ .ܗܠ ܠܟܘ .ܐܫܪܕ ܒܐܟ ܠܟܘ .ܐܬܪܓܓܕ ܒܐܟ ܠܟܘ .ܐܚܘܡ ܬܘܪܝܨܒܘ .ܐܪܓܦܕ ܀ ܢܘܗܠ ܐܘܗܿ ܐܡܕ ܢܡܕ ܐܬܫܐ ܠܟܘ .ܐܡܘܦܕ ܒܐܟ

If in the first, second or third hour of the day or night the seed is received in the womb, then the characteristics [lit. changes] of these three hours are added to the characteristics of [the embryo]. So his nature [molde] will be hot and humid, since the characteristics of the first, second, and third hours are the characteristics of blood, and blood increases in them. And whoever is conceived and generated in these three hours will have diseases [lit. pains] and colors and elements that are distinctive and known. His eyebrows are dense and very light;54 the blood vessels on his temples are thick and full of blood. His eyes are dark and restless and all the vessels of his flesh full of blood, and his body is compressed and his members and body are full of redness. And these diseases may occur to him: all diseases of the nose, and all diseases of the eye and swellings on the neck and tumors on the flesh and underdeveloped brain [lit. deficiency of the brain], and all diseases of the throat, and all diseases of the head, and all diseases of the mouth, and all fevers that are due to blood may occur to them.55

Compare it to the Book of Medicine, chapter 13 (ed. Muntner, Korot 3:533). The text is based on the Oxford manuscript; variant readings from other manuscripts are added in parenthesis.

ואם תהר האשה בתהלת היום או בתהלת הלילה לשעה הראשונה או השנית או השל�י שית בין ביום בין בלילה דע כי כל תחלואות וכל אותותיו נכרים )כי משל בו הדם( וגם מראהו נכר. ואלה אותות )הנולד( הנזרע בג׳ שעות האלה כי יהיו גבות עינוי )עבות וגם עיניו( כבדות. ומצחו רף ורך ועיניו מנושפות ונפשו חדה ועזה ואמיץ כוח וגידי בשרו 169 מלאים דם ורוח ורך בשר יהיה ומראהו אדמדם. ואות תחלואיו: כאב העינים והראש והגרון ]פל׳: )והגרגרת([ והקדחת עם תולדות החום והלחה היורדת מן הראש. וכל זה Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts מפני שירד זרע אביו בזרעו אותו ממרום הגוף ומן הראש.

And if the woman gets pregnant at the beginning of the day or of the beginning of the night, in the first, second, or third hours whether day or night, know that all his diseases and distinctive marks [lit. and all of his signs] are recognizable (since blood dominates him) and his colors are also recognizable. And these are the distinctive marks of the (conceived) [embryo] which was ejaculated in these three hours: his eyebrows will be (thick and also his eyes will be) heavy. And his forehead is weak and soft and his eyes are dark. And his spirit is sharp and harsh and strong, and the blood vessels of his flesh are full of blood and spirit, and [his] flesh will be soft, and his color reddish. And the signs of his diseases: pain of the eye and of the head and of the throat and fevers which originate from heat and phlegm descending from the head. All this [is so] on account of his father’s sperm’s descent from the top of the body and from the head at the time when he procreates him.

There are three further paragraphs following this one, both in the Syriac compendium and in the Book of Remedies, that are no less similar to each other than the passage quoted above. Each follows the same pattern: three hours of the day and night are identified when sperm is generated in a certain part of the body dominated by one of the four humors. That humor determines the embryo’s temperament, which is manifested in a number of physical properties of the body and a list of diseases he is predisposed to catch. The hours, bodily parts, and humors always match in the Hebrew and the Syriac texts; there are many parallels among the physical characteristics and diseases as well, though there are many differences, too. Although the Hebrew is not a translation of the Syriac (and vice versa), the common elements are too many to be explained away as mere coincidences. I am not aware of any Greek source parallel to the Hebrew or Syriac texts, although this does not necessarily mean that such a Greek source never existed. In any case, this example suggest that the Book of Remedies, or certain parts of it, could have been written in the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire—or based on sources originating there. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the second example. The same Syriac source includes an anatomical-physiological description of the human body. This section begins with a bold statement that the human body is composed of twelve members, 366 veins and 248 bones.56 An enumeration of the 248 bones and some of the veins follows. Unfortunately, the text is very corrupted; the number of bones actually enumerated is much higher than 248.57 A thirteenth-century Syriac liturgical poet called Giwargis Warda reworked this text in a religious hymn.58 Warda probably accessed a less corrupted version of the text; in his poem the number of the actually enumerated bones is much closer to 170 248, although it is still more. It is also important that in Warda’s version the number of veins is 365 and not 366. Texts in Chapter 3 of the Book of Remedies declares that the human body is divisible into Transit twelve “departments” (maḥlaqot), 248 “members” (avarim; however, in the actual enumeration the word “bone” is used), and 365 veins. Muntner notes that this passage is paralleled by a famous passage of the Mishnah enumerating 248 “members” of the body and then defining “member” as a composite of a single bone and the flesh belonging to it.59 Thus, the Mishnah implicitly says that human body has 248 bones. Another Jewish source, the so-called Targum (Pseudo-)Jonathan, mentions 365 “nerves” (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic: giddin) along with the 248 members of the human body.60 The termgiddin may refer to sinews and veins as well. A famous passage of the Babylonian Talmud claiming that the Torah has 365 negative and 248 positive commandments may have been meant to recall the 365 giddin and 248 members of the human body, although this is not spelled out explicitly in the text.61 Thus, it seems that the author of theBook of Remedies could derive these anatomical ideas from Jewish sources alone. However, three important considerations speak against this option. First, the Book of Remedies does not refer to the Mishnah or to any other Jewish sources. Second, a closer comparison of the list of the 248 members in the Mishnah and in the Book of Remedies reveals serious divergences.62 In other words, the Book of Remedies does not copy the list of the 248 members/ bones from the Mishnah. Third, none of the Jewish sources combines the idea of the twelve main members, 248 bones/members, and 365 giddin as the Book of Remedies does. Only the Syriac text parallels the Book of Remedies in this respect. The lists of the 248 bones in the Syriac text and in Warda’s poem are different from both the Mishnah and Asaf’s version. Therefore, there is no sufficient evidence to prove any dependence of either the Syriac medical text or the Book of Remedies on the Mishnah, although the Mishnah probably preceded both texts by at least three centuries. In fact, the idea that the human body is composed of twelve main members, 365 veins and/or sinews, and 248 members/bones is not necessarily Jewish. It seems to me more likely that this was a medical tradition that circulated among several medical practitioners in the Near East, irrespective of faith or ethnicity. Since it has no clear parallels in Greek sources, it may be regarded as a Near Eastern tradition.63 Different versions of this tradition surfaced independently of each other in the Mishnah, the Targum (Pseudo-) Jonathan, the Syriac medical compendium, and in the Book of Remedies attributed to Asaf.64 In any case, the remarkable similarities between the book attributed to Asaf and the Syriac text confirm the hypothesis that theBook of Remedies is partly based on medical lore that cannot be derived from the corpus of Hippocratic and Galenic writings, but may go back to Near Eastern medical traditions that circulated in the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire during the sixth and seventh centuries c.e.

3.3. Uroscopy in the “Book of Remedies”: Greek Sources and Hebrew Paraphrases When we turn to the uroscopic material in the Book of Remedies, the importance 171 of Hippocratic sources becomes manifest. There is no proof that the author of the Hebrew text used a Syriac version of the Hippocratic works; on the contrary, a com- Medieval Hebrew parison of “Asaf’s” text to the only extant Syriac version of the Aphorisms suggests Uroscopic Texts that the Hebrew writer never saw the Syriac text (see section 3.7 below). Never- theless, as shall be argued in the next section, there are elements that diverge from mainstream Greek uroscopic literature. Five major collections of uroscopic rules can be identified in theBook of Remedies:

Collection 1. Chapters 281–97, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:439–40 (Based on Hippocrates, Aphorisms 4.69–83.) Collection 2. Chapters 389 and 391–94, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:539 (Based on Hippocrates, Aphorisms 7.31–35.)

Collection 3. Chapters 427–37, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:544–45 (This collection is absent in the earliest manuscripts and may easily be a later addition; see Muntner’s note on 544. Perhaps it is based on a Byzantine compendium of uroscopic rules no longer extant or yet to be identified.)

Collection 4. Chapters 466–79, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:550–51 (Based on Hippocrates, Prognostics, chapter 12.)

Collection 5. Chapter 498, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:556–62 (Yoḥannan’s tract on urine. The section begins with the title sentence: “[These are] the words of Yoḥannan on the various kinds of urine according to their differences.”)

Collection 5/a. 498.1–22 (Based on “[Pseudo-]Galeni de urinis compendium,” ed. Kühn, in Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 19:602–8 = “Sunopsis peri ourōn,” ed. Ideler, in Physici et medici Graeci minores, 2:307–10, and going back to Magnus of Emesa’s treatise on urine. A part of it seems to be close to an unedited Latin version of the same text preserved in Montecassino, ms 69.)

Collection 5/b. 498.23–49 (Based on a collection of uroscopic rules appended to the aforementioned “Sunopsis peri ourōn,” ed. Ideler, in Physici et medici Graeci minores, 2:310– 16. It shows some similarities, too, to Pseudo-Galen, De signis ex urinis, ed. Moraux.)

The dependence of collections 1, 2, and 4 on the above-enlisted Hippocratic sources does not require further comment. It has been long recognized that the Aphorisms and the Prognostics are two major sources for the Book of Remedies, and a simple comparison of the Greek and the Hebrew texts will convince any reader of the 172 correctness of the data presented above. However, the dependence of collection 5 on a Pseudo-Galenic tract on urine, which is a reworked version of Magnus of Emesa’s Texts in treatise on urine, is suggested here for the first time, to the best of my knowledge. Transit Therefore, I will bring some arguments to establish it. First a few words about the Greek source text. Magnus of Emesa’s treatise was transmitted in several abridged versions. Three of them were eventually attributed to Galen: a compendium entitled De signis ex urinis was edited by Paul Moraux,65 and the two other texts, a longer and a shorter version of the tract entitled De urinis and De urinis compendium, respectively, were printed in Kühn’s edition of Galen’s Opera omnia. The Hebrew tract attributed to Yoḥannan in the Book of Remedies is based on the shorter De urinis compendium. A slightly different version of the same Greek text was printed in the second volume of Ideler’s Physici et medici Graeci minores. This version includes an appendix containing various additional diagnostic and prognostic rules. Collection 5/b is basically an abridged version of this appendix. Yet another version was translated into Latin under the title Liber medicine orinalibus and attributed to a certain Hermogenes.66 This Latin version survives in a unique manuscript from the ninth century preserved in the abbey of Montecassino.67 Unfortunately, the Latin text is unedited and the manuscript is not easily accessible. A longer passage of it is translated into English in a paper by Faith Wallis. As we shall see below, this passage shares some common elements with the Hebrew version against the other two Greek versions. Therefore, it is possible that the Hebrew text is based on the Greek Vorlage of the Liber medicine orinalibus, or on a lost Syriac translation of the same book, or on the Latin text itself. Unfortunately, since I am currently unable to access the Latin text, I cannot explore this question. The first sentence of Collection 5/a, according to the Berlin manuscript, is clearly a translation of the first sentence of the Pseudo-Galenic writing De urinis compendium (see below, where the actual texts are quoted). In accordance with Magnus’s treatise, the Greek text continues by saying that urine can be classified according to liquid and deposit (paruphistamenon).68 The Hebrew text proposes to divide urine according to liquid and to “what appears to you as a color [or appearance] which changes and which is changed.”69 This strange expression seems to be a desperate attempt to render the Greek term paruphistamenon, for which no Hebrew equivalent had been established yet. In Collections 1, 2, and 4 the Hebrew word ʿannan, “cloud,” is used to render all sorts of deposits in the urine. However, this solution could not satisfy the author of Collection 5/a, because, as we shall see, the Greek source later explains that “cloud” (nephele) is the name of only one particular type of urine. Consequently, the Hebrew ʿannan had to be preserved to render nephele, and a different translation ofparuphis - tamenon had to be invented. The Greek text itself explains thatparuphistamenon is that thing in the urine which has a “different appearance” heteron( ti emphainon)—presumably different from the rest of the liquid. The Hebrew writer saw thatparuphistamenon is explained as emphainon (from the root phaino, “to appear”); consequently, he translated it as 173 marʾeh, “appearance,” which, unfortunately, is also a term for color in Hebrew. The phrase “which changes and which is changed” tries to make sense of the adjective het- Medieval Hebrew eron, “different,” which qualifiesemphainon in the Greek text. I doubt that the Hebrew Uroscopic Texts writer comprehended the sense of the Greek text, but there is no reason to doubt that he struggled with this Greek text—or possibly a Syriac or Latin translation of it. The Pseudo-Galenic tract continues with establishing two further categories: consistency (sustasis) and color (chroia). Consistency is divided into “thin,” “thick,” and “medium” types, and then further subdivisions are established: (a) urine that is thin when it is urinated and remains so; (b) urine that is thin when it is urinated but turns thick afterwards; (c) urine that is thick when it is urinated and remains so; (d) urine that is thick when it is urinated but turns thin afterwards. The text explains the possible diagnostic and prognostic values of each of these cases.70 The Hebrew text proceeds along the same lines, although it is not a translation of the Greek text.71 The sentence announcing the distinction between consistency and color seems to be corrupted. The Hebrew phrase to rendersustasis (“consistency”) is mayim muglim, which probably means “water with pus” or perhaps “pol- luted water,” “troubled waters”; muglim is probably derived from mugla, the technical term for “pus” in Syriac medical literature.72 The term also appears in some passages of the Babylonian Talmud.73 Why did the author chose to render the Greek word with such a strange expression? Probably he wanted to combine the idea of liquidity (“water”) with the idea of some content or pollution (“pus”), which may render the liquid “thick.” After this unclear passage, the Hebrew tractate presents almost the same distinctions as the Greek: urine is divided into “thick” and “thin” types, and cases (a) through (d) are enumerated and interpreted in the same order and in the same way as in the Greek. A minor difference is that the Hebrew text fails to mention the medium type of urine, which is neither thick nor thin. The Greek text continues with analyzing the colors of the urine, and first it enumerates six kinds of colors. The Hebrew is very close to the Greek here; it can be considered a translation of the Greek. The analysis of the colors is also very similar. Let me quote one example (Kühn, 19:604; Ideler, 2:308):

καὶ το μέν λευκὸν πολλὰ σημαίνει ἢ γὰρ ἀσθένειαν τῆς δυνάμεως καθάπερ ἐπὶ τῶν γερόντων καὶ τῶν χρονίων νοσημάτων ἢ δι’ ἔμφραξιν τῶν ἀγγείων ἢ διὰ πολυποσίαν. εἰ δὲ πάχος ἔχει τὸ λευκὸν σῆψιν ὠμῶν χυμῶν ἐν φλεψὶ κειμένην δηλοῖ

And white [urine] may indicate many [different things]: either [it signifies] the weakness of the power, such as is the case of elderly people and those who suffer from chronic diseases, or [it is white] due to a blockage in the veins or due to much drinking. And if white [urine] is also thick it shows the putrefaction of crude humors taking place in the veins.

Compare it to Book of Remedies 498.7 (ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:557): 174 השתן הלבן רבים אותותיו ומיני תהלואיו. יש שתן לבן אשר יגיד על רפיון הכוח כי רוב שתן הזקנים לבן ושתן הגופים הקרים לבן. ויש מן השתן הלבן אשר יגיד כי יש Texts in בגוף ההוא חולי מרוב ימים וגידי הגוף מסותמים. ויש אשר יקרה בחולי ההוא מרוב Transit משתה היין. וכאשר תראה השתן עב ולבן דע כי נמס אחד היסודים אשר הגביר על הגוף ותחל הרפואה.

White urine has many meanings [lit. “signs”] and kinds of diseases. There is white urine which indicates [lit. “tells”] the weakness of the power, because the urine of most elderly people is white, and the urine of cold bodies is white. And some of the white urines indicate that there is a disease in that body for a longer time and the veins of the body are blocked. And some [of the white urines] occur in that sickness which is due to much drinking of wine. And if you see that the urine is thick and white, know that one of the elements [yesodim, “foundations”] which used to dominate the body has been dissolved [lit. “melted”], and healing has begun.

The Hebrew is clearly based on the Greek, although it has two significant divergences. The first is the remark that “and the urine of cold bodies is white,” which has no equivalent in the Greek original. It may be explained as a gloss which entered the Hebrew text during the tenth to twelfth centuries. The idea that white color indicates coldness of the body plays an important role in Isaac Israeli’s uroscopy, and many times it is repeated in Shlomo ben Abin’s Hebrew uroscopic treatise;74 thus this remark may reflect the view of a later copyist who “updated” theBook of Rem- edies on this point. It is also possible that the Hebrew reflects a Greek text that was slightly different from the one printed by Kühn and by Ideler. One may not exclude the possibility that the Hebrew was not directly based on the Greek but on a Syriac or Latin version which may have contained the missing element. The second divergence concerns the last sentence. The Greek text speaks about the putrefaction of crude humors, whereas the Hebrew specifies that one of the “elements” that used to dominate the body is meant. This difference could be explained as a result of exegesis: the Jewish author thought that the “crude humors” mentioned in the Greek text referred to one of the four humors (using the term “element” to denote “humor”), which causes a disease by an abundance that disturbs the balance of the four humors. However, the available evidence suggests that the Greek text must have existed in another recension as well, which was closer to the Hebrew. The passage quoted above can be compared to Faith Wallis’s English translation of the corresponding passage in Liber medicine orinalibus, attributed to Hermogenes (unfortunately, the Latin text has not been published in any form):

[F]or there are many signs and kinds of illness associated with white urine. And white urine denotes dissolution of vigour, for the urine of elderly people is often white, and the urine of eunuchs is white. And there is another white urine 175 which denotes a weakness lasting many days, and the blockage of the body’s veins; and this illness often happens because of excessive drinking of wine. Medieval Hebrew Where you see urine which is thick and white, you should know that one of the Uroscopic Texts four humours is being liquefied, and that this [humour] dominates the body.75

This text is certainly closer to the Hebrew version than the two Greek texts printed by Kühn and Ideler, respectively. This may mean that (1) the Hebrew text paraphrases this Latin text; or (2) both the Latin and the Hebrew go back to the same Greek Vorlage, which is another recension of the text printed by Kühn and Ideler; or (3) these coincidences are marginal, and all in all the Hebrew and the Latin do not have much in common. Further research based on the Latin original ought to be done before the priority of any of these alternatives can be established. In the continuation of the text, the same pattern is discernible. The Hebrew follows the template of the Greek, but there are significant differences, and many, though not all, of these differences are reflected in Wallis’s translation ofLiber medicine orinalibus. For example, concerning yellow urine, both recensions of the Greek text say that it indicates the patient’s inability to dissolve the humor causing the disease in the veins; the Hebrew specifies the humor as red bile mara( aduma), and Wal- lis’s translation of the Latin says “that the body is sick because of red melancholy.”76 The Hebrew “red bile” is supposed to be the same thing as yellow bile; the phrase is probably modeled on the corresponding Syriac term mertā summāqtā. The Latin text’s “red melancholy” (red-black bile?) does not match the Hebrew entirely, but it shows some resemblance to it inasmuch as red humor is named as the cause of the disease, as opposed to the Greek text, which omits any reference to a specific humor. The section on the colors is concluded with a brief description of healthy urine (based on Galen, De crisibus 1.12): here the Hebrew version follows the Greek original quite closely.77 The next topic is deposit paruphistamenon( ) in the urine, which ought to be analyzed in four respects: consistency, color, place, and time. The Hebrew text follows the Greek closely;paruphistamenon is rendered as marʾeh (“appearance”) again, which is quite confusing since the same term also means color and is used in that sense when the four areas of analysis are enumerated: consistency (mayim, literally “water”), color (marʾeh) place (maqom), and time (zeman). Of these four categories, only the third one, “place,” receives detailed treatment: the deposit may be visible on the top, in the middle, or on the bottom of the urine flask, respectively, and each case has different medical implications. The Hebrew follows the Greek quite closely again. The text concludes with some further remarks about “bad urines,” which indicate the deterioration of the patient’s state. The Hebrew is somehow shortened but clearly based on the Greek up to the end of the source text. However, Yoḥannan’s treatise contains a second part, which is based on an addition to the original tractate attested in the longer version of the Greek text printed by Ideler.78 This second part is a loose collection of diagnostic and prognostic rules. It begins with a description of healthy urine and then discusses deviations from the “sound” urine as pathological signs. This method of presentation resembles Galen’s 176 De crisibus 1.12, which has a similar structure but different content. Although most of Collection 5/b is clearly based on the “appendix” printed by Texts in Ideler, some of its passages cannot be derived from that source.79 Some of the rules Transit have parallels in other sources. Three examples:

Book of Remedies 498.31 is clearly based on Hippocrates, Aphorisms 4.70.

The comments on women’s and children’s urine inBook of Remedies 498.24–25 are paralleled in a Pseudo-Galenic tract on urine based on Magnus of Emesa’s work, but different from the source text of 5/a.80 Book of Remedies 498.35 resembles a diagnostic rule in yet another compendium attributed to Galen and based on Magnus of Emesa’s work.81

Thus Collection 5/b, as well as its Greek source, is an eclectic grouping of uroscopic rules similar to a number of compendia that are attested in Greek and Latin manuscripts.82 The same conclusion can be drawn concerning Collection 3. Here we lack a clearly identifiable source text, but some of the rules have parallels in Pseudo-Galenic tracts on urine. For example, Book of Remedies 431 resembles line 140 of De signis ex urinis edited by Paul Moraux. Collection 3 may be based on a Greek source that is not extant or yet to be identified, or it may have been compiled by a Hebrew medical writer. Although Collection 3 is absent from the Oxford manuscript, and thus it is possible that it is a later addition to the Book of Remedies, there is no reason to assume a date much later than Collection 5/a–b. The characteristics of twelfth-century uroscopic literature (see below) are not recognizable in this compendium. Moreover, an early thirteenth-century Hebrew uroscopic compendium utilizes Collection 3 along with the other uroscopic sections of the Book of Remedies (see section 4). Thus, a source nearly as old as the Oxford manuscript attests that Collection 3 was transmitted together with the other uroscopic parts of theBook of Remedies.

3.4. Uroscopy in the “Book of Remedies”: “Asaf” versus “Yoḥannan” and Hippocrates versus Magnus of Emesa Collections 1, 2, and 4 (see above, section 3.3) form an earlier layer within the Book of Remedies, whereas 3 and 5 belong to a later layer. A distinction between the two groups is indicated by the different attribution of the collections: 1, 2, and 4 are all attributed to Asaf, whereas 5 is attributed to Yoḥannan. The texts belonging to the first group are based on the Hippocratic corpus, and they do not pay much attention to the colors of urine. In contrast, the second group treats colors extensively, and the humoral theory is present in a more explicit way. As has been shown in the previous section, Collection 5/a is, in fact, a paraphrase of a reworked version of Magnus of Emesa’s tract on urine; it endorses Magnus’s classification of the six colors of urine. Thus the second group seems to reflect the innovations of sixth- and seventh-century Byzantine physicians (see above). Thus, the differences between thecontent of the first group and that of the second 177 group match the differences between the earlier and later strata of Greek/Byzan- tine uroscopic lore discussed above. This fact suggests that Hebrew medical writers Medieval Hebrew appropriated uroscopic lore in two steps. First, the Hippocratic (but not the Galenic!) Uroscopic Texts loci classici on uroscopy were paraphrased in Hebrew and attributed to Asaf. Second, the new Byzantine uroscopy of the sixth and seventh centuries came to the Jewish medical writers: a Hebrew author paraphrased an abridged and reworked version of Magnus of Emesa’s treatise on urine, and this paraphrase was augmented with some further rules of urine analysis taken from eclectic compendia. The new material was probably added to an already existing collection of Hebrew medical writings attributed to Asaf. The fact that another personality, namely, “ Yoḥannan,” was declared to be the author of the new uroscopic text indicates that the older collections, that is, 1, 2, and 4, had already obtained some authority among the circles of Jewish physicians who probably read and copied such texts. Therefore, the new texts could not be promoted as the words of Asaf; another medical authority, real or fictional, had to be called on for that role. This is why the Hebrew writer who added 5 to the collection attributed it to Yoḥannan and not Asaf. The evidence suggests that the author of 1, 2, and 4, on the one hand, and the author of 5, on the other, could hardly be the same person. Thus the attribution of 1, 2, and 4 to Asaf and the attribution of 5 to Yoḥannan possibly represent a real difference between two Hebrew writers. Both of them were able to access Greek medical texts, both of them were able to produce Hebrew paraphrases of them, and the second one could not live earlier than the sixth century c.e. It seems likely that both “Asaf” and “Yoḥannan” belonged to the same intellectual circles, which must have consisted of a few Jewish doctors who were interested in Hippocratic medical lore but preferred Hebrew as a language of learning for whatever reasons. “Asaf” was probably older and more conservative in his approach to medical sources than “Yoḥannan.” Were they master and disciple?83 Further research is required to decide this question. For example, the Book of Remedies contains a tract on pulses attributed to Yoḥannan.84 A comparison of this text to passages treating pulses in the parts attributed to Asaf may corroborate or refute the suggestions made above.

3.5. Divergences Between the Greek Sources and the Hebrew Paraphrases Although the Hebrew texts are clearly based on the Greek sources, as shown in section 3.3, there are no small number of divergences. Some of them can be explained as errors of transmission. A clear example is Aphorisms 4.69 versus Book of Reme- dies, chapter 281.85 The Greek text specifies that the given uroscopic rule applies to patients “not without fever” (οὐκ ἀπυρέτοισι). In the Hebrew text, the rule applies Another example is the Hebrew paraphrase of Aphorisms .(בלא קדחת) ”without fever“ 7.31, which fails to mention the essential information, the color of the sediment indicating a certain diagnosis. It is possible that these mistakes were produced through the transmission of the text and not by the original authors. Another type of differences results from terminological problems. The Hebrew of the Book of Remedies is based on biblical Hebrew, which lacks a number of tech- 178 nical terms required to translate a technical, scientific text. Inventing a scientific terminology in Hebrew was a considerable challenge. In some cases, the authors of Texts in the Hebrew text failed to reach a satisfactory solution or preferred to ignore certain Transit Greek technical terms altogether. The latter option was preferred especially in cases when a technical term was not strictly medical but rather logical or philosophical. For example, the Pseudo-Galenic treatise on urine begins with the sentence, “There are many differences between urines (as has been stated above) according to genus and according to species.”86 This is translated into Hebrew as: “I wish to explain the kinds of the urines, because they are many, and their divisions and colors [deposits?] are many too.”87 The logicaltermini technici “genus” and “species” had no equivalent in Hebrew when the Book of Remedies was composed. Nevertheless, the Hebrew writer did his best to reproduce the sense, employing the words min (kind) and maḥloqet (division) to render genus and species. However, since the author does not add any explanatory glosses to these words and the Book of Remedies does not include any section on logic, the two Hebrew words cannot be considered as terminological translations of the logical terms. In fact, maḥloqet is used in the sense “part of the body” elsewhere in the book (see above, section 3.2). The author apparently did not have the ambition to establish a recognizable logical terminology in Hebrew. The aforementioned terminological difficulties were by no means limited to logical or philosophical concepts. The Hebrew writers who produced theBook of Remedies had difficulties with rendering such terms as “chronic disease,” “crisis,” or “tertian fever.” As far as I can see, these terms are mostly circumscribed in Asaf- literature—for example, chronic disease as “disease that lasts for a longer time.”88 In some cases, rare biblical words are employed as technical termini, such as timahon (see Deuteronomy 28:28) for phrenetis and triyyah or tri for pus (see Judges 15:15 and Isaiah 1:6; see also Rashi’s commentary on Judges 15:15, which contains one of the earliest references to the Book of Remedies).89 These words seems to have been so obsolete for the expected readership that the authors added Greek or Aramaic glosses to them. Thustimahon is explained as phrenetis (written in Hebrew letters) and triyyah as myglym, which is certainly to be derived from Aramaic mugla, the terminus technicus for pus in Syriac medical literature.90 Some of the divergences are interpolations highlighting the background of certain rules, which the authors of the Book of Remedies saw necessary to add, assuming that the Jewish reader was not familiar with the overall cultural context of the Hippocratic writings. Thus, the Hebrew paraphrase of the very first uroscopic rule in the Aphorisms begins with stating that “every man, if he urinates into a flask and you see urine that is thick. . . .”91 The corresponding Greek text Aphorisms( 4.69) has nothing similar; the Jewish medical writer’s purpose in adding this remark was to highlight the pragmatic background of uroscopic analysis. Similarly, Aphorisms 4.71 briefly states, “In cases that come to a crisis on the seventh day, the patient’s urine on the fourth day has a red cloud in it, and other symptoms accordingly” (trans. Jones).92 In the Hebrew paraphrases, more background information is given, but some of the technical vocabulary of the Greek original is 179 poorly rendered or omitted altogether: “If a man has fever, and he shows his urine to you on the fourth day, and the urine is reddish and clean and transparent, know that 93 Medieval Hebrew he will be healed after seven days have passed.” It is remarkable that the Hebrew Uroscopic Texts author preferred to omit such a basic term of Hippocratic medicine as “crisis.”

3.6. Non-Galenic Hippocratism The most interesting divergences between the Greek source texts and the Hebrew paraphrases are those which reflect specific interpretations of the Hippocratic and post-Hippocratic writings. Some of these implicitly or explicitly present interpretations and textual variants which have parallels in Late Antique medical literature. A general pattern is observable: theBook of Remedies tends to follow variant readings and interpretations that are mentioned but rejected by Galen or that are unrelated to his commentaries on the Hippocratic texts.94 This is not surprising in light of the more general observation that the Book of Remedies does not rely on specifically Galenic medical ideas and texts (see section 3.1 above). Let us examine some examples. Aphorisms 4.69 describes urine that is “thick, full of clots [θρομβώδεα], and scanty.”95 The adjective θρομβώδεα is derived from the word θρομβους, meaning “clot”; hence it is translated “full of clots” by W. H. S. Jones. However, this is not how Galen understood the text. Galen argues that the adjective refers to the small quantity of the thickness of the urine and he criticizes those who understand the phrase as referring to deposits visible in the urine.96 Had Hippocrates written “thick and scanty,” Galen argues, no essential information would have been missing from the text.97 The extant Syriac translation of theAphorisms upholds Galen’s approach and translates only the adjectives “thick” and “scanty.”98 As opposed to this exegetical tradition, the Hebrew paraphrase in Collection 1 translates θρομβώδεα as “and oil in ושמן בו כמראה כטפות) ”it [i.e., in the urine] and its appearance is like dips of blood ,this is clearly an attempt to render the Greek adjective in the literal sense.99 Thus ;(דם it seems that the Hebrew text follows the tradition that was rejected by Galen. In Aphorisms 4.76, Galen proposed a textual emendation: instead of “small pieces of flesh-like hairs” (Jones) he read “small pieces of flesh-like things or hair- like things.”100 Galen explains that Hippocrates had in mind two different types of deposits in this aphorism—flesh-like and hair-like deposits—and it is an error to interpret the passage otherwise. The same emendation is adopted by subsequent commentators, such as Stephen of Athens, and Theophilus.101 The Syriac translation follows this emendation too.102 However, the Hebrew paraphrase does not; it mentions only one kind of deposit, which is flesh-like and hair-like.103 In Aphorisms 4.79, Galen remarks that the text is mutilated and one should add “and the kidneys” to the end of the aphorism.104 Stephen of Athens and Theophilus comment on Galen’s emended text.105 However, neither the Syriac translation nor the Hebrew paraphrase contains this addition.106 Similarly, in Aphorisms 7.35, Galen mentions that in the manuscripts both the readings ἐπίστασις (“scum” that is located on the top of the urine within the flask) and ὑπόστασις (“sediment” that is located on the bottom of the flask) are attested, 180 but the latter is to be rejected because the phenomena described by Hippocrates in this aphorism appear always on the top of the urine in the flask.107 The Syriac ver- Texts in sion translates the text in accordance with Galen’s opinion.108 However, the Hebrew cloud) in the corresponding passage (Book of Remedies 394), which) ענן Transit text has is the usual translation of ὑπόστασις throughout Collections 1, 2, and 4; therefore, it seems likely that the Hebrew text is ultimately derived from a Greek text which had ὑπόστασις.109 It is worth noting here that three of the oldest manuscripts used in the Loeb edition of the Aphorisms also read ὑπόστασις.110 In a number of cases, the Hebrew paraphrase adds interpretative remarks that cannot be plainly derived from Hippocrates’s texts or from Galen’s commentaries, and in most cases they have no parallels in other extant commentaries on the Aph- orisms, either. For example:

Aphorisms 4.73: “When there are swelling and rumbling in the hypochondria, should pain in the loins supervene, the bowels become watery, unless there be breaking of wind or a copious discharge of urine. These symptoms occur in fevers.” (trans. Jones)111

Book of Remedies, 285: Every urine, which is oily, troubled, dirty, and thick, if the “owner” of the urine tells you that his loins hurt, then it is expectable [lit. “correct”] that the disease [consisting] of the bowels becoming watery will begin, and coldness of phlegm will also dominate him as well as strong chill. And all this is [valid], if there is fever.112

The divergences between the Greek and the Hebrew are many. Some of the elements of the Greek are not represented in the Hebrew at all (such as “swelling and rumbling in the hypochondria”), whereas other elements of the Hebrew cannot be derived from the Greek (for example, “coldness of phlegm will also dominate him”). It is not difficult to explain the omissions from the Greek source text: we have seen above numerous cases in which the Hebrew writers preferred to omit passages that were too difficult to translate. It is more difficult to explain newthe elements of the Hebrew text. One may speculate that a medical writer possessing some competence in Hippo- cratic writings could infer that patients suffering from fever have an excess of phlegm, and the latter humor, being cold, may chill their bodies. The same medical writer may have inferred that “rumbling in the hypochondria” is due to some aeriform matters there, and the same aeriform matters may appear in the urine and make it look troubled and dirty by not allowing the deposit to settle. Thus the author of the Hebrew text may have inferred these ideas and then preferred to reshape the text according to his interpretation when paraphrasing Aphorisms 4.73 to translate the text into Hebrew. Two more remarks are necessary. First, it is also possible that the interpretation was read in a book or heard from a master, or that the source text was different from 181 the textus receptus of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms. Second, the interpretation implied in the paraphrase is not related to Galen’s commentary on the Aphorisms, nor is it 113 Medieval Hebrew related to Stephen’s and Theophilus’s commentaries. It is a piece of Hippocratic Uroscopic Texts exegesis that stands alone. Another example from Collection 4, which is based on Hippocrates’s Prognostics, chapter 12, is relatively unproblematic:

Prognostics, chapter 12: “So long as the urine is thin and of a yellowish-red colour, it is a sign that the disease is unconcocted; and if the disease should also be protracted, while the urine is of this nature, there is a danger lest the patient will not be able to hold out until the disease is concocted.” (trans. Jones)114

Book of Remedies, chapters 471–72: And if you see that the urine is very much red, and it is thin—there is no oily dirt in it—until that disease [becomes] harsh, and [then] he cannot subdue it, because it [i.e., the disease] stands in its strength. And if the urine continues to be red and thin, know that his disease has defeated him and it will dominate the body until it has no strength to stop the power [of the disease].115

We can observe that the Hebrew author has not attempted to represent the Hippo- cratic idea of “concoction of disease” (or its failure) at all; he just explains that the disease will be harsh and the patient will not recover, but he omits any reference to the underlying medical theory. On the other hand, the Hebrew writer adds a gloss explaining that “thin” urine means that there is no oily deposit in it, and he cares to repeat that the urine continues to be “red and thin” a second time, when the Greek original says only “while the urine is of this nature.”116 There are some other cases in Collection 4 when it is not entirely clear how the novel elements of the Hebrew text are to be explained. For example, in Book of Rem- edies, chapter 469 we read about shiny deposits, like pieces of glass or scales of fish, on the top of the urine, while nothing corresponds to this in the Greek text, as far as I can see. Further research is needed to clarify the relationship of these passages to the Hippocratic texts.

3.7. Further Considerations on the Linguistic Background, Dating, and Provenance of the “Book of Remedies” Summarizing the results of the previous sections, we can formulate some hypothetical statements about the authors of the Book of Remedies. The greatest challenge we encounter is still the uncertainty about the provenance and time of the composition (see section 3.1 above). Elinor Lieber has brought evidence pointing to tenth-century southern Italy, which was under Byzantine rule in those days. That would mean that the Book of Remedies belongs to the same cultural context as Sefer Yosippon (a Hebrew historical compendium going back to the works of Josephus Flavius) and the medical 182 and scientific works of Shabbatai Donolo.117 As we have seen in section 3.3, a portion of the uroscopic rules in the Book of Texts in Remedies seems to be closer to a Latin compendium attested in a unique manuscript Transit from the ninth century preserved in the monastic library of Montecassino than to any of the known Greek versions. This fact corroborates Lieber’s hypothesis about the southern Italian origin of the Book of Remedies, although further research comparing the Latin original of the Montecassino manuscript to the Book of Remedies is warranted. On the other hand, there is evidence suggesting that certain parts of the book, most notably the part on materia medica and the chapter on embryology, are dependent on Syriac sources. For the uroscopic passages, no Syriac source can be identified at this moment, but this might be due to the fact that a sizable portion of early Syriac medical texts are lost. Nevertheless, a few indicators of a possible Aramaic background of the Hebrew all mean מרום השתן, במרום השתן, ברום השתן text can be identified. The phrases “on the top of the urine [i.e., within the urine flask]” in the uroscopic passages of מרוםthe Book of Remedies.118 These Hebrew phrases seem to reflect the preposition (on the top of) in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic.119 It has been mentioned above that two Hebrew neologisms (mayim muglim, “water with pus,” and mygl) are based on mugla, the technical term for pus in Syriac medical literature. This word appears in a few passages of the Babylonian Talmud as well; however, there is no clear evidence, to the best of my knowledge, for any relationship between the Book of Remedies and the Babylonian Talmud. Therefore, it is more reasonable to suspect the influence of Syriac medical terminology here than that of Babylonian rabbinic literature. It has also been mentioned that the Hebrew term for yellow bile, mara aduma (lit. “red bile”) is possibly a calque from Syriac. Another candidate is the Hebrew phrase translating Greek νεφριτικά (“disease of the kidneys”; trans. Jones) in Aphorisms 7.34 ,(כאב הכליות) ”and 35. In both cases, the Book of Remedies writes “pain of the kidneys which seems to be based on Syriac ܐܬܝܠܘܟܕ‌ ܐܫܚ (pain of the kidneys), appearing in the Syriac translation of the Aphorisms (7.34: ܢܘܗܬܝܠܘܟܕܵ ܐܫܚ [“pain of their kidneys”]; 7.35:ܐܬܝܠܘܟܒ ܐܦܝܪܚ ܐܫܚ [“strong pain in the kidneys”]).120 The terminology is possibly influenced by Syriac, although the Hebrew text is not related to the only extant Syriac translation of the Aphorisms—and to this point we will now turn. In his famous epistle on the Syriac and Arabic translations of Galen’s works, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq mentions two Syriac translations of Galen’s commentary on the Aphorisms: the first is that of Job of Edessa (early ninth century), and the second is an improved version of the first by Ḥunayn himself.121 These translations of the Galenic commentaries must have included the Hippocratic text as well. A unique manuscript containing an anonymous Syriac version of the Aphorisms was discovered and edited by H. Pognon in 1903. This is the only extant Syriac version of theAphorisms today. Rainer Degen argues that this text probably represents Ḥunayn’s translation.122 The Hebrew text doesnot seem to be related to the Syriac translation of the Aph- orisms at all. For example, the Greek verb σημαίνει (indicates) is routinely translated 183 as ܥܕܘܫܡ throughout the Syriac text, which is a participle in a causative stem of the root ydʿ (to know), so it literally means “making something known.” It would have Medieval Hebrew been very convenient for the author of the Book of Remedies to translate this Syriac Uroscopic Texts which is an analogous construction in Hebrew from the same verbal ,מודיע phrase as root and having the same meaning. However, in the Book of Remedies we find the is] a sign of,” which is understandable as a translation]“ אות ל nominal construction of σημαίνει, but not as a translation of the Syriac phrase. I have not been able to find any link between this particular Syriac text and the Book of Remedies. This fact does not preclude the possibility that the terminology of the Hebrew text was influenced by Syriac or that some other Syriac texts were utilized by the Hebrew authors. The Hebrew of the uroscopical passages exhibits a link to rabbinic texts composed in Palestine during the Byzantine period or slightly later. The Greek word ὠχρόν (pale) in the Pseudo-Galenic De urinis compendium (Kühn, 19:604) is ren- (saffron-like”]; 498.6“] מכורכם) dered into Hebrew in Collection 5/a as mekhurkam like the color of saffron”]; 498.8). These“] כמראה הכורכום) and ke-mar’e ha-kurkum both—كركم or Arabic kurkum ܟܘܪܟܡܐ phrases seem to reflect Syriackurkāmā meaning saffron.123 One may doubt the adequacy of this translation, since saffron is usually associated with a much more intensive shade of yellow than paleness. How- ever, the phrase panim mekhurkamot in the sense of “pale faces” is attested in Genesis Rabba (parasha 99), a work composed in Palestine during the fifth or sixth century c.e.124 The rootkrkm in Nitpaʿel is attested in the sense “to become pale” in other rabbinic writings of the same period and provenance.125 Thus, the choice of this Hebrew word to render Greek ὠχρόν is understandable if we assume that “Yoḥannan,” the author of Collection 5/a, belonged to the same cultural and linguistic community as the Jews living in Palestine during Byzantine or Umayyad or early Abbasid times. These findings make Elinor Lieber’s theory about the southern Italian origin of the book less likely, although they are far from being sufficient to refute it. First of all, there is evidence for Syriac-to- Latin translations of Christian theological texts during the middle of the fifth centuryc.e. —Tatian’s famous gospel-harmony, the Diatessaron, being one of the possible examples.126 Thus, the possibility that Syriac medical texts were translated into Latin, or at least were accessible in Italy during the fifth and sixth centuries, cannot be excluded. If “Asaf” and “Yoḥannan” were Aramaic-speaking Jews from Palestine or Syria, they could still write their books in southern Italy; the connections between Jews living in southern Italy with the Jewish communities of the land of Israel were strong in this period. The difficulties about the date of theBook of Remedies also remain unresolved. The fact that Collection 5/a is based ultimately on the uroscopic treatise of Magnus of Emesa means that the Book of Remedies cannot be older than the sixth century c.e. The aforementioned parallels with Syriac medical texts from the sixth or seventh century point to the same period. An advantage of the earlier dating is that it allows us to suppose a link between the authors of the Hebrew Book of Remedies and the works of Hellenistic Jewish physicians. Unfortunately, we do not have medical texts written in Greek by Jew- 184 ish physicians, but we know that such texts existed.127 The Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius, of the first half of the sixth century, mentions a Jewish physician called Texts in Domnus who wrote commentaries on the works of Hippocrates (!) in Greek.128 Transit If the Book of Remedies is dated to the sixth or early seventh century, then it is possible that it is a Hebrew continuation of a previously Hellenized Jewish medical literature in Greek. Domnus or similar Jewish physicians could be the masters who taught “Asaf” and “Yoḥannan” Hippocrates’s Aphorisms, Prognostics, and other texts.129 We also know about a Jewish physician called Māsarjawayh who translated a medical encyclopedia from Syriac to Arabic around 684 c.e. in Syria.130 Thus, Jewish physicians studying Syriac texts during the Umayyad period were not unknown, and such physicians may have transmitted medical lore from Syriac sources to the authors of the Book of Remedies. On the other hand, a much later dating to the ninth or tenth century cannot be dismissed either. An advantage of a later dating is that it allows us to suppose that the Jewish authors used the (no longer extant) Syriac version of Dioscorides dating to the middle of the ninth century. It is then also easier to explain the close resemblances between Collection 5/a and the Liber medicine orinalibus attributed to Hermogenes, which is preserved in a unique manuscript from the ninth century. In any case, Collections 1, 2, and 4 did not have many connections to the mainstream of Galenic commentary literature. Theteachers of the first Hebrew medical writers, whether they were Jews or Gentiles, Greek or Aramaic speakers, were probably in a marginal position within the medical scholarship of their age. They transmitted to “Asaf” and “Yoḥannan” texts, variant readings, and explanations that were disregarded or discredited in the general Galenic-Hippocratic medical tradition. On the basis of its uroscopic sections, it seems that the Book of Remedies preserved some of these marginalized elements of ancient Greek medical lore and transmitted them to medieval Jews living in western Europe.131

4. On the Reception of the Book of Remedies in Northern France: The Evidence of ms Paris 1129

The Book of Remedies was received, studied, copied, and used in medical practice by Jewish physicians in Germany at the turn of the thirteenth century, as has been proved by Joseph Shatzmiller.132 Thus, theBook of Remedies transmitted a medical lore that originated in the Byzantine empire or its former eastern provinces during the sixth to tenth centuries to western European Jewish physicians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the following, we will briefly characterize the reception of the uroscopic sections of the Book of Remedies on the basis of an early thirteenth- century Hebrew manuscript copied in northern France. ms Paris 1129 is a Hebrew manuscript containing the Book of Remedies and various other medical texts, among them no fewer than four anonymous compendia of uroscopic rules. The manuscript was copied in northern France during the first quarter of the thirteenth century. By that time, “Doeg the Edomite” had finished his 185 Hebrew translations of medical texts; thus, in principle, Hippocrates’s Aphorisms and the important treatises by Isaac Israeli and Theophilus were accessible in Hebrew Medieval Hebrew (see section 2 above). However, as we shall see, the compendia contained in ms Paris Uroscopic Texts 1129 were not influenced by Doeg the Edomite’s translations. The following uroscopic tracts can be distinguished within the manuscript, none of them being attributed to an author: (1) untitled, fols. 1r–8r; (2) Remedies from the Uncircumcised Sages of Montpellier, fols. 44v–47v; (3) The Colors of Urine; fols. 47v–49v and 58r; and (4) Twelve Chapters on the Colors of Urine, fols. 53v–56v. The only author quoted explicitly in these texts is Isaac Israeli. He is mentioned at the beginning of The Colors of Urine and credited with instructions about how the urine should be taken from the patient. These instructions indeed correspond to what Israeli writes about this topic in the first chapter of his book. Nevertheless, the influence of Isaac Israeli on the uroscopic texts in this manuscript seems to be rather marginal. We will return to this point later.

4.1. Contemporary Christian Sources The uroscopic texts in the manuscript are taken from three clearly identifiable sources: the Book of Remedies attributed to Asaf; a uroscopic tract by Shlomo ben Abin, who lived in northern France during the second half of the twelfth century; and oral or written communication with contemporary Christian doctors in the vernacular. The last layer of the material is easily discernible by the presence of Old French glosses and terms that are characteristic of Salernitan medicine. These features dominate the text called Remedies from the Uncircumcised Sages of Montpel- lier, which is based on the teaching of Christian physicians from that area. But they appear in the first (untitled) text as well. A most remarkable passage shows close parallels to Mauro of Salerno’s Regulae urinarum. Words italicized in the English translation indicate technical terms of Latin origin that are transliterated in Hebrew characters but not translated into Hebrew in the original text:

שתן שוסיטירינא ועבה בכל בשוה קדחת קוטדיאינא מפלאמא נטוריל ויש לו כאב בחלצים ובראש ועצלות איבריו זרוק בפיו ובכל שעה מג׳ שעות ולמעלה מהלילה בקור ואחר כך מחמם

[If] the urine is of light yellow [color] and thick in a uniform way [lit. “everywhere and equally”], [then the patient suffers from]quotidian fever [caused] by natural phlegm. So he will have pain in the loins and in the head and passiv- ity in his members, and [there will be] saliva in his mouth, and he will be cold every hour from three o’clock on in the evening and after that he will be hot.133

This can be compared toRegulae Urinarum Magistri Mauri, in Collectio Salerni- tana, ed. Renzi, 3:10:

Urina igitur in colore subcitrina, in substantia per totum et equaliter spissa 186 sine lividitate, quotidianam significant de flegmate naturali. Ille ergo, vel illa, cujus est talis urina, quantum est in colore et substantia ipsius urine, nocte Texts in qualibet a tertia ora noctis in antea predictis sinthomatibus debet infestari, Transit primo frigore, deinde calore.

If the urine has light yellow color, and its substance is thick everywhere and equally and without bluish grey [color], then it signifies quotidian [fever caused] by natural phlegm. He or she, who has such a urine, as far as the urine is of [such] color and substance, will suffer from the aforementioned symptoms during the night from the third hour of the night; first from coldness [he/she will suffer] and then from heat.

flemma naturel]) plays no role in the Book] פלאמא )נטוריל ”The term “natural phlegm of Remedies or in its identifiable Greek source, but it is important in the uroscopic treatise of Mauro of Salerno. It is worth noting that the death of Mauro of Salerno is estimated to 1214; thus the Hebrew manuscript is contemporary or nearly contemporary with Mauro’s activity. Joseph Shatzmiller has already identified a comment in the Oxford manuscript of the Book of Remedies indicating that Jewish physicians may have learned medical information from Mauro.134 This passage corroborates that this was indeed the case.

4.2. Shlomo ben Abin’s Uroscopic Tract Layer (b) is identifiable in two steps. First, a simple comparison to a uroscopic tract attributed to a certain Shlomo ben Abin in a fifteenth-century Ashkenazi manuscript shows that substantial parts of the uroscopic texts in the Paris manuscript are slightly different recensions of the same tract.135 Thus, the question is whether Shlomo ben Abin’s text is dependent on the anonymous compendia in the Paris manuscript or vice versa. This question can be decided by comparing the uroscopic texts to another medical compendium transmitted in the name of Shlomo ben Abin.136 The authorship of Shlomo ben Abin can be established through the following arguments. First, direct addresses to the readers (“when you see that . . . ,” “you should know that . . . ,” “I will explain it to you in its proper place”) are frequent in the uroscopic tract, just as in the medical compendium. Second, in the medical compendium the author announces twice that he will write a uroscopic tractate.137 Third, the same thematic interests are observable in the two texts. The medical compendium describes the four basic temperaments (sanguinic, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic) and the uroscopic treatise focuses on the same topic. Finally, both the medical compendium and the uroscopic tract are more theoretical than practical in their orientation. The author’s main purpose is to understand how the four basic temperaments are recognizable, rather than to treat particular diseases. The strategy of interpreting the evidence is also similar in the two texts: the author attempts to uncover a combination of two of the four elementary qualities (cold, hot, dry, 187 humid), and then to identify any of the four humors on the basis of the elementary qualities.138 Medieval Hebrew Thus, the uroscopic tract follows the same literary and thematic program as the Uroscopic Texts medical compendium of Shlomo ben Abin. On the other hand, it does not share these characteristics with other texts in ms Paris 1129. Three conclusions follow: (1) the uroscopic tract was indeed written by Shlomo ben Abin; (2) the anonymous compendia in the Paris manuscript draw from Shlomo ben Abin’s work, and not vice versa, and (3) Shlomo ben Abin must have written his work before ms Paris 1129 was copied, that is to say, before the beginning of the thirteenth century. The last conclusion corroborates Steinschneider’s hypothesis that Shlomo ben Abin is identical with a liturgical poet called Shlomo ben Abun who was active in northern France during the last quarter of the twelfth century.139 Shlomo ben Abin’s uroscopic rules follow the same pattern: (1) he identifies the color and the consistency of urine; (2) he decodes them as signs of elementary qualities; (3) he identifies one of the four basic humors on the basis of those qualities; and (4) he enumerates the diseases that may be caused by that humor. There are two theoretical assumptions behind this method. The first is the classical theory of the four humors’ corresponding to four combinations of qualities: blood is hot and humid, phlegm is cold and humid, yellow/red bile is hot and dry, black bile is cold and dry. The other is a rather schematic semantic code of colors and qualities of urines: white urine indicates that the patient’s body is cold, red urine indicates that it is hot, thick urine means that it is humid, thin urine means that it is dry. Thus, the four possible combinations of red/white colors and thick/thin consistencies will indicate four possible combinations of qualities, and thus four humors:

Red + thick = hot + humid = blood Red + thin = hot + dry = red bile White + thick = cold + humid = phlegm White + thin = cold + dry = black bile

For example, Shlomo ben Abin explains red and thin urines this way:

בראותך השתן אדום ודק בלי עבות ובלי עכור תדון כי חליו מן המרה האדומה והיא קולרא רוביא האדום זהו הדם ]צ״ל החם[ והדקות הוא היובש וכן המרה האדומה חמה ויבישה ותדון בו חולי הראש עם קדחת שלישית או שאחזתו חמה וכאב הלב ועצירה וחולי המתנים והברכים ויובש הכבד וצמא ברוב.

When you see that the urine is red and thin without thickness and murk, conclude that his diseases are due to red bile, which is cholera rubea. The redness is heat, and the thinness is dryness, and thus the red bile is hot and dry. And you can conclude that he has diseases of the head with tertian fever, or that heat takes him and pain in the heart, and strangury, and disease of the 188 hips, and the knees, and dryness of the liver.140

Texts in Similar rules are constructed indicating the presence of the rest of the humors and Transit of combinations of two humors in the continuation of the text. It should be emphasized that this schematic decipherment of the color and consistency of urine does not appear in the Book of Remedies or its sources. It is definitely a later development than the uroscopic lore in the works of “Asaf” and “Yoḥannan.” The origin of this semantic code is unclear. The earliest evidence I am aware of is a short section in Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’s (854–925) medical compendium, Kitāb al-Ḥāwī. In the Latin version it is quoted in the name of chamec filius tayp, meaning probably Aḥmad ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Sarakhsī, who died in 899 c.e. in Bagh- dad.141 In the Arabic original it is quoted from “the book of Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Ṭabīb.” 142 The latter is either an otherwise unknown medical writer, or an alternative name of the former.143 Further attestations of the same semantic code are two obscure uroscopic compendia in a fifteenth-century Greek manuscript.144 Both texts are in Greek, but the first is claimed to be a translation from Syriac and the second from Persian. The original Syriac and Persian versions of these texts may have originated in the ninth or tenth centuries, although this cannot be proven at this moment. The possible relation of these texts to Shlomo ben Abin’s uroscopical tractate needs further research. In any case, the most likely possibility is that Shlomo ben Abin encountered these semantic principles in the fifth chapter of Isaac Israeli’s treatise on urine.145 Never- theless, the two Jewish physicians differ in the way they utilize these principles: for Isaac Israeli, they belong to the theoretical background of uroscopy but play little role in actual diagnosis and prognosis, whereas for Shlomo ben Abin they are the quin- tessence of uroscopy. Salernitan uroscopic literature shares Isaac Israeli’s approach: the semantic code is well known, but it plays little role in particular diagnostic and prognostic rules.146 On the other hand, despite these innovations, Shlomo ben Abin’s work is based on the Book of Remedies in many respects. The treatise ends with a compendium of uroscopic rules copied from Collections 4 and 3 in the Book of Remedies.147 It is possible that the purpose of this part was to augment the theoretical main body of the text with some practical guidance. As has been mentioned, most of Shlomo ben Abin’s work discusses rather general, theoretical, and vague principles, which are of little use for practicing physicians. It seems that when Shlomo ben Abin wanted to include more practical rules for uroscopic analysis, he returned to the Book of Remedies rather than basing himself on Isaac Israeli or contemporary Latin sources. This is all the more surprising since Shlomo ben Abin never quotes theBook of Remedies, but he claims that his work is based on Hippocrates, Galen, and Isaac Israeli, the “fancy” medical authorities of the twelfth century.148 However, it seems that Shlomo ben Abin had only a limited knowledge of the works of these authorities. He certainly appropriated the Galenic theory of the four temperaments, but his treatment of the topic is rather rudimentary. What he knew of Hippocratic uroscopy, 189 he knew from Collection 4 of the Book of Remedies (based on Prognostics, chapter 12). As has been mentioned above, the first chapter of the uroscopic tract indeed Medieval Hebrew reproduces some of Isaac Israeli’s instruction about when and how to take urine Uroscopic Texts from the patient, and the “semantic code” Shlomo ben Abin utilizes may have come from Isaac’s work as well. Nevertheless, most of the content of Isaac’s work is not represented in Shlomo ben Abin’s tract. Thus it is likely that he had only a superficial familiarity with Isaac Israeli’s uroscopic treatise. The terminology used all over in Shlomo ben Abin’s uroscopic tract is that of the Book of Remedies. This might have been a reason for a curious development in the transmission of that text: in one manuscript, Shlomo ben Abin’s treatise is transmitted in the name of Yoḥannan, one of the supposed authors of the Book of Remedies.149 Returning to ms Paris 1129, a comparison of the four texts to Shlomo ben Abin’s treatise shows that texts 3 and 4 are slightly reworked versions of his uroscopic work. Text 1 also includes a slightly abridged version of Shlomo ben Abin’s uroscopic treatise. Thus, Shlomo ben Abin’s work is attested in three slightly different and abridged versions in this single manuscript.

4.3. Uroscopic Collections from the “Book of Remedies” in ms Paris 1129 Text 1 is the longest and most complex uroscopic compendium in ms Paris 1129 (fols. 1r–8r). As has been mentioned above (section 4.1), some of its passages reflect contemporary Christian uroscopy; they have many Old French glosses. On folios 2v through 5r we find the abovementioned abridged version of Shlomo ben Abin’s uroscopic tract; nothing within the manuscript indicates that this is an independent unit. The remainder of the text is simply copied from Collections 1, 3, 4, and 5 of the Book of Remedies. Only Collection 2 (based on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms 7.31–35) is not utilized, for reasons that remain unclear. The compiler was more interested in practice than in theory; this is especially evident in the way Collection 5/a was epitomized. It should be recalled that the original text in the Book of Remedies is a Hebrew paraphrase of an abridged version of Magnus of Emesa’s uroscopic treatise. Besides diagnostic and prognostic rules, it contains some more theoretical passages about the taxonomy of signs observable in urines (see section 3.3 above). These passages are all ignored in text 1 of the Paris manuscript. The text of theBook of Remedies is abridged sometimes; rhetorical elements, such as direct addresses to the reader (e.g., “you should know that . . .”) are often omitted. The compiler wanted to reproduce the relevant uroscopic information and not the rhetorical niceties of the source text. Therefore, it seems likely that the manuscript was copied for pragmatic purposes. If this is the case, then we can conclude that Jewish doctors probably used the uroscopic rules transmitted in theBook of Remedies in diagnosing patients at the beginning of the thirteenth century in northern France. This result is hardly surprising in light of Joseph Shatzmiller’s studies on Jewish doctors and medical practitioners in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Germany: the 190 Book of Remedies was probably the most influential Hebrew medical text in these territories.150 Texts in Transit 5. Conclusion: A Minor Medical Tradition

The evidence presented in this chapter attests the existence of minora medical tradition, one that existed in the shadow of the mainstream of medical writing. The adjective “minor” may require some comment. In an entry of his diary (25 December 1911), Franz Kafka wrote about the characteristics of “minor literature” kleine( Litera- tur) that do not follow the models of the “great literatures” dominating the world.151 The term “minor culture” has been employed by Malachi Beit-Arié to describe the peculiar characteristics of medieval Hebrew booklore.152 Reimund Leicht has coined the term “astrologische Kleinliteratur” to characterize short astrological compendia, which are often unrelated to the “classics” of mainstream astrological tradition.153 In a similar vein, the Book of Remedies and the anonymous compendia in ms Paris 1129 can be described as minor medical literature, representing nonstandard medical lore and literary conventions. The major chain of transmission of uroscopic lore from East to West consists of Theophilus (Byzantium, seventh/ninth century), Isaac Israeli (North Africa, ninth– tenth century), Constantinus Africanus (Italy, eleventh century), Mauro of Salerno (Italy, twelfth century), and Gilles of Corbeil (northern France, thirteenth century). Mainstream uroscopical literature consisted of the aforementioned treatises in addition to the relevant Hippocratic and Galenic texts (see section 1). Medieval Jews eventually translated some of the mainstream texts, especially Isaac Israeli’s treatise (see section 2 above). However, we can reconstruct another chain of transmission consisting of less well known and less influential texts, a chain of transmission largely unrelated to the mainstream of medical writing in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. This chain begins with non-Galenic reception (by Hellenized Jewish physicians?) of Hippocratic writings in Late Antiquity. The next step was “Asaf’s” compiling Col- lections 1, 2, and 4 in Hebrew on the basis of Hippocratic texts, then “Yoḥannan’s” Hebrew paraphrase of an abridged version of Magnus of Emesa’s uroscopic treatise as well as some eclectic collections of uroscopic rules. Then all these materials were collected in the Book of Remedies, compiled sometime between the sixth and late tenth centuries in the territory of the Byzantine Empire (or possibly in its former eastern provinces). This Hebrew medical encyclopedia was transmitted afterward to the medieval Jewish communities of Germany and northern France and used for practical purposes during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This uroscopic lore was partly based on Hippocratic traditions and partly on Late Antique Byzantine medicine (especially the work of Magnus of Emesa), just as the mainstream of tradition was. However, it was not influenced by Theophilus and Isaac Israeli, two key authorities of the mainstream, at all. ms Paris 1129 suggests that Jewish physicians in early thirteenth-century northern France were able to access 191 uroscopic lore as taught in Salerno and Montpellier to some degree (see section 4.1 above), and there are occasional references to Isaac Israeli as well. Nevertheless, Medieval Hebrew the same manuscript also evidences the strength of the more archaic uroscopic lore Uroscopic Texts transmitted by theBook of Remedies. In all likelihood, the Book of Remedies was the only medical work a Jewish physician living in Christian Europe could study system- atically before the Hebrew translations of major medical works began at the end of the twelfth century. It is remarkable that the Book of Remedies transmitted texts, variant readings, and explanations that were disregarded or discredited in the mainstream of the Galenic- Hippocratic tradition of medical literature. This state of affairs may be related to the marginal social status of the physicians who composed and transmitted theBook of Remedies. It is possible that the early Hebrew uroscopic texts preserved Greek medical traditions that preceded the time when Galen’s legacy began to dominate the field.

Notes

1. Cuneiform texts with uroscopic content are attested in Neo-Assyrian clay tablets; see Markham J. Geller, Renal and Rectal Disease Texts, Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 70–71, 250–51. A uroscopic section is included in the Akkadian “Diagnostic Handbook,” which dates back to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1700 b.c.e.); see Markham J. Geller, Ancient Babylonian Medicine: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 42 and 90–91. On uroscopy in the Hippocratic corpus, see below. 2. See Gerhard Baader, “Early Medieval Latin Adaptations of Byzantine Medicine in Western Europe,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 251–59, here 254–55; and Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, L’uroscopie au Moyen Âge: “Lire dans un verre la nature de l’homme” (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012), 45–48 (with further references). 3. See U. C. Bussemaker, “Über Magnus von Emesis und dessen Buch von Harne,” Janus 2 (1847): 273–97; Bussemaker, “Traité d’Etienne sur les urines, publié pour le première fois d’après un manu- scrit de la Bibliothèque royale,” Revue de philologie, de littérature et d’histoire anciennes 1 (1845): 415–38, 543–60; Luciana Rita Angeletti and Berenice Cavarra, “The Peri Ouron Treatise of Stephanus of Athens: Byzantine Uroscopy of the 6th–7th Centuries a.d.,” American Journal of Nephrology 17 (1997): 228–32; W. Wolska-Conus, “Stéphanos d’Athènes (d’Alexandrie) et Théophile le Prôtospathaire, commentateurs des Aphorismes d’Hippocrates, sont-ils indépendants l’un de l’autre?” Revue des études byzantines 52 (1994): 5–58, esp. 7–9 on dating Theophilus. 4. Cf. Gundolf Keil, “Die Urognostische Praxis in vor- und frühsalernitanischer Zeit” (Habilita- tionsschrift, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg in Breisgau, 1970), 19–41; Baader, “Early Medieval Latin Adaptations,” 255–56; Faith Wallis, “Signs and Senses: Diagnosis and Prognosis in Early Medieval Pulse and Urine Texts,” Social History of Medicine 13 (2000): 265–78; Wallis, “Inventing Diagnosis: The- ophilus’ De Urinis in the Classroom,” DYNAMIS: Acta hispanica ad medicinae scientiarumque historiam illustrandam 20 (2000): 31–73. 5. See Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, “On Urine Analysis and Tibetan Medicine’s Connections with the West,” in Studies of Medical Pluralism in Tibetan History and Society, ed. Sienna Craig, Mingji Cuomu, Frances Garrett, and Mona Schrempf, Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung 18 (Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2010), 195–211. 6. The original Arabic of this text is still unedited. 7. Eugenio Fontana, Il libro delle urine di Isacco l’Ebreo, tradotto dall’arabo in latino da Constantino Africano (Pisa: Casa Editrice Giardini, 1966). 8. See Keil, “Die Urognostische Praxis,” 76–89; Wallis, “Inventing Diagnosis”; and Moulinier- Brogi, L’uroscopie au Moyen Âge, 49–73. 9. Aegidius Corboliensis [Gilles of Corbeil], Carmina medica, ed. Ludovicus Choulant (Leipzig: 192 Leopold Voss, 1826). 10. Keil, “Die Urognostische Praxis,” 136–41; Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, “La fortune du De urinis de Maurus de Salerne et ses volgarizzamenti inédits,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Moyen Âge Texts in 122 (2010): 261–78. Transit 11. See esp. Moulinier-Brogi, L’uroscopie au Moyen Âge, 137–200. 12. On William of England, see Moulinier-Brogi, Guillaume l’Anglais, le frondeur de l’uroscopie médiévale: Édition commentée et traduction du De urina non visa (Genève: Droz, 2011). On Paracelsus’s uroscopy, see Camille Vieillard, L’urologie et les médecins urologues dans la médecine ancienne (Paris: F. R. de Rudeval, 1903), 99–103. 13. His work is edited in Julius L. Ideler, ed., Physici et medici Graeci minores, vol. 2 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1842), 3–192. 14. On the gradual disintegration of Galenism during the early modern period, see Owsei Temkin’s classic Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 124–92. 15. I am employing Itamar Even-Zohar’s term here. In my opinion, Even-Zohar’s theory of literary polysystems is capable of explaining many features of Hippocratic-Galenic medical literature in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This topic cannot be explored within the framework of the present chapter, however. 16. See Moses Maimonides, Medical Aphorisms: Treatises 1–5, ed. and trans. Gerrit Bos (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2004), 71–76 and 119–20. 17. See Paul Potter, ed. and trans.,Hippocrates , Loeb Classical Library 9 (Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 2010), 103–270. 18. This has been noticed by Vieillard,L’urologie , 67–68. 19. Pseudo-Galen, De urinis, chap. 3; see Karl G. Kühn, ed., Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 19 (Leipzig: Car. Cnobloch, 1830), 575–76. 20. See Angeletti and Cavarra, “Peri Ouron Treatise.” 21. See Moulinier-Brogi, L’uroscopie au Moyen Âge, 148–60. 22. Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmet- scher (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1956 [1893]), hereafter abbreviated asHU . 23. See Moritz Steinschneider, “Eine medizinische hebräische Handschrift,”Magazin für die Wis- senschaft des Judenthums 10 (1885): 182–214, here 189–90; 201–5, and esp. 206–9; Steinschneider, HU, 712–14. The introduction is edited by Steinschneider, “Haqdamat ha-maʿatiq bi-k etav yad Paris 1190,” Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 15 (1888), Hebrew section, 6–14, and “Zur hebräischen Abtheilung,” ibid., 197; Gad Freudenthal, “The Father of the Latin-into-Hebrew Translations: Doeg the Edomite, the Repentant Convert (1197–1199),” in Latin-into- Hebrew— Studies and Texts, vol. 1, Stud- ies, ed. Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 105–120. 24. Steinschneider, HU, 833 and 758. 25. Ibid., 662–63. 26. Ibid., 663–64. 27. Ibid., 658–61. 28. Ibid., 652. 29. Ibid., 758. 30. See Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Was There Science in Ashkenaz?” in “Science and Philosophy in Ashkenazi Culture: Rejection, Toleration, and Accommodation,” ed. Gad Freudenthal, Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow- Instituts 8 (2009): 67–92, here 83–84. 31. The first monograph on theBook of Remedies is by Ludwig [Lajos] Venetianer, Asaf Judaeus: Der aelteste medizinische Schriftsteller in hebraeischer Sprache (Strassburg: Karl J. Tübner, 1916). This was followed by Suessman Muntner, Mavo le-Sefer Asaf ha-rofe (Introduction to the Book of Asaf the Phy- sician) (Jerusalem: Geniza, 1957), and Aviv Melzer, Asaph the Physician: The Man and His Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), containing long extracts of the text in English translation. For an introduction, consult Elinor Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines: A Hebrew Encyclopedia of Greek and Jewish Medicine, Possibly Compiled in Byzantium on an Indian Model,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 38 (1984): 233–49. 32. For example, chapter 14 of the Book of Remedies (in Muntner’s edition, Korot 3:534–35; see next note), which discusses lunatic and epileptic diseases on the basis of Hippocrates’s On the Sacred Disease, is absent from the oldest manuscript of the text (ms Oxford) but appears in a thirteenth-century 193 Ashkenazi mystic book, the Sefer ḥokhmat ha-nefesh by Eleazar of Worms (chapter 55, with minor variant readings). It is difficult to tell whether Eleazar of Worms quotes theBook of Remedies here (and the fact that this chapter is not present in the oldest manuscript is insignificant) or, on the contrary, the chapter Medieval Hebrew belongs to Sefer ḥokhmat ha-nefesh originally, and it was added to the later versions of Book of Remedies Uroscopic Texts from Eleazar’s work, or both are dependent on a common, earlier source no longer extant. 33. Suessman Muntner, ed., “Asaf ha-rofe, Sefer Refuʿot” (Asaf the Physician, Book of Remedies), Korot 3 (1965): 396–422, 533–60; 4 (1968): 11–40, 170–207, 389–443, 531–72, 691–730; 5, no. 1 (1971): 27–68, 160–87, 295–330; 5, no. 2 (1971–72): 435–73, 603–49, 773–807; 6, no. 1 (1972): 28–51. 34. Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms Opp. 687 (Neubauer 2138); see Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 3:396. 35. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. hebr. 231. 36. Joseph Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices in Germany Around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sefer Asaph,”Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983): 149–64. 37. See Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 246–47. 38. See ibid. and Venetianer, Asaf Judaeus, 16–20. 39. Cf. Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 247; Venetianer, Asaf Judaeus, 20–23. 40. See Muntner’s notes in “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 3:399–403. 41. Cf. Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 246 n. 94. 42. See Israel M. Ta-Shma, “Rabbi Moshe ha-Darshan ve-ha- sifrut ha-ḥitzonit” (Rabbi Moshe ha- Darshan and apocryphal literature), in Ta-Shma, Knesset Meḥqarim, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2005), 188–201. 43. For example, Galen’s theory of the four temperaments (sanguinic, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic) is almost entirely absent in the Book of Remedies. A theory resembling Galen’s appears only in the context of embryology, a passage that is possibly based on a sixth- or seventh-century Syriac source (see section 3.2). 44. These works were mentioned by an Arab medical writer, Ibn Rabbān al-Ṭabarī, in the middle of the ninth century; see Carl Brockelmann, “Firdaws al-Ḥikmah of ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī,” Zeitschrift für Semi- tistik und verwandte Gebiete 8 (1932): 270–88, here 272 and 278. 45. Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 245–46. 46. Immanuel Löw, Aramaeische Pflanzennamen (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1881), 24–26. Löw’s opinion is endorsed by Steinschneider, HU, 650. 47. Steinschneider, HU, 667. 48. Siam Bhayro, “A Judaeo-Syriac Medical Fragment from the Cairo Genizah,” Aramaic Studies 10 (2012): 153–72. 49. Jean-Baptiste Chabot, “Notice sur deux manuscrits contenant les oeuvres du moine Isaac de Rabban Isho et du métropolitain Ahoudemmeh,” Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres bibliothèques 43 (1965): 43–76. 50. On the inadequacy of the term “Nestorian church,” see Sebastian P. Brock, “ ‘Nestorian Church’: A Lamentable Misnomer,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78 (1996): 23–53. 51. Philippe Gignoux, “Anatomie et physiologie humaine chez un auteur syriaque, Ahūhdem- meh,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 142 (1998): 231–42. 52. Gerrit J. Reinink, “Man as Microcosm: A Syriac Didactic Poem and Its Prose Background,” in Calliope’s Classroom: Studies in Didactic Poetry from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. A. Harder, A. A. MacDonald, and G. J. Reinink (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 123–52, here 130–31. 53. Grigory Kessel, “La position de Simon de Taibuteh dans l’éventail de la tradition mystique syriaque,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. Alain Desreumaux (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 121–50, esp. 126–28. 54. Chabot’s Latin translation is gravia, “heavy.” However, Syriac yaqira may mean “very light” (praeclarus) as well, and this sense fits the present context. Cf. Karl Brockelmann,Lexicon Syraicum (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1895), 149 s.v. 55. Chabot, “Notice sur deux manuscrits,” 55; cf. his Latin translation on 65. 56. Ibid., 54; cf. his Latin translation on 64. 57. See Gignoux, “Anatomie et physiologie humaine,” 235–36. 58. See ibid., 231–36. 59. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 3:408–9; the reference is to Mishnah, Oholot 1:8. For further sources, consult Julius Preuss, Biblisch-talmudische Medizin (Berlin: S. Karger, 1923), 66–73. 194 60. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 1:27. 61. Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 23b; cf. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 3:408–9. 62. See Muntner’s notes registering the differences in Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 3:410–11. Texts in 63. For a brief survey of ancient Near Eastern medical traditions, consult Markham J. Geller, Transit “Introduction: ‘Oeil Malade et Mauvais Oeil,’ ” in Advances in Mesopotamian Medicine from Hammurabi to Hippocrates, ed. Annie Attia and Gilles Buisson (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1–12. 64. Another medical tradition attested in early Arabic texts counted 360 joints, 360 (variant: 148) bones, 360 veins and 360 (variant: 300) arteries; see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Medical Isrāʾīliyyāt? Ancient Islamic Medical Traditions Transcribed into the Hebrew Alphabet,” Aleph 6 (2006): 373–98, here 387. 65. Paul Moraux, ed., “Anecdota Graeca Minora VI: Pseudo-Galen, De signis ex urinis,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 60 (1985): 68–74. 66. See Wallis, “Signs and Senses,” 272–73, and the literature quoted there. 67. Montecassino, Benedictine Abbey, ms 69, fols. 545–51. See Codicum casiensium manuscriptorum catalogus, vol. 1, no 1 (Montecassino: n.p., 1915), 79–80. 68. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 19:602. .והשני הוא המראה לך כמראה שונה ומשתנה :Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:556 .69 70. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 19:602–3. 71. Book of Remedies, 498:1–5; see Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4: 556–557. 72. See Brockelmann, Lexicon Syraicum, 179, s.v. 73. Babylonian Talmud, Ḥullin 47b, 48a, Yevamot 75b. 74. See section 4.2 below. 75. Wallis, “Signs and Senses,” 272–73. 76. Ibid., 273. 77. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 19:605; cf. Book of Remedies 498:13, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:558. 78. Ideler, Physici et medici Graeci minores, 2:310–16. 79. Book of Remedies 498:26–28. 80. Pseudo-Galen, De urinis, chapter 39, ed. Kühn, 19:595. 81. Paul Moraux, ed., “Anecdota Graeca Minora VI: Pseudo-Galen, De signis ex urinis,” 71; lines 114–115. 82. Cf. Baader, “Early Medieval Latin Adaptations,” 255–56; Wallis, “Inventing Diagnosis,” 37. 83. This has been suggested by Melzer,Asaph the Physician, 72. On the other hand, it should be remarked that a twelfth-century uroscopic tractate by a known author, Shlomo ben Abin, was attributed to Yoḥannan in a fourteenth-century manuscript (see section 4). 84. Book of Remedies, chap. 499, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:562–64. 85. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:439. 86. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 19:602. היה הואלתי לבאר מיני השתן כי רבים הם ומחפ :Book of Remedies 498:1, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:556 .87 .לקותיו ומראותיו רבים 88. Book of Remedies 498:7, ed. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:557, quoted above in section 3.3. 89. For timahon, see Book of Remedies 498:33, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:561. For tri, see Book of Rem- edies, chapters 294 and 295, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:440 (based on Hippocrates’s Aphorisms, 4.81). 90. It is employed regularly as the Syriac translation of Greek “pus” in the extant Syriac translation of the Aphorisms. See H. Pognon, ed., Une version syriaque des Aphorismes d’Hippocrate: Texte et traduction, vols. 1–2 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903). See, for example, 1:19 [Aphorisms 4.81]. 91. Book of Remedies, chap. 281, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:439. 92. W. H. S. Jones, ed. and trans., Hippocrates, Loeb Classical Library 4 (London: William Heine- mann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), 155. 93. Book of Remedies, chap. 283, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:439. 94. Venetianer, Asaf Judaeus, 45–46, argues that the Hebrew paraphrases of the first two aphorisms reflect the content of Galen’s commentary, but the rest of the Hebrew text does not. 95. Trans. Jones, Hippocrates, 4:153. 96. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 17/2, 751–52. 97. Ibid., 751. 195 98. Pognon, Une version syriaque, 1:18. 99. Book of Remedies 281, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:439. It is possible that “oil” is meant to render Greek but may mean “fatty, oily,” too. Medieval Hebrew (עב παχέα, which is usually translated as “thick” (Hebrew 100. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 17/2, 770–71. Uroscopic Texts 101. Leendert G. Westerink, ed. and trans., Stephani Atheniensis in Hippocratis Aphorismos commen- taria III–IV, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum XI, 1, 3, 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 412–13. 102. Pognon, Une version syriaque, 1:19. 103. Book of Remedies 288, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:439. 104. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 17/2, 775–76. 105. Westerink, Stephani Atheniensis in Hippocratis Aphorismos, 420–23. 106. See Pognon, Une version syriaque, 1:19; Book of Remedies 291, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:440. 107. Kühn, Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 18/1, 135–37. 108. Pognon, Une version syriaque, 1:30. Commentaries by Stephen and Theophilus are not extant. 109. Book of Remedies 394, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:539. 110. See Jones’s note in Hippocrates, 4:201. 111. Ibid., 155. 112. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:439. 113. Nor have I found any parallel in Anargyros Anastassiou and Dieter Irmer, Testimonien zum Corpus Hippocraticum, part 3, Nachleben der hippokratischen Schriften in der Zeit vom 4. bis zum 10. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), esp. 118. 114. Jones, Hippocrates, 2:27. 115. Muntner, “Asaf ha-rofe,” Korot 4:550. 116. These additions have no relation to Galen’s commentary on this passage; see Kühn,Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, vol. 18/2, pp. 155–56. 117. Cf. Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 235–37 and 247–49. 118. E.g., Book of Remedies 428, 469, 498:10. 119. Sokoloff,A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat-Gan: Bar- Ilan University Press, 1992), 328. 120. Cf. Book of Remedies 393 and 394, ed. Muntner, Korot 4:539; cf. Pognon, Une version syriaque, 1:30. 121. G. Bergsträsser, ed., Ḥunain Ibn Isḥāq über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: n.p., 1925), 40 [Arabic], 32–33 [German translation]. 122. Rainer Degen, “Zur syrischen Übersetzung der Aphorismen des Hippokrates,” Oriens Chris- tianus 62 (1978): 36–52. 123. Löw, Aramäische Pflanzennamen, 215–216. 124. Herman L. Strack and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. and ed. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 279. 125. Genesis Rabba, parasha 20 Pesikta Par. p. 38a, Num R. s. 19; Talmud Yerushalmi, Sanhedrin 19a. 126. See William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 125, esp. n. 159, and 387–90. David Ganz, “Knowledge of Ephraim’s Writings in the Merovingian and Carolingian Age,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 2 (1999): 37–46. 127. See F. Kudlien, “Jüdische Ärzte im Römischen Reich,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 20 (1985): 36–57; Pieter W. van de Horst, “The Last Jewish Patriarch(s) and Graeco-Roman Medicine,” in van de Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 27–36. 128. Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974), 1:368–69, 2:679. See van der Horst, “Last Jewish Patriarch(s),” 32. 129. Cf. Muntner, Mavo le-Sefer Asaf, 171–74; Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 246. 130. Lieber, “Asaf’s Book of Medicines,” 234. 131. For other instances of nonstandard medical lore in early medieval sources, consult Langer- mann, “Medical Isrāʾīliyyāt.” 132. Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices.” 196 133. Paris, BnF, hébr. 1129, fol. 8r. 134. Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices,” 156–58. 135. Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms Opp. 688, fol. 159r–160v. Texts in 136. Ibid., fols. 157r–159r. וכל זה אבינך במראה השתן ואבאר אותם באר היטב ב״ה בדברי איפםקרוש ,וגליאנוס : Ibid., fol. 158r 137. Transit and ובדברי ר׳ יצחק הישראלי ב״ר שלמה אשר דיבר בשערי השתן ולא השגוהו שום ,חכם לכל זה אשכילך בקוצר ואבאר עניניו בשער השתן :fol. 158v 138. See ibid., fols. 158v–159r. 139. See Moritz Steinschneider, Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin: Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1878), 45. On thepay ṭan Shlomo ben Abun, see Leopold Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag von J. Kauffmann, 1865), 311–312. 140. ms Oxford, Bodl. Opp. 688, fol. 159r. 141. Al-Rāzī, Continens Rasis (Venice: Ottaviano Scotto, 1529), fol. 405v/d, “Dixit chamec filius tayp [= Aḥmad b. al-Ṭayyib]: Rubedo est a caliditate, albedo a frigiditate, croceum a siccitate, et turbidum ab humiditate. Urina rubea turbida significant sanguinem; Rubedo est propter caliditatem et turbedo est propter humiditatem et simile est dicendum de aliis qualitatibus.” Cf. Lucien Leclerc, Histoire de la médicine arabe (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1876), 272. 142. al-Rāzī, Al-Ḥāwī fī al-ṭibb, ed. Muhammad M. Ismaʿil, vol. 6 (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2000), 46. 143. On the uncertainties concerning al-Sarakhsī’s father’s name, see Franz Rosenthal, Ahmad b. at-Tayyib as-Sarahsi: A Scholar and Littérateur of the Ninth Century (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1943), 16. 144. Naples, Biblioteca dei Girolamini, ms XXI 1, fol. 167r–v and fol. 170r; cf. Moraux, “Anecdota Graeca Minora VI,” 63. Both texts are edited in Ideler, Physici et medici Graeci minores, 2:303–4 and 305–6. 145. See Fontana, Il libro delle Urine di Isacco l’Ebreo, 164–65. 146. See, for example, the anonymous De urines et earundem significationis in Salvatore de Renzi, ed., Collectio Salernitana, vol. 2 (Naples: Filiatre-Sebezio, 1853), 413–14. 147. Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms Opp. 688, fol. 160r–v. וכל זה אבינך במראה השתן ואבאר אותם באר היטב ב״ה בדברי איפםקרוש ,וגליאנוס ׳ :Ibid., fol. 158r .148 ובדברי ר׳ יצחק הישראלי ב״ר שלמה אשר דיבר בשערי השתן ולא השגוהו שום ,חכם ׳ לכל זה אשכילך בקוצר 149. Paris, BnF, hébr. 1116, fol. 30v. The manuscript was copied in the fourteenth century, perhaps in North Africa. 150. Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices”; idem, “Doctors and Medical Practices in Ger- many Around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sepher Hasidim,”Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 583–93. 151. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari analyzed this concept in detail in their monographKafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). 152. Malachi Beit-Arié, Hebrew Manuscripts of East and West: Towards a Comparative Codicology (London: British Library, 1991). 153. Cf. Reimund Leicht, Astrologumena Judaica (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 107–19 and 139–152.

197

Medieval Hebrew Uroscopic Texts Ten

The Transmission of Sephardic Scientific Works in Italy

Israel M. Sandman

Textual Transmission as a Cultural Index

The greatness of medieval Italian Jewish culture lay more in the preservation, study, and transmission of great works and less in the origination of such works. In my experiences editing Sephardic (= Jewish Iberian) Hebrew scientifico-religious works from manuscripts,1 I have found that Italian copies (viz., copies of the Hebrew, scribed in Italy) serve as an important link in the transmission of these works. Furthermore, in each of two such cases, Meshovev Netivot of Sam- uel Ibn Matut (“Motot”) and the calendrical work of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya (Abraham Bar Ḥāyyā), there exists an Italian manuscript family that exhibits unusual consistency among members and unusual fidelity to the reconstructed urtext.2 To appreciate the exceptional nature of this phenomenon, we need to bear in mind that before the age of printing, copyists typically engaged in a variety of editorial practices, emending the text as a matter of course.3

Acknowledging Another Category of Hebrew Scribal Activity: Communally Organized Manuscript Copying

The Phenomenon Particularly with medieval Hebrew manuscripts scribed in Italy, I have discovered multiple manuscripts displaying such fidelity to their exemplars that they contain almost identical—I would say “standardized”—text.4 Furthermore, the standardized texts that these manuscripts contain are of high quality: they contain little intentional change and few unconscious errors. In addition, these manuscripts are designed to be very clear and user-friendly (as will be described below). And in most cases, they contain no personalized or customized elements: no colophon; no highlighting of personal names or name-acrostics, or other words; and no opining glosses by the main scribes.5 In some cases, multiple manuscripts contain identical editorial glosses by later hands. Sometimes, throughout successive generations of the manuscript family, in several manuscripts the original scribe of each manuscript preserves an identical anomaly in the text while preserving an identical gloss about it in the margins, rather than reformulating the main text according to the gloss. (These features will be illustrated and analyzed below.) In these manuscript families, the presence of expert scribal activity, the fact that this activity is executed in a user-friendly manner, the overwhelming absence of cus- tomization or personalization (on behalf of either patron or scribe), and the recur- rence of identical glosses point to a culture of well-funded copying activity carried out for an impersonal, broad clientele. In other words, all this points to coordinated copying for communal use in medieval Jewish Italy. This, in turn, indicates a communal interest, in medieval Jewish Italy, in preserving and disseminating various Hebrew works—in our cases, Sephardic scientific works.

Process Underlying the Phenomenon Although the texts in question are very similar, some of the nontextual stylistic features (“paratext”6) of the surviving manuscripts vary, as do their date ranges. Thus, from here we have no indication of Jewish scriptoria or commercial institutions for copying. What is more probable is that standardized, authoritative texts of various works were established and then transcribed in fair copy. These fair copies, or their copies, were then obtained and copied by interested communities (and occasionally individuals7). Indeed, we find the phenomenon of a standardized, authoritative text mentioned in the colophon of a manuscript scribed in Vlona/Vlore, Albania (just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy; see below on the Italian-Byzantine connection) in 1385. The colophon states that the scribe copied the work “from the manuscript 8.(מהכתב אשר נסמכים עליו .upon which we rely” (Heb

199 Question of the Pervasiveness of the Phenomenon In order to discern scribal approaches to textual transmission, one must compare Sephardic multiple scribal texts of a single work. I have been doing this in the genre of works Scientific Works that combine religious and scientific/philosophical knowledge; thus, it is in this in Italy genre that I am aware of the phenomenon of communally organized copying. (I wonder whether the phenomenon exists in other genres, too.) For a variety of reasons, such communally organized copying has not been previously described. In the past, the goal of critical editing was mostly to recover the urtext, not to understand transmission history.9 Thus, entire swaths of intellectual history were overlooked. At present, when interest in transmission history has emerged, data are still not being gathered for medieval Hebraica. Few critical editions are being made of medieval Hebrew works. Furthermore, multiple statements by Malachi Beit-Arié, the doyen of medieval Hebrew paleographical study, seem to exclude even the possibility of this phenomenon. According to Beit-Arié, just over half of the medieval Hebrew manuscripts were copied by scholars for personal study. These scholars felt free to alter the text intentionally in various ways, trying to correct, improve, edit, and customize it, with the result that no two of these versions are alike. Beit-Arié refers to these scholar-scribes as “copyists.” In contrast, the other (almost) half of medieval Hebrew manuscripts were scribed by those whom Beit-Arié refers to as “(hired) scribes,” those who copy texts for others. Understandably, the latter avoid deliberate textual intervention; however, their lack of personal engagement in the contents makes them more prone to introducing and perpetrating unintentional errors.10 Accordingly, one would expect to find textual uniformity (except for outright errors) among unintelligent witnesses (made by noninterventionist, inattentive hired scribes), and lack of textual uniformity among intelligent witnesses (due to individualistic intervention of learned copyists). One would not at all expect to find a highly standardized text preserved in multiple manuscripts, and particularly not a standardized text of high quality. This would require a coordinated effort to (establish and) transmit high-quality texts, that is, texts copied by educated scribes but in a noninterventionist manner—not for personal use. In other words, this would require a communally/institutionally coordinated program of textual transmission by attentive and educated scribes (thus adding a third type of scribe/copyist to Beit- Arié’s model). Beit-Arié, however, emphatically rejects the existence of such a third type: “medieval Hebrew books were not produced by the intellectual establishments, or upon their initiative, whether in religious, academic or secular institutional copy centers, but privately and individually. . . . Our knowledge of this practice, and its extent, is drawn from colophons.”11 In some cases, Beit-Arié’s binary model holds up. How- ever, as discussed above, I have been finding exceptions to this model, particularly in Italy, and, to a lesser degree, in Ashkenazic manuscripts, which include families of high-quality, intelligently made standardized texts. As Beit-Arié indicates, his conclusions are based only on manuscripts with col- 200 ophons,12 in the belief that comparable patterns hold true for manuscripts without colophons. In codicological areas, such as quiration, scoring, and lineation, this may Texts in be true. However, on the question of whether medieval Hebrew copying was person- Transit alized or communal, it is fallacious and circular to consider only manuscripts with colophons. As noted earlier, colophons, by their very nature, would be expected primarily in personalized environments. Thus, for this question, by considering only manuscripts with colophons, Beit-Arié is in effect limiting his investigation to only that evidence which will render this conclusion. He thus excludes evidence that is most likely to render opposing data, to which I presently proceed. The Italian Family of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s Calendrical Work

Abraham Bar (= son of) Ḥiyya,13 a Sephardic Jew who lived for some time in France, completed his calendrical work in France in 1123.14 (It has no title, but is sometimes ספר/referred to by the generic Hebrew term for “calendrical work”: Sefer ha-ʿIbbur ,Sometime between the work’s completion and the late thirteenth century .(העבור when this family’s earliest surviving copies were made, the progenitor of the Italian family came into existence. The cohesiveness of its descendants testifies that great deference was shown to this progenitor; the high textual quality of the family implies that the progenitor indeed deserved the deference of its descendants. Outright Ital- ianisms (for example, in the transliteration of the Roman names of the months),15 other related features unique to this family (such as the attaching of the preposition -of] to the subsequent word, with both orthographic and phonetic impli] של/šel cations),16 identical departures from the standard text in statements about other religions, and several family-wide errors not present in extrafamilial witnesses all make it clear that the family’s progenitor was not the authorial urtext. Rather, the Italian family’s progenitor must have been a text that, with conscious effort, was established/standardized with the goal of faithfully conveying Bar Ḥiyya’s urtext, albeit embodying Italian-Hebrew conventions. The existence of such a carefully and well-established standardized Italian progenitor, in tandem with the existence of a commitment within the Italian Jewish community to copying and preserving its text, would account for the superlative way in which this family has been preserved. There are seven surviving members of this family, in contrast to the other two surviving families of this work, which survive in only two and three witnesses, respectively, and the other ten manuscripts, which have no other surviving family members at all. All of the seven surviving members of the Italian family preserve the entire work or close thereto, with a comprehensiveness equaled by only one manuscript from outside the family (Oxford Bodleian Opp. 183) and approached by only two other manuscripts (JTS 2564 and JTS 2596), and in contrast to the other twelve manuscripts. The members of the Italian family are written and their tables and illustrations are presented with clarity and professional- ism surpassed by none and comparable to few other manuscripts, and all surviving 201 members of the Italian family emerged between approximately the late thirteenth century and the early fifteenth century, that is, within roughly one and a half centu- Sephardic ries, indicating a communal interest in this work within this relatively brief time, and Scientific Works possibly pointing to communal coordination as to what works were copied.17 in Italy

Family Branches and Members The Italian family branches in several ways. All mss but Florence Medici 491 form the main, “immediate” family, while Florence Medici 491, which is written in a Byzantine Hebrew script (the Italy-Byzantium connection is discussed briefly Table 10.1 Manuscript families of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work Number of Amount of Region Date range Shelfmarks manuscripts work preserved Italian 7 (6 immediate Late thirteenth–early Entire JTS 5512; Günzburg 509; BL family + 1 Byzan- fifteenth centuries Add. 26899; Urbinati 48; BL Or. tine cousin) 10538; Neofiti 30; Medici 491 Byzantine 3 Fourteenth to sixteenth– Part 1 (most) Vatican ebreo 386; BnF hébreu seventeenth centuries 1061; Munich 36 Ashkenazic 2 Fifteenth–sixteenth Almost entire JTS 2564; JTS 2500 centuries

below), forms a “cousin” branch. Examining the differences among the immediate and cousin branches, we find several points. First, the cousin does not contain extraneous material that is included in the immediate family. For example, in book 2, chapter 6, between parts 2 and 3 of the chapter, all members of the immediate family contain two external additions, neither of which is in the cousin: (1) a table, -list ,(דרכי הלבנה והנהגותיה .entitled “The Ways of the Moon and Its Conduct” (Heb ing the times and duration of the moon’s visibility over the course of the month, and (2) “A Novel Point from Another Work: Naḥmanides (of blessed memory) said that the fact that we call Tišrī the seventh month. . . .”18 Were the absence of these extraneous items the only difference between the immediate and cousin branches, we could posit that both branches had come directly from the same standardized text, with the cousin simply having omitted extraneous materials. Yet there is another realm of difference to consider: in some cases, the cousin shares the unique readings of the immediate family, but in other cases it conforms to the readings preserved in the manuscripts from outside the Italian family. Thus, between the authorial urtext and the surviving witnesses, we should posit two generations of authoritative, standardized progenitors, one that subsumes the entire extended Italian family and another that subsumes only the immediate family. Within the immediate family, there are two branches. The larger branch, which spans roughly one and a half centuries, begins with ms Urbinati 48, dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century19 (which I take to mean late thirteenth or early 202 fourteenth century), but dated more precisely to ca. 1300,20 and with ms JTS 5512, dated to the fourteenth century. This branch of the family then moves through a Texts in lost intermediary into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when we find two very Transit closely nuanced manuscripts: BL Or. 10538, which is dated to the general time span of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Neofiti 30, which is dated to the fifteenth century, but more precisely to the early part of that century.21 Although Neofiti 30 is written in what is technically Sephardic script, I include it in the Italian family for the following reasons. First, its text is genealogically part of the Italian family. Furthermore, the circumstantial evidence indicates that it was actually scribed in Italy. (Indeed, since Italy was a crossroads, a variety of Hebrew Table 10.2 Stemma of the Italian family of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work Authorial original, dated 1123 Progenitor of Italian family Other branches Progenitor of Italian immediate family Urbinati 48, ca. 1300; Moscow Günzburg JTS 5512, 14th c. 509, 13th–14th c. Intervening BL Add. 26899, dated generation 1316 BL Or. 10538, 14th– Cousin: Florence 15th c.; Neofiti 30, Medici 491, early 15th c. 14th–15th c. Note: Items listed in the same box are closely related; descent is not necessarily direct or immediate.

hands were used there. In some cases, individual scribes were proficient in the scripts of multiple geographical regions.22) The circumstantial evidence is as follows: as stated, the text of this manuscript was derived from the Italian family; it has later glosses in Italian Hebrew script; the combination of these two factors connects it to Italy both before and after its main text was scribed; the Roman month names (in book 3, chapter 9), which generally are transliterated (into Hebrew characters) in keeping with regional pronunciation, are given according to Italian and not Iberian pronunciation; and letter shapes and the ductus of this hand overlaps with Italian examples (cf. the letter shapes and ductus of Urbinati 48). The smaller branch of the immediate family begins with ms Günzburg 509, dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, continuing with ms BL Add. 26899, which has a colophon dating it to 1316. The cousin branch, attested in only ms Medici 491, is dated to the later period, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Clarity and Disambiguation

As suggested above, clarity and user-friendliness in a manuscript are particularly important when the copy is intended for use not by the scribe but by others, who need 203 to find their way from outside the work, via the manuscript in hand, into the work’s interior. As traced by Beit-Arié, among the factors considered by scribes, including 23 Sephardic those in Italy, in developing their mise-en-page, were the needs of users. And indeed, Scientific Works the clarity employed by some scribes of the Italian family of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical in Italy work evidences superlative attentiveness to making a clear presentation to the user. As with many Italian manuscripts, these calendrical manuscripts make it easy to locate chapter breaks. However, even in this area, this family surpasses the one other Italian manuscript as well as all the non-Italian manuscripts of this work. Four of six members of the immediate family—Urbinati 48, JTS 5512, Günzburg 509, and BL Add. 26899—take the following steps: the word “chapter” and the chapter number (spelled out, not in symbol), usually followed by several initial words, are written on a line of their own; these words are written in a larger, bolder, squarer script; and they do not fill the entire line but are written in the center of the line, leaving blank space on both sides. (For similar practices in the “cousin” manuscript, Medici 491, see below.) The other two manuscripts, too, employ devices that make chapter location easy. BL Or. 10538 leaves an entire blank line between chapters, places graphic symbols above the word “chapter” and the (spelled-out) chapter number, and leaves extra space between these words and the beginning of the chapter’s text. However, it does not use larger, bolder, or squarer script here. ms Neofiti 30, despite being written in Sephardic format, leaves an entire blank line between chapters (this being unusual for the Sephardic style); it does use larger, bolder, squarer script for the word “chapter” and the (spelled-out) chapter number; in typical Sephardic fashion, it places a separating margin between the text and these words; and it, too, caps these words with graphic symbols. Beyond the usual attentiveness in Italian Hebrew manuscripts to style and clarity, there is a special commitment to clarity in this manuscript family. The goal underlying this special commitment appears to be the attempt to disambiguate confusing elements that are in the body of the text. This is seen in the following three examples.

Disambiguation Example 1: Vowel Indication Hebrew is generally written without indication of vowels. The reader, being familiar with the language, intuitively knows which vowels to supply and does not require them to be written. However, in the cases of certain long vowels, corresponding consonants (“vowel-letters”) are incorporated into the written word—not as consonants, but as vowel-indicators. For example, a long I will be graphically represented yōd)—which, in this case, has no) י/by its phonetically corresponding consonant, Y consonantal value, only a vowel value. Through this indication of vowels, ambiguities are avoided in cases when the consonants alone could have been read in various ways. On occasion, though, the indication of only the select long vowels does not suffice to disambiguate between various possible readings. This is particularly true for a less erudite or attentive reader. Readers who are at home with the subject matter and who are engaged in it rarely have this problem. The scribes of this family yōd) for any vowel of the I family (and) י/ typically add vowel letters—particularlyY wāw) for any vowel of the U family, even) ו/not only for long I), but often also W 204 when classical Hebrew orthographic convention does not call for them, such as in Texts in cases of short vowels or certain long vowels. This policy is so strong in the case of Transit yōd that when, on occasion, the unneeded yōd is forgotten, it is squeezed in between the letters or added interlineally—particularly in ms Urbinati 48. Furthermore, in all manuscripts of this family, when a yōd is required as a consonant (either as a stand-alone consonant or in an A-Y diphthong), often twoyō ds are written—lest a single yōd be misconstrued as a mere vowel-letter. On other occasions, the omission of the unneeded yōd is compensated for by inserting vowel pointing (that is, bona fide vowel markings, around the consonants, rather than consonant signs used as stand-ins for vowels)—when adding the yōd would introduce further ambiguity, or when the addition is precluded by layout requirements. the second one”) is written“) השני/To illustrate: traditionally, the word ha-šēnī However, in these manuscripts, the .נ/and the Nש/without a yōd between the Š presumably lest—(השיני =) expectation was that a yōd would be inserted there this word be misconstrued as ha-šәnē, a gross error that would not be made by an educated, attentive reader. When, on folio 9a, line 21, the scribe of ms Urbinati 48 neglected to include the unnecessary medial yōd, he went back and wrote it cen- יתיאש/when, on folio 38b, line 20, he wrote yityāʾēš ;נ/and the N ש/tered above the Š he again added the ,(יתייאש with only one yōd in the medial position (rather than unnecessary second medial yōd by the same method as before. On folio 49a, bottom line, he compensates doubly, adding both a medial yōd as well as vowel markings on folio 31a, bottom line, where the extender of the ;< שִ י שִ י> making it into ,ששי to and ל L) precludes the insertion of an unnecessary yōd centered above the) ל letter (the insertion of vowel points alone (for the entire word, however ,ש the second (name) שם/ Throughout many of these manuscripts,šēm . הַ שְ לִ שִ י :needs to suffice for were ,( שֵ ם) there) specifically by vowel pointing) שם/ is differentiated fromšām the word would be misconstrued as śīm (put). And in a ,(שים :a yōd inserted (thus number of manuscripts of this family (Urbinati 48, fol. 47b, line 21; Neofiti 30, fol. 82a, line 4; BL Add. 26899, fol. 53a, line 15; as well as the cousin manuscript, Medici 491, fol. 84a, line 30), in book 3, chapter 5 of Bar Ḥiyya’s work, the word rabbōtay -presumably to high ,רבותיי :my masters) is written with a doubling of theyō d, thus) light the A-Y diphthong and to differentiate it from a simple longI . Again, all this is orthographically unconventional24 and completely unnecessary for an attentive reader. It is helpful only for the common, popular audience—thus indicating that these manuscripts were planned for just such a broad-based, communal clientele, and that the planning was so programmatic that when these extra elements were occasionally forgotten, they were added one way or another.

Disambiguation Example 2: Vowel Pointing to Disambiguate Number Symbols Calendrical texts are naturally replete with numbers, which record vital calendrical data. In Hebrew texts, numbers are usually not spelled out as words, but are rather 205 symbolized by individual letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In various Hebrew scripts, (kāp/K) כ ,various letters look very similar. For example, in Italian Hebrew script Sephardic nūn/N). Note that the vocalized name of Scientific Works) נ bēt/B) and) ב is easily confused with each of these letters contains a different vowel: longA for kāp; long E for bēt; and in Italy long U for nūn. A number of manuscripts in this family use this difference in vowels to disambiguate the individual letters where they symbolize numbers. In ambiguous ,for 2 ; כָ ׳,cases, their scribes write the associated vowel beneath the letter, thus: for 20 .For several representative examples, see mss Günzburg 509, fols) .נֻ ׳ ,and for 50 ; בֵ ׳ 23a and 46a; BL Add. 26889, fol. 25a; and JTS 5512, fol. 15a.) Disambiguation Example 3: Locators in Margins In book 3, chapter 9 of his calendrical work, Bar Ḥiyya discusses the calendars of a variety of cultures. Each member of the Italian manuscript family employs some sort of attention-getting device within the chapter to signify where in the chapter various calendars are discussed. Some manuscripts do this comprehensively, for each calendar discussed in the chapter, while others employ the device for only some calendars. The devices are either in the margin or in the body of the text, or in both. Devices in the margin always include the label indicating which calendar is being discussed. In mss Urbinati 48 and Medici 491, these marginal labels are suspended from a triangular design, with its point upward; in mss BL Or. 10538 and Neofiti 30, the labels are topped with three-dot designs, arranged as point-down triangles. ms JTS 5512 employs an inconsistent, eclectic mix of devices: nontextual graphics embedded in the body of the text; marginal pointers (if these are indeed by the main scribe); indentation; paragraph breaks; and larger script. mss Günzburg 509 and BL Add. 26899 simply use bigger, bolder, squarer letters, surrounded by extra space. These cases of programmatic and extreme implementation of clarity and disambiguation provide further evidence that the scribing of the manuscripts of this family was planned programmatically, with a broad, communal usership in mind. (This program influenced the scribing of the for-personal-use ms BL Add. 26899, too.)

The Italian Family of Samuel Ibn Matut’s Meshovev Netivot

Samuel Ibn Matut (often misconstrued as “Motot”) was a Sephardic thinker in the late fourteenth century. He authored a number of religio-scientific works, the first Restorer of paths),25 which synthesizes) משובב נתיבות/of which is Meshovev Netivot ספר/Kabbalah and philosophy, incorporating a running commentary on Sefer Yeṣira The book of creation [lit. “formation”]). According to his colophon, copied in) יצירה a number of manuscripts, he completed this work in Guadalajara, Spain, in 1370. As I discuss elsewhere,26 ms Günzburg 321, which is written in a fifteenth- or sixteenth- century Italian Hebrew hand, and ms London Montefiore 279, which is written in a sixteenth-century Italian Hebrew hand, share almost identical text of a very high quality (viz., close to the projected urtext). Each manuscript contains several textual errors or peculiarities not shared by the other, indicating that neither was derived 206 from the other. Rather, both must have been derived from a common ancestor of even better quality. This family of Italian manuscripts continues with ms Budapest Texts in Kaufmann 173, written in an early sixteenth-century Italian hand. This manuscript Transit contains the errors common to Günzburg 321 and Montefiore 279 and adds a few of its own. The final bone fide member of this family,27 containing the errors mentioned above and adding some of its own, is ms Oxford Bodleian Michael 545. Although written in an Ashkenazic hand, the textual genealogy just outlined indicates that Michael 545 was copied from an Italian exemplar. However, the Italian connection is present not only in this manuscript’s origins. The manuscript was in Italy around 1600, where and when it was censored by Dominico Irosolimitano, who censored the abovementioned Günzburg 321, too. Furthermore, the watermarks of Michael 545 resemble those dating to 1520–33; soon after that time, in 1550, Matthias Delacrut—son of Solomon Delacrut, the manuscript’s owner—made his way to Italy. Adding all this Italian evidence together, it is more logical to posit that Matthias Delacrut acquired or commissioned (or perhaps even copied) the manuscript in Italy, not that he took it to Italy from abroad.28

The Big Picture

We have seen that the phenomenon of faithfully perpetuating high-quality, authoritative, standardized, nonpersonalized, presumably communally directed Italian families of Hebrew Sephardic scientifico-religious works took place, in the case of the transmission of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work, in the late thirteenth to early fifteenth century, and in the case of the transmission of Ibn Matut’s Meshovev Netivot, in the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth century. Joining these two cases, we can trace this Italian phenomenon from the thirteenth century into the sixteenth century. This indicates that Italian Jewry was capable of transmitting and interested in possessing accurate, high-quality copies of these works. This fidelity to preserving received texts is present, too, in the texts produced by the “Hebrew Scholasticism” in fifteenth- century Italy, a parallel (and as we shall see below, a related) intellectual trend in Jewish Italy described by Mauro Zonta.29 Also, in both cases, Italy’s role as a crossroads of Jewish cultures is evidenced. Sephardic works made their way to Italy; there, authoritative versions were both established as well as copied in the Hebrew scripts of Italy; there, too, the works were copied into other Hebrew scripts, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazic; and thence the works were further disseminated abroad (e.g., from Italy to Poland [see note 29] and possibly to Byzantium [see the section on Byzantium below]).

How Were These Works Used?

A natural follow-up question is, Did Italian Jews actually pursue this knowledge? By looking into the texts and accompanying glosses of the Italian family manuscripts of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work in comparison to the texts and accompanying glosses 207 of Italian manuscripts30 of another work by Bar Ḥiyya, namely, the straight scientific Form of the earth), not only will we be able to answer this) צורת הארץ/Ṣurat ha-Areṣ Sephardic question in the affirmative, but we will also be able to nuance our understanding of Scientific Works the pursuit of this knowledge. in Italy

Types of Glosses and What They Indicate

Analytical and Interpretive Glosses, Indicating Applied Study of the Works In contrast with Bar Ḥiyya’s strictly mathematical works, in his calendrical work, which is a scientifico-religious hybrid aimed at a wider audience, he does not delve deeply into science and math. Rather, in it he spells out only as much science and math as are required to follow, not to master, calendrical issues. He thus rounds many calculations and completely omits some others (i.e., those underlying the coordination of elements in fixing the calendar).31 The calendrical work appears to have been a work that, at least in Italy, was deemed desirable to preserve and to have accessible. This is evidenced by the fact that it was faithfully and intelligently copied and well preserved, to the degree that a strong manuscript family of the work emerged there. Nevertheless, these copies (with the exception of ms Neofiti 30) are not heavily glossed, showing evidence of only low-volume practical use on the “consumer level.” Furthermore, the glosses that do appear, whether by the main scribe or later hands, are not of an analytical nature: they do not discuss the substance of the concepts contained in the work. Rather, they are of an editorial nature, regarding the correct version of the text. (See below for a discussion of editorial glosses and what they indicate about transmission history.) In contrast, some of the Italian copies of Bar Ḥiyya’s Ṣurat ha-Are ṣ, a strictly mathematical/scientific work in which the math and astronomy are more rigorous than those in his calendrical work, contain a rich variety of analytical glosses (in addition to editorial glosses, such as variant readings and the like). ms BL Or. 1056 is a Sephardic copy of Ṣurat ha-Are ṣ, which, however, contains text written by various hands in Italian Hebrew script. This manuscript, which ended up in Italy, was written either in Iberia or in Italy in an Iberian hand. In either case, the combination of the earlier layer, of Sephardic Hebrew writing, and the later layer, of Italian Hebrew writing, illustrates the conveyance of this scientific work from Sephardic to Italian Jewish culture. The first three folios of this manuscript seem to have sustained damage in the bottom outside quadrant, and on these folios that quadrant was removed and replaced with new paper, upon which the missing text was filled in using Italian Hebrew script. In addition to this editorial work, throughout the margins of the manuscript there are analytical glosses, written in a different Italian Hebrew hand. Of particular interest is a gloss on folio 12a, in which Bar Ḥiyya’s text is analyzed in light of an idea put forth by another Sephardic scholar, one who made it to Italy in person—Abraham Ibn Ezra. This demonstrates the intellectual engagement of Italian Jews in the ideas that they were importing from Iberia. ms BL Or. 12277 contains another copy of Ṣurat ha-Are ṣ, this one in an Italian 208 hand from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It, too, contains analytical glosses by later hands, illustrated by the following example from chapter 4 of the work. The Texts in issue under discussion in the main text is whether stars (meaning the luminous Transit celestial bodies) other than the sun generate their own light, or whether their light is acquired from the sun’s shining onto them. The author indicates that the majority view is that they do not have their own light, but only that which the sun shines onto them. However, in this case one would expect the appearance of these stars to be subject to the same phenomena that apply to the appearance of the moon, including waning and waxing as the moon does over the course of the month, and being subject to eclipses. The fact that the stars do not appear to undergo these phenomena would indicate that their light comes from themselves, not from the sun. The author adduces explanations according to which the stars’ light can come from the sun and yet we will not see them undergoing the expected phenomena of waning, waxing, and being eclipsed. In a gloss in the margin of folio 22, side a, column a, other reasons are offered, written in an Italian Hebrew script that is different from that of the main scribe:

Addition: Concerning the reason that he gave as to why the light does not progressively increase on its body in the first half, and in the second half it progressively decreases [waxing and waning], as is the case with the moon: it is possible to say that on account of their great distance, they appear very small; and on account of their great smallness, by means of sight it is not possible (lit. “seeing is not able”) to discern within them the increase and the decrease. Regarding this, Rabbi Solomon wrote another reason: that are [זויות/on account of their great distance, the angles [Heb. zāwiyyōt obstructed, and they appear circular, as is explained in the science of optics.32

ms BL Or. 4597, yet another copy of Ṣurat ha-Areṣ in an Italian Hebrew hand, also dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, is replete with all sorts of glosses by multiple hands. Even analyzing the title written onto this manuscript is informative. As clarified by my colleague Ilana Wartenberg, the more comprehensive title given The work on) ספר החזיון—ספר צורת הארץ/here, Sefer ha-Ḥizzayon—Ṣurat ha-Areṣ astronomy [lit. “vision”]—The work on the form of the earth), picks up on Bar Ḥiyya’s own statements in the work. As further clarified by Wartenberg, before giving this title, the scribe listed the sources upon which the author draws—Alfraganus, ʾAbu ʿAli (presumably Alhazen/Alhacen), and Ptolemy33—thus demonstrating the erudition of the scribe. In addition to editorial glosses—filling in of phrases or words missed during the original scribing, noting variant readings, and so on—there are two other types of glosses: translational and analytical. In the translational glosses, Hebrew technical terms are rendered into the Italian vernacular, sometimes with explanation. In some cases, the Italian is given in transliteration into Hebrew characters, and in other cases the Italian is given in Latin characters. These translations and explanations show that the work was studied in a serious and pragmatic way. 209 An example of this occurs on folio 3a, in the discussion of the “fixed stars.” There is an effort to articulate the concept of “fixed stars,” which refers to those stars which Sephardic are seen to maintain fixed positions within the overall system of heavenly bodies, Scientific Works moving at the fixed rate of the overall system (in contrast to the “wandering stars,” in Italy which are seen to vary their positions within the system). The main (Hebrew) text .(המיושבים/refers to these “fixed” stars as “the seated/settled stars”ha-mәyuššā ( bīm Interlineally, above the Hebrew for “the seated/settled,” there is a Hebrew gloss, with an alternate term to express the concept: “the standing/lasting/constant” And in the margin, in a different Hebrew hand, we find .(הקיימים/ha-qayyāmīm) the Italian term with explanation: “In the foreign language [viz., Italian] this means stelle fisse/the fixed stars]34 intending to say that they do not draw apart] סטילי פֿיסי from one another from time to time. Rather, the distance between them is forever constant.”35 These translational glosses demonstrate the fusion between Hebraic and Latin/vernacular learning that was taking place at the time, cited earlier from Zonta. This fusion of Hebraic and Latin learning is evidenced even in the Hebrew transliteration of the name “Ptolemy,” mentioned above: as pointed out by Bernard R. (here (TH ת with a ,בטלמיוס rather than בתולומאוס—Goldstein,36 this unusual form additional O vowels)—is in conformity) ו T), and additional letters) ט rather than a with a Latin form of the name, Ptholomei, as attested in manuscripts. An analytical gloss, in the margin of folio 23a, seems to be in the hand of the original scribe. It raises a contradiction from “the words of all the wise men,” as well as Bar Ḥiyya’s own words later in this chapter, to Bar Ḥiyya’s statement and accompanying diagram at the beginning of chapter 5. Again, this clearly demonstrates an earnest study of this field and of this work in particular. Furthermore, the combination of the maintenance of the base text with the marginal gloss calling the base text into question demonstrates the scribal commitment to simultaneously upholding, on the one hand, the integrity of the received text, and, on the other hand, recording correct and accurate data.

The surfeit of glosses in Italian copies of Bar Ḥiyya’s Ṣurat ha-Areṣ contrasts with the paucity of glosses in Italian copies of his calendrical work. This dearth of glosses stands out, particularly in sections of the calendrical work that contain incorrect numerical data, where correctional glosses would have been expected. Indeed, despite the usual high quality of textual transmission in the Italian family of the calendrical work, when it comes to conveying accurate numbers, this family’s strength falters slightly. Although all members of this family generally agree with each other, providing the same numbers, occasionally these numbers are wrong, and sometimes glaringly so. And these errors are rarely noted—for instance, in marginal glosses and the like—whether by the original scribe or subsequent users.37 For example, one of the tables at the end of the work gives shorthand signs for the following data for each year of the nineteen-year cycle, over a fixed set of cycles:38 the weekday on which Rosh Hashanah falls; whether the year is defective, orderly, or full; and the weekday on which Passover begins. In the Italian family (in which the table exists in all manu- 210 scripts except Günzburg 509), the 271st cycle is presented twice in this table39—but each time with different data, and without any gloss pointing to the contradiction. Texts in This calls into question whether the data from this work were actually applied. Transit Although more evidence is required before generalizations can be made, and multiple factors must be taken into consideration, preliminarily, this difference in usage between the copies of the calendrical work and the copies of Ṣurat ha-Areṣ seems to indicate an interest on the part of Hebraic Italy in works of a more scientifically rigorous nature, related to Zonta’s abovementioned discussion of fifteenth- century Hebrew scholasticism in Italy. Editorial Use of Glosses: Multiple Older Manuscripts Were Consulted for Critical Editing A telling example of evidence that older manuscripts were used in editing later copies occurs in book 1, chapter 3 of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work. There he discusses the visibility of northern and southern stars from various points on earth. Inter alia, he mentions that for those residing from a certain latitude north of the terrestrial equator, “the [celestial] north pole ascends above them; it is never hidden from them.” In the Italian family, the words “hidden” and “from them” are reversed, thus: “it is never, from them, hidden.”40 While this reading is not impossible, it is inferior; and, as indicated by all the evidence from outside the Italian family, this is not the original reading. In two of the three oldest manuscripts of this family (Günzburg 509 and JTS 5512), which are dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, later Italian Hebrew hands, which I would estimate to be from around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, identically mark the error, in a subtle fashion: on top of the word that was as symbolized by ,2) ב written first but should have been second, they write a small the second Hebrew letter,bē t); on top of the word written second but which should .(as symbolized by the first Hebrew letter,ʾā lep ,1) אhave been first, they write a small Here we see not only ongoing engagement with these works as transmitted in these manuscripts, but also an ongoing editorial quest for correct readings. This editorial engagement becomes even clearer in the next example, bridging the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Editorial Use of Glosses: Multiple Younger Manuscripts Are Formulated Based on Multiple Older Ones Toward the beginning of book 2, chapter 6 of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work, the following conclusion is drawn: “What we come up with is that the mōlād [moment of the conjunction of the sun and moon] for the month of Tišrī in the year in which the world was created occurred at five hours and 204 parts [204/1080 of an hour] of the night of day two [of the week, viz., Sunday night going into Monday]. This was a tradition in our possession.”41 All members of the Italian family contain this statement, with little variation. Nevertheless, in this context two variations are noteworthy. First, only in ms JTS 5512, the main text continues the above-quoted state- ”.ל׳ב׳ה׳ ר׳ד׳ is (סימן/ment, adding: “The sign (i.e., shorthand symbol, Heb. sīmān While most other manuscripts in this family do not contain this gloss at all, the 211 two fifteenth-century manuscripts of this branch of the family, viz., BL Or. 10538 and Neofiti 30, do contain the gloss—yet (unlike JTS 5512) not in the body of the Sephardic text, but only in the margin. Further linking these two fifteenth-century manuscripts Scientific Works is the second noteworthy variant: earlier, where all manuscripts read “year,” Heb. in Italy with the ,שעה/these two manuscripts read “hour,” Heb. ŠʿH/šāʿā ,שנה/ŠNH/šānā supplied in the margin, just above the—ע/instead of an ʿ נ/corrected letter—a N gloss discussed above. And for both glosses, each manuscript uses the identical format, symbol, and wording as the other. (These glosses seem to be in the hands of the main scribes.) Thus, we see that these two later manuscripts testify to the following editorial process: multiple witnesses from the Italian family were used; readings were compared; preferred readings were included in the main text; variants were noted in the margin; and editorial decisions made in earlier manuscripts were carried over into subsequent manuscripts. In this case, one of these witnesses used was JTS 5512 or a lost manuscript that was very close to it; at least another one of the witnesses used contained the standard Italian-family version, without the gloss about the sign/ and possibly another witness (now lost to us) appeared to contain the ;סימן/sīmān .year/שנה hour instead of/שעה reading

Glosses Manifest Across Generations Toward the beginning of book 2, chapter 5 of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work, we find two versions of the following passage. Most manuscripts, in all families, read, at the beginning of the cycle, the sun and :(מוסרים/We transmit (Heb. mōsərīm“ moon are equal, as one.”42 However, two manuscripts, both in the Italian family, contain a corrected version. ms Günzburg 509 has an interlineal gloss, in a later -which stands for either “appar ”,נ׳ “ מוצאי]׳[,ca. fifteenth-century) hand, reading) we find.’ ” The point is that the‘ :(נ]וסח[ =) we find’ ” or “version‘ :(נ]ראה[ =) ently at the beginning of the :(מוצאים/statement should be fixed to “We find (Heb. mōṣәʾīm cycle, the sun and the moon are equal, as one.” The gloss suggested in ms Günzburg 509 was actually implemented in ms Neofiti 30, where it seems that the original reading was the standard one, over which the corrected version was written. Although we do not know the process underlying the new reading in ms Neofiti 30, we do know that this sort of change, by writing the new reading over the old one rather than by keeping the old reading and adding a gloss, is unusual, and thus was presumably based on an earlier authority and not made autonomously.

Editorial Use of Glosses: Glosses with Variant Readings from Outside the Italian Family Particularly in ms Neofiti 30, we find many marginal glosses, not in the Sephardic-style hand of the main scribe (which, in any case, I believe to be Italian, as discussed above) but in pure Italian Hebrew script, giving readings from outside the Italian family. Often these glosses are identical or similar to readings that are found only in ms Oxford Bodleian Opp. 183, which represents a slightly different version of the work. For example, in book 2, chapter 1 of his calendrical work, Bar Ḥiyya dis- 212 cusses various terms for the moon, stating, “We find that in the language of the Ishmaelites [i.e., Arabic] they call the lunar month šahr, being in the foreign tongue Texts in of the Ishmaelites an expression [denoting] revelation. The dependable sages of Transit their language said: The month is designated by this term, an expression denoting revelation, because the moon is visible on it; it becomes revealed to the eyes after it was hidden from our eyes.”43 Instead of “The dependable sages of their language said: The month . . . ,” ms Oxford has “The dependable sages of their language that)—a reading added) כי/said that the month . . . ,” adding the Hebrew word kī into ms Neofiti 30 interlineally. Similarly, at the beginning of book 3, chapter 10, the standard reading is “I have explained,” whereas ms Oxford has “I have already explained”—again, a reading added into ms Neofiti 30 interlineally. In book 3, chapter 3, Bar Ḥiyya explains that using the value that the sage Samuel ascribes to a solar year, the nineteen-year cycle, meant to harmonize the solar and lunar cycles, will not work precisely: in each such cycle, the solar year will gain one hour and 485 parts (= 485/1080 hour) on the lunar year. Over time, this multiplies into a significant discrepancy. Bar Ḥiyya provides a table to track this discrepancy, giving the parameters of the table. Most manuscripts adhere to at least the basic parameters, but two do not: Oxford Bodleian Opp. 183 and JTS 2596. Some of these differences are glossed into Neofiti, too.44 In a lesser measure, other manuscripts, too, in the Italian family contain glosses with readings from outside the family. For example, at the end of book 1, chapter 7, a gloss in Günzburg 509, in a different hand, contains a several-sentence alternate version of the discussion of the relation between the lunar cycles and the solar year.

Glosses as Part of the Transmitted Text: Faithful Nonintervention In the conclusion of his calendrical work, Bar Ḥiyya offers several calendrical tables, one of which is a table showing “on which day of the week each one of the solar months will begin, within the Great Cycle, which is [the cycle of] 28 years.”45 This table is preserved only in ms Oxford Bodleian Opp. 183 and in five of the seven members of the Italian family, viz., mss JTS 5512, Urbinati 48, BL Add. 26899, Neofiti 30, and BL Or. 10538. The format in which this table is preserved in the Italian family includes two columns for February: one column is labeled “February, 28 [days],”46 while the other February column is not labeled at all. However, in every fourth row, indicating that ,(כבושה/this unlabeled column states “embolismic” (Heb. kәbūšā in these years February contains 29 days.47 mss JTS 5512, Urbinati 48, and BL Add. 26899, representing both branches of the Italian immediate family, contain the following mistake with its accompanying correctional gloss: “The embolism in this table in the month of February in accordance with the view of the people of France was mistakenly written at the month of December,”48 viz., the (צרפת/Heb. Ṣārәpāt) extra column was inserted not following February, but between December and Jan- uary (the first month in the table being October). The fact that this appears in both branches of the Italian immediate family indicates that it existed in the common progenitor, before the branching apart. The choice by these scribes to maintain the 213 received text with its error and its correctional gloss, and not to change the received text by simply correcting the table, provides an extreme illustration of the sacrosanct Sephardic status, in this culture, of the authoritative, standardized text, including its errors and Scientific Works glosses. in Italy In a second example, in book 1, chapter 7, Bar Ḥiyya discusses the measure of the moon’s daily orbit, which, according to all manuscripts outside of the Italian family, he gives as “13 out of 360 parts . . . plus another 3 minutes out of 60 minutes to the part.” 49 In the Italian family,50 however, there is a problem with the number of min- the reading in the Italian ,ג׳ utes. Instead of 3, which in Hebrew characters is written This is evidenced by the fact that this .ל׳ progenitor seems to have been 30, written reading is the only one present in the Günzburg 509—BL Add. 26899 branch of the immediate family, and that it occurs in the earlier stratum of the other branch of the immediate family: in ms Urbinati 48 it occurs as the primary reading, with a marginal gloss indicating “In doubt whether 30 or 3; or [possibly] 50”;51 and in ms JTS 5512, the gloss with the multiple options is embedded into the body of the text (presumably having migrated from an exemplar’s margin). These two manuscripts and their progenitor testify to their scribes’ need to note and preserve the question rather than to resolve it. The inference to be drawn from this is that these scribes saw themselves as transmitters-producers rather than as consumers.

Between NonIntervention and Change: Corrections, Deletions, and Glosses

However, we find that mss Neofiti 30 and BL Or. 10538, which constitute the closely related later end of the branch that begins with mss JTS 5512 and Urbinati 48, evidence a different attitude and standard of behavior toward preserving errors and correctional glosses. Returning to the first example (the table showing “on which day of the week each one of the solar months will begin, within the Great Cycle, which is [the cycle of] 28 years,” in the conclusion of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work), we find that neither the mistake nor the correctional gloss appears. Thus, somewhere between the earlier and latter ends of this branch of the family, a scribe took the reasonable step of fixing the error—indicating a modified position: that the sacrosanct status of the received text, even if it was an authorized, standardized text, did not necessarily trump the judicious application of reason. Similarly, in the second example (Bar Ḥiyya’s discussion, in book 1, chapter 7, of the measure of the moon’s daily orbit), the two manuscripts representing this later end of the branch that began with mss Urbinati 48 and JTS 5512 have dropped all the conflicting data, simply leaving a blank space where the number belongs. This, too, indicates a move away from the sacrosanct status of the received text, including its errors and glosses. Somewhere along the line, a scribe did not feel the need to do any more than allude to the problem by leaving space for its resolution. Another example of the spirit of initiative taken by the exemplar of these two later manuscripts, viz., Neofiti 30 and BL Or. 10538, occurs at the end of book 2, chapter 214 10, of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work. There the author delineates four segments within the year, noting the Pentateuchal pericopies read in each: “The second segment ....(שבועות/Texts in [runs] from the departure of Passover until Pentecost (Heb. Šābūʿōt Transit The Sabbaths between them [number] a mere six.”52 Outside of the Italian family, šēš). In most of) שש/in most manuscripts the Hebrew word for six is spelled out: ŠŠ In the two manuscripts in 53.שם/the Italian family, there is an incorrect reading: ŠM with nothing—neither the (correct) second ,ש/ question, however, we find a singleŠ in the second slot. Rather, both manuscripts contain—ם/nor the (incorrect) M ,ש/Š an identically formatted call-out symbol to an identically formatted and worded Thus we see ”.(נ״ל שש .marginal gloss that fixes the text: “it seems to me: ŠŠ/six (Heb that the scribe of their exemplar was unwilling to perpetrate the error, yet respected the received text enough to reserve his gloss for the margin, not being bold enough to put something different into the main text. Furthermore, we see that the text was copied with understanding of its contents.

Between Italy and Byzantium

As mentioned above, one member of the Italian manuscript family of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work, the “cousin,” ms Medici 491, dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, is written in Byzantine Hebrew script. Also, in the forms of some of the Roman month names, this manuscript differs from the Italian immediate family. However, bearing in mind Byzantine cultural dominance in southern Italy in the Middle Ages and, conversely, medieval Italian dominance of and impact on some Byzantine regions,54 script type and forms of month names alone are insufficient to allow us to conclude whether this manuscript was written in Italy or in Byzantium. While further study is required to determine this manuscript’s provenance, the very confluence of Italian and Byzantine elements in this single manuscript is one more datum that I have come across demonstrating the nature and degree of the inter- twinement of these two Jewish Mediterranean cultures. (I have seen evidence of this phenomenon in another manuscript, too: ms Lambeth Palace Library 1214, which constitutes the surviving bulk of a Greek Octateuch [that is, minus Genesis and Exodus] with commentary, copied in 1103 for the Duke of Cyprus, with later glosses in Latin and in Hebrew. The Hebrew glosses date from around the fifteenth century,55 and they are written in a script that vacillates between Byzantine and Italian Hebrew types, sometimes mixing and even fusing the two.)

Clarity and Disambiguation in ms Medici 491 (“Italian Family Cousin”)

In ms Medici 491, chapter openings are particularly noticeable: they are rubricated. As in the rest of the Italian family of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work, chapters begin on new lines, which contain at least the word “chapter” and the chapter numbers 215 (written out as words, not in symbols). In addition to the rubrication, all this is also in script that is larger, squarer, and bolder than the script of the rest of the text. Sephardic Often, the first line will contain some opening words, too, some or all of which Scientific Works are written rubricated, in larger, squarer, bolder script. Also, in the case of number in Italy disambiguation, in book 2, chapter 4, instead of representing 200 with the symbol dālet/D), which equals 4, two) ד׳ rēš/R), which can easily be confused with) ר׳ .qōp/Q) are written, each one equaling 100, giving the correct total of 200) ק׳letters Whether scribed in Italy or Byzantium, this manuscript embodies the same goals of clarity and disambiguation as does the rest of the Italian family. Summary of Conclusions

In this chapter, we have seen evidence that in Jewish Italy, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was an organized program to produce standardized, high- quality copies of various works—a category hitherto unrecognized. (This phenomenon may be more pervasive: it seems to exist in Ashkenaz, too, and it is mentioned in a Hebrew Byzantine colophon.) Evidence of this organized, standardized copying specifically exists for Sephardic works that fuse scientific and religious thought. Further investigation (e.g., by producing critical editions) is required in order to see whether this phenomenon holds true for other sorts of works. Provisionally, I have distinguished between the way in which different sorts of (Sephardic scientific) works were transmitted and used in medieval Jewish Italy. Works of a strictly scientific-mathematical nature show evidence—for example, in their glosses—of analytical, practical usage; works of a scientifico-religious nature show evidence of standardization and preservation. Clearly, medieval Jewish Italy served as an intellectual crossroads. Hebrew works and scholars from elsewhere (e.g., Sepharad, Ashkenaz) flowed into Italy. Both the works and the scholars were integrated and finely honed there, and thence this pro- cessed wisdom went forth (e.g., to Poland and Byzantium).

Notes

Manuscripts Consulted Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Cod. hebr. 35, 36 Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana, Florence ms Or. 491 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence Magl. II. VI. 26 Biblioteca Palatina, Parma Cod. 3165 (= De Rossi 108) Bibliothèque nationale de France mss Hébreu 1061, 1070 Bodleian Library, University of Oxford ms Michael 545 ms Oppenheimer 182, 183 British Library 216 ms Additional 26899 mss Oriental 832, 1056, 4597, 10538, 12277 Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), Budapest Texts in ms Kaufmann 173 Transit Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw ms 189 (former Vienna, Schwarz, 300) Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Library of mss 2500, 2564, 2696, 5512 Lambeth Palace Library, London ms 1214 Montefiore Collection, London ms 279 Russian State Library, Moscow mss Günzburg 321, 406, 509, 571 Vatican—Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana ms Neofiti 30 ms Urbinati 48 ms Vatican ebreo 386

Abbreviations Add. Additional BL British Library BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France Günzburg Russian State Library, Moscow, Günzburg JTS Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America Medici Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana, ms Or. Neofiti Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Neofiti Opp. Oppenheimer Or. Oriental Urbinati Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinati ebreo

1. Israel Sandman, “TheMәšō bēb Nәtībōt of Samuel Ibn Matut (‘Motot’): Introductory Excursus, Critical Edition, and Annotated Translation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2006); the calendrical work of Abraham Bar Ḥāyyā/Ḥiyya; Sefer ha-ʿIbbur (Sēper ha-ʿIbbūr) of Abraham Ibn Ezra; and Yesod of Isaac Israeli. My work on Bar Ḥāyyā/Ḥiyya and Ibn Ezra was part of a (יסוד עולם ;ʿOlam (Yәsōd ʿŌlām research project generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), carried out between 2008 and 2013 at University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, under the principal investigatorship of Professor Sacha Stern and working with Dr. Ilana Wartenberg; that on Israeli is part of a research project generously funded by the European Research Council (ERC), begun in 2013, again at University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, under the principal investigatorship of Professor Sacha Stern and working with Dr. Ilana Wartenberg. The research and writing for this article were begun under the AHRC project and completed under the ERC project. 2. As for Israeli’s Yesod ʿOlam (see previous note), there are at least twelve Italian (or hyphenated- Italian) mss (excluding at least two from the culturally distinct Syracuse, Sicily), containing either the entire work or large or small fragments thereof. In my editorial and translation work, I am currently just under halfway through the vast second (and final) chapter of book 1. Thus, I have not yet had occasion to analyze all of the fragments. I have not yet found a specifically Italian family or special Italian features of transmission. However, all three major versions—what Langermann, Richler, and I identify as version 1; what Langermann, Richler, and I identify, respectively, as “a later version,” “second redaction,” and version 2; and, unidentified by Langermann and Richler, what I identify as version 4—are attested in Italian mss: version 1 in ms Firenze—Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Magl. II. VI. 26, in ms Moscow, Günzburg 571, in ms Warsaw, Jewish Historical Institute 189 (formerly Vienna, Schwarz, 300), and in aspects of ms BnF héb. 1070; version 2 in ms BnF 1070; and version 4 in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbib- liothek Cod. hebr. 35 (attested in only one other ms, the Sephardic Parma—Biblioteca Palatina Cod. 217 3165 [De Rossi 108]). See Y. Tzvi Langermann, The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1999), 9 n. 17, and Benjamin Richler, Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2008), 324, s.v. “Vat. ebr. 380.” Version 3 consists of version 2 plus Sephardic interpolations, attested in various permutations in some late, Ashkenazic mss and in the first printed Scientific Works ed. Barukh ben Jacob of Shklov [Berlin, 1777]). in Italy ,ספר יסוד עולם ,edition (Isaac Israeli 3. Particularly for the situation with Hebrew works, see the special issue of Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (Autumn 1993), and therein particularly: Israel Ta- Shma, “The ‘Open Book’ in Medieval Hebrew Literature: The Problem of Authorized Editions,” 17–24, and Malachi Beit-Arié, “Transmission of Texts by Scribes and Copyists: Unconscious and Critical Interferences,” 33–51. 4. These findings are buttressed by statistics presented by my colleague Kineret Sittig, “Study- ing Text Transmission by Simple Quantitative Analysis of Shared Variants: A Case Study” (Medieval Monographs on the Jewish Calendar, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, Workshop 8: Text Edition from Manuscripts, 16 February 2012). In manuscripts of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s “Sabbath Epistle,” she found an extraordinary degree of homogeneity (as well as textual correctness) in manuscripts from Italy. To a lesser degree, I have found elements of this phenomenon in some Ashkenazic manuscripts, too. See Israel M. Sandman, “Critical Method of Editing Used by a Late Medieval Ashkenazi Scribe,” Journal of Jewish Studies 65, no. 2 (Autumn 2014): 349–67. 5. The main exception is ms BL Add. 26899: it is the only one of its family with a colophon. Significantly, the nature of the colophon indicates that the copy was scribed for personal use (see note Moses, is highlighted in the body of the = משה ,below), and an acrostic of the scribe-user’s name 7 work (using initial letters of the first three lines of book 1, chapter 10—on fol. 16b). Much more subtly, Moses (fol. 17a, line 20—in book 1, chapter 9) by = משה ms Günzburg 509, too, highlights the name possibly indicating that ,מ׳פני ש׳צמח ה׳אדמהinserting thin dashes above the initial letters of the words the name of the scribe of this manuscript, too, is Moses. 6. See Gérard Genette,Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 7. As touched upon above, only one out of seven members of the Italian family of Bar Ḥiyya’s calendrical work (discussed below), ms BL Add. 26899, has a colophon (fol. 97a). The colophon implies that this manuscript was copied for personal use by the scribe and his descendants:

.. . השם יזכני ללמוד וללמד לשמור ולעשות מצוותיו וחקיו ומשפטיו אני וזרעי וזרע זרעי עד סוף כל הדורות ויקיים עלינו מקרא שכתו׳ ]יהושע א:ח[ לא ימוש ספר התורה הזה מפיך והגית בו יומם ולילה למען }תשמור{ לעשות ככל הכתו׳ בו כי אז תצליח את דרכיך ואז תשכיל.. .

May God merit me to study and teach, to guard and do His commandments, decrees, and judgments—me, my descendants, and the descendants of my descendants, until the end of all generations. May the verse “This book of Torah [referring also to this manuscript—ed.] will not depart from your mouth; you shall meditate upon it day and night, so that you guard to do in accordance with all that is written in it, for then it will prosper your way, and then you will be wise” (Joshua 1:8) be fulfilled in us. . . .

8. BL ms Or. 832, fol. 69b (colophon for the section containing Muḥammad al-Tabrīzī’s explanation of Maimonides’s twenty-five propositions at the beginning of part 2 ofThe Guide of the Perplexed). 9. For Hebrew works, a notable exception is the scholarship of M. Steinschneider. He was attentive to contents of libraries, temporal and geographical dissemination, and transmission by copyists, but he left it to others to continue these investigations and put the pieces together. (In Moritz Stein- schneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher [Berlin, 1893], he focuses more on translation than on copying.) 10. Malachi Beit-Arié, “Publication and Reproduction of Literary Texts in Medieval Jewish Civ- ilization: Jewish Scribality and Its Impact on the Texts Transmitted,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 230ff. 218 11. Beit-Arié, “Transmission of Texts,” 38, 39. (See also Beit-Arié, “Publication and Reproduction,” 229.) However, a close reading of this statement reveals the conflation of two issues: (1) initiative— whether the production was done at the initiative of the (better: an) establishment/communal body, Texts in or individuals; and (2) venue—whether the copying was carried out in an institutional or private Transit setting. On point 2, I agree with Beit-Arié; on point 1, I am afraid that he misses the category of communally initiated copying that I have described above. 12. These manuscripts have the advantage that their historical contexts are more objectifiable. 13. Usually vocalized ‘Ḥiyyā’, but the scheme of his rhymed introduction to this work seems to as discussed by E. Freimann, “Biographie des Verfas ,”ימנה עם זכייא \ אברהם בר חייא“ :indicate Ḥayyā Sefer Hegjon Ha-Nefesch) ספר הגיון הנפש או ספר המוסר להקדמון ר׳ אברהם בר חייא הנשיא זצ״ל sers,” in oder Sitten-Buch von Abraham bar Chijja ha-Nasi), ed. Sal. Jeh. L. Rapoport (Leipzig, 1860), item 14 of the introduction, p. liii. [This evidence for the correct vocalization notwithstanding, the editors have decided to keep to the spelling that has entrenched itself in scholarship for over a century.—Eds.] 14. The location is indicated in his introduction, and the date is indicated in several places in the work, including his prose description of the tables in the conclusion. 15. Only some of the Italianisms made their way into the Byzantine “cousin” of this family, ms Florence Medici 491. 16. An extreme illustration of this phenomenon occurs, for example, in ms JTS 5512, on fol. 38b: from של/ at the end of two lines, where the scribe ran out of room and thus separated the prefixšel . ש לְ ; שֵ לְ :the subsequent word, he used vowels to indicate that the two parts are to be connected, thus Accordingly, the prefix and subsequent word are to be pronounced as a single word, with a vocal schwa-vowel added at the join. Cf. Nurit Pasternak, “On Word Division in Judeo-Italian Manuscripts,” Gazette du livre médiéval 29 (1996): 37–38. 17. Relatedly, in conversation, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger has suggested the existence of communal libraries in medieval Jewish Italian communities. On the phenomenon, in thirteenth-century Italy, of library copies of scientific works being established for use as exemplars, see the historical notes by Gasapino Antegnati (written shortly after 1314) regarding the autograph manuscripts of Gerard of Cremona’s translations from Arabic to Latin, which Gerard enjoined his nephew, master Peter of Santa Lucia, to take from the translation center in Toledo (Spain) to the Church of Santa Lucia in their hometown of Cremona (Italy), where the nephew was “to allow anyone who wanted a copy to borrow the original texts, and thus all these books of medicine, as well as many other books on philosophy and other sciences, drew their origin and were copied from these exemplars, and were diffused.” See Marika Leino and Charles Burnett, “Myth and Astronomy in the Frescoes at Sant’Abbondio in Cremona,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 66 (2003): 273–88, 284; references in n. 24. This passage .חידוש מספר אחר: הר׳מ׳ב׳ן׳ ז״ל אמ׳ כי מה שאנו קורין תשרי חדש שביעי... :Hebrew .18 Writings of =) כתבי רבינו משה בן נחמן )רמב״ן( ,is published (with slight variations) in Ch. B. Chavel Naḥmanides), vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1962/63), 215–17. 19. In the online catalogue of the National Library of Israel, aleph.nli.org.il (retrieved on 21 Octo- ber 2013). Unless otherwise specified, datings are on the basis of this catalogue, confirmed on this date. 20. Richler, Hebrew Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, p. 630, s.v. “Urb. ebr. 48.” 21. Ibid., p. 551, s.v. “Neof. 30.” 22. Cf. Colette Sirat,Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 185. 23. Malachi Beit-Arié, Unveiled Faces of Medieval Hebrew Books: The Evolution of Manuscript Production—Progression or Regression? (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003), particularly chapter 3, “The Structural Transparency of Copied Texts,” and more particularly, 54–55. 24. Although it seems to have become standard in Modern Hebrew spelling (possibly via this channel). 25. Isaiah 58:12. 26. Theeditio princeps of the work, “TheMәšobeb Nәtibot of Samuel Ibn Matut (‘Motot’),” chapter 2, section A.2.1, “The Italian Family ofMәšobeb Nәtibot mss,” 70–72. 27. As distinct from versions based on multiple textual traditions, incorporating readings from this family and others (sometimes called a “contaminated” version). 219 28. As indicated in chapter 2, section A.2.1 (pp. 70–72) of my dissertation (see note 26 above); many thanks to Benjamin Richler for providing a wealth of information on this topic. Furthermore, Delacrut may have had a role in the transmission of scientific works in Hebrew from Italy to Poland. Sephardic The argument put forth by David E. Fishman, “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science Among Scientific Works Polish Rabbis,” Science in Context 10, no. 4 (1997): 575–77, particularly n. 14, is augmented by evidence in Italy from ms Oxford Bodleian Opp. 182. This seventeenth- or eighteenth-century manuscript in Ashkenazic script (which was the script of Jewish Poland) begins with (a scribal copy of) Delacrut’s autobiograph- ical musings, including the following statements: (a) circumstances compelled him to leave his native the Capitol“ = בולזיאה הבירה land, from which he made his way to a welcoming land, and therein to BWLZYʾH” (= Bologna, on the basis of Fishman and his sources, op. cit.; I do not know whether the or a valid Hebrew form of the toponym); and (b) there ,בולניאה \ בולונאה Hebrew is a corruption of Delacrut studied, inter alia, Peurbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum (cf. Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Peurbach in the Hebrew Tradition,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 29 [1998]: 137–50, particularly section 3-c, “Matitiyahu Delacrut,” pp. 142–43), recorded in this manuscript in the Hebrew translation of Solomon son of Abraham of the family of Avigdor—followed by a copy of Isaac Israeli’s Yesod Olam, discussed in the present article. Thus, it seems likely that Delacrut discovered both these astronomical works in Italy, and transmitted them to Poland. 29. Mauro Zonta, Hebrew Scholasticism in the Fifteenth Century: A History and Sourcebook (Dor- drecht: Springer, 2006), 24–29, and particularly 26: “these texts adhere to their Latin sources more closely and literally than their Spanish counterparts: Italian ‘Hebrew Schoolmen’ reproduced Latin words and contents more faithfully.” 30. I am not aware of any genealogical work done on these Ṣurat ha-Are ṣ manuscripts, so in this case I cannot comment on any possible family relations. 31. Thanks to my colleague Ilana Wartenberg for having raised and provided insight into this matter. תוס׳ ועל הטעם שאמ׳ למה אין האור הולך וגדל בגופו במחצי׳ הראשון. ובמחצית השני הולך :Hebrew .32 וחסר כמו בירח. וי״ל כי לרוב ריחוקן נראין קטנים מאד ולרוב קטנם אין הראות יכול לברר בהם התוספ׳ והחסרון. I am ור׳ שלמה כתב בו טעם אחר כי לרוב ריחוקן נפסקים הזויות ונראין עגולים כמבואר בחכמ׳ המבטים..ע׳פ׳ת׳מ׳. unsure as to the point being made about the angle. (Is it an explanation of why we do not see crescent or half-circle shapes on the surface of these bodies, but they rather always appear circular?) Also, I do not know the meaning of the abbreviation ʿ.P.T. M. at the end. 33. Thanks to Ilana Wartenberg and Bernard R. Goldstein for help with the identifications. 34. Thanks to my colleague Catherine Keen (University College London, Italian) for her help on this. .. . בסדר מהלך הכוכבים המיושבים >הקיימים< >פי׳ בלעז סטילי פֿיסי ר״ל שלא יתרחקו זו :Hebrew .35 מזו כפעם בפעם אלא המרחק שוה בניהם לעולם< .. . 36. Emails, 30 October 2013, citing J. M. Millás-Vallicrosa, Las traducciones orientales en los man- uscritos de la Biblioteca Catedral de Toledo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1942), e.g. pp. 154, 159. 37. Thanks to my colleague Nadia Vidro (who is working on another branch of the ERC project mentioned above) for having called my attention to this, particularly to the question of how many such glosses exist in ms BL Add. 26899. 38. I discuss this in more detail in Israel Sandman, “Scribal Prerogative in Modifying Calendrical Tables,” in Time, Astronomy, and Calendars in the Jewish Tradition, ed. Sacha Stern and Charles Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 2014), section 2.7. 39. In Neofiti 30 this mistake was avoided, having been replaced with another mistake: one of the does not work sequentially as an alphabetic ב׳ע׳א׳ ,However .ר׳ע׳א׳ not ,ב׳ע׳א׳ cycles is labeled number-representation. ויהיה קוטב הצפון עולה עליהם ואינו מסתתר מהם :(Hebrew, standard text (with slight variations .40 ואינו .מהם . . :(The Italian family contains the following reversal (again, with slight variations .לעולם .מסתתר לעולם ועלה לנו שמולד תשרי בשנה שנברא בה העולם היה בה׳ שעות ור׳ד׳ חלקים מליל שיני והיה זה :Hebrew .41 .מסורת בידינו .ואנו מוסרים בראש המחזור חמה ולבנה שוים כאחד :Hebrew .42 220 ואנו מוציאים בלשון ישמעאלים קוראים לחדש לבנה שהר אשר הוא בלעז ישמעאלים לשון גליו :Hebrew .43 ואמרו חכמי איתן לשונם נקרא החדש בשם הזה בלשון גלוי מפני שהלבנה נראית בו. והיא מתגלה לעינים אחר .שהיתה מסתתרת מעינינו Texts in Transit 44. For explanation of the concept and details of the tables, see section 2.3 of my article “Scribal Prerogative in Modifying Calendrical Tables.” 45. I analyze various aspects of the transmission of this table in ibid., section 2.5. 46. One manuscript, BL Add. 26899, reads: “28 days and a quarter.” 47. In the Italian family, in the other three rows, in some manuscripts this column has a symbol ”,orderly“ = כסדרן/for kәsidrān כ׳/.for “nothing,” and in other manuscripts it has the abbreviation K indicating that in these years there is no embolism (viz., insertion of an extra day). .הכיבוש בלוח הזה בחודש פריברו על דעת אנשי צרפת נכתב בטעות בחדש דיצימרו :Hebrew .48 Although the Hebrew .י׳ג׳ חלקים מש׳ס׳ חלקים.. . ועוד ג׳ רגעים מס׳ רגעים בחלק.. . :Hebrew .49 term is rәgāʿīm (in other contexts translated “seconds”), here it refers to the first subdivision of degrees (as Bar Ḥiyya makes explicit at the beginning of 1:6); in English: “minutes.” 50. At least in the immediate family; I lack an image of this page of the cousin (ms Medici 491). .ל׳ או ג׳ ספק או נ׳ :More literally, “30 or 3. Doubt. Or: 50”; Hebrew .51 .והפרק השני הוא ממוצאי פסח עד עצרת.. . והשבתות אשר ביניהן שש בלבד :Hebrew .52 .ם/ms JTS 5512 seems to have something written over the M .53 54. In general, see Steven B. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium (1204–1453) (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 113. More particularly, see Joshua Holo, Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 88–94; Patricia Skinner, “Conflicting Accounts: Negotiating a Jewish Space in Medieval Southern Italy, c. 800–1150 ce,” in Christian Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook, ed. Michael Frassetto (New York: Routledge, 2007), esp. 5; and Vera Von Falkenhausen, “The Jews in Byzantine Southern Italy,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dia- lectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 271–96. These כנסת ,sources highlight the Byzantine presence in (particularly southern) Italy. And see Israel Ta-Shma “רבי ישעיה די טראני וקשריו עם ,vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2005), particularly chapter 2 ,מחקרים which highlights the Italian Jewish influence in Byzantium. Both directions ,(ביזנטיון וארץ ישראל” )9–19 of influence were already in place before the scribing of the manuscript under discussion. 55. Many thanks to Judith Olszowy-Schlanger for her insights on this manuscript.

221

Sephardic Scientific Works in Italy Eleven

New Medicine and the Ḥikmet-i Ṭabīʿiyye Problematic in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

B. Harun Küçük

During the third decade of the eighteenth century, Ottoman physician Ḥasan Efendi (fl. 1720) claimed that medicine was not only a self-sufficient system of natural philosophy, but also the highest among the sciences.1 According to Ḥasan, medicine was both more comprehensive than natural philosophy, of which it used to be part, and superior to fiqh, or religious law, the most important discipline at the medrese. The translation belonged to a barrage ofṭ ıbb-ı cedīd (new medicine) texts valorizing empirical knowledge and advocating the standardization of medical practices that were completed and presented to the sultan in the 1720s.2 A cynical observer might have brushed Ḥasan’s assertions aside as mere fantasies, whereas an honest observer might have found them disrespectful or even dangerous. Yet he was not drawing on an exceptionally lively imagination, but the hard realities of the eighteenth- century Ottoman Empire. Physicians such as Ḥasan had begun to enjoy unprecedented levels of prestige and wealth in the early eighteenth century. Between 1660 and 1720, medicine’s cultural value and epistemic status had climbed so far that Grand Vizier Damad İbrahim was even contemplating the establishment of an independent medical academy that would be completely separate from the medrese.3 What followed Ḥasan’s preface was in fact a Turkish retransla- tion of Ibn Sallūm’s (d. 1669) New Chemical Medicine (Ṭıbbüʾl-Cedīd al-Kimyevī), an Arabic collation of Oswald Croll’s Basylica chymica and Daniel Sennert’s De chymicorum. As such, it belonged to a family

I would like to thank Tzvi Langermann, Lucia Dacome, Donatella Germanese, Elaine Leong, Judy Kaplan, and Kathleen Vongsathorn for their valuable feedback. of manuscripts that constitute a movement the authors themselves called ṭıbb-ı cedīd li-Baraqlīsūs (Paracelsus’s new medicine). Ibn Sallūm of Aleppo, the first significant representative of the movement, was the chief physician (ḥekīmbaşı) to Mehmed IV.4 His original translation had been exceptionally popular, not only among Ottoman readers but also among European collectors.5 Justifiably, a great deal of scholarship has focused on Ibn Sallūm’s pioneering role as the translator of early modern European medical texts. Many scholars have used his oeuvre to study the reception of Paracelsian ideas in the Ottoman Empire. The movement as a whole has been the subject of sustained interest since the early twentieth century. In some ways, therefore, this chapter focuses on a well-known phenomenon that has already been treated by distinguished scholars such as Manfred Ullmann, Felix Klein-Franke, Emi- lie Savage-Smith, Nil Sarı, Bedizel Zülfikar, Gül Russell, Ayten Aydın, Miri Shefer- Mossensohn, Natalia Bachour, and others.6 In comparison to Ibn Sallūm’s work, Ḥasan’s Terceme-i Ṭıbb-ı Cedīd is a highly derivative text, but it is also an invaluable artifact that shows the layers in the medical debates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Placed in its proper context, this eighteenth-century manuscript suggests that the new Paracelsian recipes flooding the Ottoman market were the harbingers of a crisis and a resolution that had epistemic as well as political dimensions. On the one hand, the ṭıbb-ı cedīd of Ibn Sallūm was a risky innovation, which, conceived purely as new recipes, turned out to be a failure leading to more dead bodies than cured patients. On the other hand, it was this very failure that launched new governance mechanisms into motion and that transformed the ṭıbb-ı cedīd practitioner into a full-fledged natural philosopher by the 1720s. As a response to the failure of new medicine, the Ottoman state stepped into a domain that had previously belonged to medical guilds and began to micromanage and standardize medical practices. The practitioners, too, had to expand their skill sets far beyond those required by garden-variety Galenic medicine: they had to master not only herbs and minerals, but also astrology, mathematics, and last but not least, natural philosophy. The greatest achievement of ṭıbb-ı cedīd, a movement built on translations and retranslations of European works, was helping liberate Ottoman naturalism from metaphysics, theology, and the medrese. It was part of the Ottoman Empire’s budding vernacular naturalisms, which focused on description and experiential knowl- 223 edge rather than on deductive reasoning, one of the hallmarks of scholastic ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye (natural philosophy).7 Its greatest opponents were not a presumed “old New Medicine guard” but a humanistic movement that also emerged in the 1660s as well as the pop- in Istanbul ular tradition of prophetic medicine (ṭıbb-ı nebevī).8 Providing cures that worked was only half the battle for the new physicians. They also needed to show that their view of the natural order was in fact superior to that of Aristotle, Avicenna, and ishrāq— or that espoused in the hadith. Success came after a long period of struggle in getting the court to trust the practitioners of new medicine. By the mid-eighteenth century, physicians and their medical concerns governed the world of Ottoman naturalism. Early ṭıbb-ı Cedīd

The first steps toward understanding the ṭıbb-ı cedīd movement are to specify what “moved” and to identify the actors. Given the novelty and “modernity” traditionally ascribed to Ottoman Paracelsianism, one way to address these questions is to assess just what was new about new medicine. Briefly put, ṭıbb-ı cedīd was a set of medical practices that increasingly emphasized pharmacology, mineral ingredients, and the study of pathology—as opposed to regimens, simple herbal drugs, and the preservation of health. It claimed to offer quick and effective cures to many illnesses and to address intractable epidemics, such as malaria, which the traditional physicians had proven incapable of curing. In terms of its content, it was both a revival of medieval Arabic medicine and an introduction of not only new remedies but also new diseases.9 Vocal skepticism toward the “received knowledge” of the university makes it relatively easy, at least at the rhetorical level, to distinguish new knowledge from old in Europe. Paracelsus, the figurehead of what would in the Ottoman setting become ṭıbb-ı cedīd, had famously denounced the conservatism of the medical faculties. The relationship between the old and the new was not altogether clear in the Ottoman Empire, as evinced by the fact that “old medicine,” or ṭıbb-ı qadīm, does not really feature as a meaningful phrase in medical books until the mid-eighteenth century.10 Otto- man scholastic medicine, such as it was, was a very different enterprise in which very few prominent physicians from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries took part. Not only was learned medicine thoroughly Galenic, but it was also bookish. There was little interaction between the medical practitioners and the learned physicians. The former were trained into the craft of medicine through apprenticeship and made a living by offering their services to paying customers. The learned physicians were medrese-trained, were always paid by the state, and basically had three career options if they remained within the profession: they could teach medicine at a hospital or a medical medrese; they could administer one of the hospitals, that is, serve non-paying patients; or they could become physicians at the court, which required them to be successful practitioners as well. Both teaching and administering medicine were low-wage, low-prestige occupations, compared to what else the learned physicians could do with a medrese education.11 One was always better off teaching 224 religious sciences or serving as a judge. Furthermore, there was little if any incentive to write medical books. Most books on the known medical curricula were medieval Texts in works, where Avicenna’s Qānūn and its myriad commentaries figured most promi- Transit nently. The best one could do would be to gloss one of these well-known texts. Consequently, the medrese had virtually no bearing on medical practice or on medical discourse, which accounts for why ṭıbb-ı qadīm (old medicine) was not a reference point in the medical discourse. There was, so to speak, no enemy that was large enough and distinct enough for the ṭıbb-ı cedīd practitioners to target. By all estimates, the medrese-trained physicians were such a small contingent and were often so preoccupied with making careers in the judicial profession that they hardly practiced medicine.12 To a certain degree, the same was true of seventeenth-century Ottoman non-Muslims as well. Although university-trained Greeks and Jews had a strong presence in the medical marketplace, they, too, were mostly interested in medicine as a means to patronage. The best among them became dragomans or, occasionally, used their proximity to the central administration to gain support for their commercial ventures.13 Consequently, when the so-called new chemical medicine appeared at the sultan’s court, there was nary a stir among learned physicians. The only vocal opponent of new medicine, ḥekīmbaşı Nuh Efendi, seemed to oppose new medicine because he was upholding not the “medical orthodoxy” of the medrese— there was no such thing—but the orthopraxis of the marketplace, which the Jews, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslims shared.14 Although ṭıbb-ı cedīd did not have a medical faculty to target, the circumstances in which it flourished were nevertheless similar to what we find in Europe. Except for the absence of a dominant “medical faculty” in Istanbul, the world of the seventeenth- century Ottoman physician would seem all too familiar and accessible to a German doctor, a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. The umbrella doctrine that loosely governed medical practices was Galenism. The medical faculties of Leiden and Padua supplied physicians to a large part of Europe, as they did to some elite Ottoman households.15 From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the administrative and the urban elites in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe proved willing spend larger sums of money on their health, which turned medicine into a more prestigious occupation.16 The guilds of physicians, pharmacists, oculists, and surgeons regulated the marketplace in both geographies. The Ottomanḥ ekīmbaşı (chief physician) and the Spanish protomedicato shared similar protocol ranks in their respective countries and fulfilled a set of duties that mixed regulatory, practical, and educational functions. In terms of trends, too, the Ottoman medical world closely mirrored what we find in Europe. In both places, there was a strong emphasis on hands-on training and on mastering the ever-broadening horizons of medical practice after the European expansion. There were also substantial connections between the two geographies. Many Ottoman practitioners, mostly from Greek or Jewish backgrounds, would in all likelihood be proficient in a European language. Many Italian, English, and French physicians spent years in Ottoman port cities as retainers in trade companies and consular households. Finally, Ottoman and European physicians appear to have 225 socialized with one another far more frequently and with greater intensity than is generally assumed.17 New Medicine While cosmopolitan socialization was the likely reason why Paracelsian medicine in Istanbul made it to Istanbul in the first place, at least some of what was called “new medicine” was neither new nor of exclusively European origin. Its components were already embedded in the Ottoman medical profession, especially in the seventeenth century. The values that the proponents of new medicine advocated, particularly experience (tecrübe) and technical skill (ḥadhāqat), were virtually identical to those espoused by all physicians. Early seventeenth-century Galenists such as Emir Çelebi were already asserting that hands-on experience was superior to the study of texts.18 The emphasis on empirical knowledge had created an environment of lively debate in Ottoman medical schools by the 1640s.19 An alchemical tradition based on the writings of Jābir b. Ḥayyān (Geber) had been on the rise from the late sixteenth century onward. Ottoman physicians had been employing certain inorganic ingredients, particularly gems, for centuries.20 Ottoman medicine had been a fundamentally cosmopolitan enterprise, with the inclusion of Sephardic Jewish and Greek physicians, since the late fifteenth century. Thus, the debates, ideas, and demographics that “new medicine” mobilized already existed, albeit in piecemeal fashion, in seventeenth- century Ottoman medicine. Yet there was also something foreign and weak about ṭıbb-ı cedīd between 1660 and 1690. The movement began with Ṣāliḥ ibn Sallūm of Aleppo’s Arabic translations of Daniel Sennert’s De chymicorum and Oswald Croll’s Basilica chymica. Ṣāliḥ was a convert, and he had translated the texts together with a certain Nicholas, a man of European origin, who was one of Mehmed’s court physicians.21 The later proponents of new medicine were also mostly translators, retranslators, or, at the very least, readers of European medical texts that had some connection with Paracelsus. From the perspective of medical therapy, what distinguished new medicine from the empire’s established Galenic practices was the use of minerals and of alchemical processes in the preparation of drugs—ingredients and methods that were arguably “foreign” to traditional physicians. At least some of the ingredients were foreign in the literal sense. Chemical recipes used imported materials from Venice and France.22 The only courtly proponents of ṭıbb-ı cedīd were Moshe ben Abravanel, whom Mehmed IV forced to convert to Islam and take on the name Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi, and his descendants, who had ties to Ibn Sallūm’s family through intermarriage.23 Looking back from the early eighteenth century, it is also clear that many practitioners of new medicine in Istanbul were actually from Europe.24

The Trouble with Medical Novelty

Early ṭıbb-ı cedīd was a partly foreign medical failure. Its main trouble had to do with its disciplinary location. Was the ṭıbb-ı cedīd practitioner primarily a physician? Was he an alchemist who used his hard-earned skills to cure disease? Or was he someone whose main asset was mathematical precision in preparing and administering drugs? 226 Thus, even at the most basic level, there was at once more and less to ṭıbb-ı cedīd than transplanting European ideas in a non-European setting. Texts in Receiving and using the translated recipes took quite a bit of acclimatization. Transit So much so that, the manuscript evidence suggests, early ṭıbb-ı cedīd as medicine met with little success in its early decades. The adoption of new Paracelsian methods had both reinforcing and hazardous interactions with the existing medical culture. For example, while some ingredients were familiar to Ottoman physicians, the idea of precise dosage—and lethal overdose—was somewhat more problematic. Para- celsus’s alchemical methods and, to a certain extent, the astrologically informed administration of drugs would also be too sophisticated for the vast majority of physicians, who had no formal training in philosophy or mathematics and, surely, no former experience at an alchemical laboratory. One issue, voiced by a certain Süleyman Efendi, was the excessive emphasis on pathology.25 The ṭıbb-ı cedīd practitioners failed to address one of the main duties of a physician, that is, keeping a healthy person healthy. In the Aqrabādhīn-i Cedīd (The new pharmacopoeia), Süleyman complained that the practitioners of ṭıbb-ı cedīd did not know much about and paid little attention to prevention and hygiene. The implication, which a later report from 1704 confirmed, was that this new type of physician prescribed drugs rather than suggesting a change in regimen.26 While the drugs could be successful, their consumption often drove the patient to need other drugs in order to counteract the side effects. The result, one that will surely seem familiar to twenty-first-century patients, was that people started to rely on an ever-increasing quantity and variety of medicaments in order to stay healthy. Ömer Şifai, an alchemist who believed that ṭıbb-ı cedīd was nothing more than “alchemy of the physicians” (kimyā-i ḥükemāʾ), voiced another set of problems in Cevherüʾl-Ferīd fī Ṭıbbüʾl-Cedīd. 27 He believed that practitioners had to address matters of dosage and methodology in order for the recipes to actually work. Failing in this department, as most physicians had, the administration of these medicaments led to patient deaths. This fundamental distinction meant that the best physicians needed alchemical training, which Ömer had been providing in Bursa. A third problem was the issue of weights and measures. Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi the Younger, who became Ahmed III’s chief physician in 1727, noted that many practitioners had difficulty implementing the recipes because they drew from different traditions that used different scales.28 The introduction of new medicine seems to have aggravated this latent (but prevalent) problem. For example, the two most prominent medical traditions, Arabic and Greek, used dirham and drachm, which corresponded to different weights but were often confused in medical practice. Moreover, the weight of the dirham itself had “lately become the subject of controversy [ikhtilāf].” It is well known that the absolute weight of the units was different in each region of the Ottoman Empire, which meant that layers of medical knowledge from different periods and regions rendered any compound recipe difficult to implement. However, as precise dosage was key to administering mineral drugs, the incompatibility of weights and measures became a far greater problem than it had 227 ever been. Hayatizade the Younger also said that, while the merchants (ʿaṭṭār) used a dirham of sixteen carats (qīrāṭ), the dirham of sharia, which both the jurists (fuqahāʾ) New Medicine and the physicians used, weighed fourteen carats. Ultimately, all of this meant that in Istanbul the physician needed to check and test all recipes using a well-calibrated balance and could no longer rely on books or merchants uncritically. Mustafa Feyzi placed ṭıbb-ı cedīd within riyāḍiyye, or the exact sciences, and deployed textual strategies from mathematical texts. He also provided certain sample recipes and ways to verify them by arithmetical means. He used Arabic numerals instead of prose to indicate quantities and drew tables (cedāvil) in order to simplify, verify, and standardize recipes. Fig. 11.1 Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi’s recipe cedvel, indicating the qualities and quantities of the ingredients in four- ingredient theriac. Mīzānüʾl-Terkīb, Süleymaniye Library, Nuruosmaniye ms 3602, 12v. Ṭıbb-ı cedīd’s troubles did not end there; there were also linguistic problems. What languages did the physician have to master in order to match names with things? As Ottoman physicians came from different confessional backgrounds and different textual traditions, it was already difficult to speak of a common canon. Jewish, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic physicians often followed different books and used different professional languages. Thus, important by-products of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempts to render medical texts into Turkish were polyglot medical dictionaries.29 The arguments about the nature of ṭıbb-ı cedīd escalated into a larger philosophical debate. Galenic medicine had also been a part of natural philosophy in the Ottoman Empire, but the novel methods and the contested identity of the ṭıbb-ı cedīd practitioner meant that his relationship to theoretical knowledge about nature stood in need of reconfiguration. Such reconfiguration would not have been possible in the sixteenth century, but, because ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye (natural philosophy) had spilled beyond the borders of the medrese over the seventeenth century, ṭıbb-ı cedīd could now partake of an essentially lay domain of philosophical discourse that no longer had the theological commitments it once had.

The Ḥikmet-i Ẓabīʿiyye Problematic in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

While ṭıbb-ı cedīd fared poorly as medical practice, it nevertheless set greater epistemological debates into motion. While there were overt similarities between Euro- pean and Ottoman medical cultures, the same was not as true about the traditions of ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye. The differences in the philosophical context imbued the Ottoman ṭıbb-ı cedīd with a different mission and a different meaning than the one Paracelsian medicine had in Europe. Markus Köhbach, Ayten Aydın, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, and Natalia Bachour have already warned against painting too triumphalist a picture of Ottoman medicine by drawing attention to the fact that ṭıbb-ı cedīd was a complex phenomenon with adherents, fence-sitters, and (justified) dissenters.30 Although the key novelty of new medicine was that it introduced to the Ottoman readership philosophical ideas and chemical practices drawn from a large family of European Paracelsianisms, 229 the history of ṭıbb-ı cedīd was entangled with a constellation of other local developments. However, no one has yet gone so far as to say, as I do, that the first reasonably New Medicine robust intellectual system that moved from Europe to the Ottoman Empire in the in Istanbul early modern era was actually an unwelcome development that killed patients. And what made Ottoman Paracelsianism arguably “modern” was not Paracelsus himself but the Ottoman efforts to regulate, acclimatize, salvage, and make sense of this foreign, ill-understood, and problem-ridden medical and theoretical innovation. The most important story to be told about ṭıbb-ı cedīd is not about medicine but about the cultural and political contexts of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ottoman thought.31 As I have argued elsewhere, it is difficult to point to a coherent group of Ottoman natural philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While current scholarship on Ottoman natural philosophy often privileges the ulema, it is clear that there was a much broader intellectual landscape that existed outside the medrese. Ottomans of different confessional, ethnic, linguistic, and educational backgrounds observed and wrote about nature from a wide variety of perspectives. In the period when ṭıbb-ı cedīd emerged, there was an ongoing negotiation among the various actors about the scope, methods, and meaning of natural philosophy. Hence the title of this chapter: by the early eighteenth century, there was a discernible ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye problematic in the Ottoman Empire.32 Before I go on to situate ṭıbb-ı cedīd in this problematic, it will be useful to advance a few structural claims and generalizations that will help the reader recognize the various actors and see the main philosophical dynamics in this period. By far, the most prominent group of Ottoman individuals engaged in the empire’s intellectual discourse were the medrese professors. However, both biographical evidence and testimony reveal that most professors, in fact, did not write very much at all.33 Most books that came out of the medrese, perhaps expectedly, were commentaries on canonical texts. The scarcity of scholarly writing was one of the reasons why the sultan established a printing press. “Ancient authors have always made fine innovations,” said the printer İbrahim Müteferrika in his Virtues of Printing, adding, “modern scholars should be no more hesitant than the ancients in formulating new rules and laws by which to organize empires and nations.”34 One of the field’s current impressionistic judgments of the seventeenth century, which I share but do not commit to, is that philosophical theology (kelām), the foundation of the sixteenth-century medrese, no longer had its former dignity and popularity in the seventeenth century.35 Katip Çelebi’s Balance of Truth, the key evidence that informs this tentative judgment, points to Mehmed Birgili’s staggering popularity as the culprit. Birgili, a Qurʾan literalist whose views on learning are more or less in line with those of al-Ghazālī, commended the study of positive theology (ʿaqāʾid) and of logic, but he also believed that philosophy (ḥikmet) and philosophical theology (kelām) had no place in the medrese. What fell out of fashion as Birgili’s views gained popularity were physics and metaphysics, which had played a key role in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theological compendia.36 230 One way to understand Birgili’s position is to compare it to similar developments in early modern Europe. Here, I take my cue from Tijana Krstić’s and Derin Terzio Texts in ğlu’s use of Heinz Schilling’s idea of confessionalization to account for a complex Transit set of religious developments. In the seventeenth century, many Ottoman scholars joined efforts to forge a coherent Sunnism. The flexibility of Sufism and of the -phil osophical apparatus that made Sufi practices tenable in a Sunni setting slowly gave way to harder and more practice-oriented strictures on piety. While it would be a stretch to call these developments a Muslim Reformation movement, they nevertheless shared certain features with the Protestant Reformation.37 The disappearance of metaphysics from European university curricula in the settings of Catholic and Protestant Reformation movements is a well-known phenomenon. For example, Philipp Melanchthon’s ideal curriculum eschewed Aris- totelian metaphysics because it was an unjustified attempt to understand divine mysteries through human reason.38 On the opposite end of the spectrum lay the Aristotelians of Padua, who promoted a methodological and naturalistic reading of Aristotle and left the study of metaphysics to theologians.39 In some ways, the relationship between religion and philosophy underwent a similar transformation in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, as evinced by the rise of ʿaqāʾid and logic and the demise of philosophical theology. Of course, none of this is to say that the Ottomanérudits had no interest in nature. The study of nature became a lay occupation as the medrese’s engagement with philosophy reached its nadir. The important and innovative naturalistic tracts from this period are not in learned Arabic but in vernacular Turkish; their authors are not medrese professors but courtiers, physicians, Sufis, and bureaucrats. Con- sequently, the seventeenth-century Ottoman study of nature belongs in a different, nonscholastic textual landscape. One salient feature of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century lay Ottoman naturalism is the authors’ profound command of a large variety of ancient and early medieval sources, including noncanonical ones. In this period, Abbasid naturalists who had fallen into obscurity in the intervening centuries, such as Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, resurface, as do more radical thinkers such as Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (Rhazes).40 The laicization of natural philosophy resulted in the deconfessionalization of discourses on nature. The list of people who would qualify as Ottoman naturalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include Greeks, Jews, and Armenians as well as Muslims. This is evident not only in the long-standing multiculturalism of Ottoman medicine but also in the parallelisms in the intellectual trajectories of different confessional communities, studies of which have thus far remained isolated from one another. Other, equally significant indications of deconfessionalization are the new multiconfessional cliques who realized several large-scale translation projects under the aegis of Mehmed IV and Ahmed III.41 Lay involvement in the discourses on nature also meant that systematicity— specifically, the need to resolve queries about nature in order to reach a pious 231 synthesis—was no longer as significant a concern as it was in the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century medrese.42 Many of the Ottoman naturalistic treatises from the New Medicine seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are erudite and comprehensive, but not nec- in Istanbul essarily systematic. A list of significant nonsystematic treatises would surely include Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s Tuḥfetüʾl-Erīb üʾn-Nāf iʿa Rūḥanī ve-Ṭabīb,43 Katip Çelebi’s Cihan- nüma,44 and İbrahim Müteferrika’s Heyʾetüʾl-qadīme veʾl-Cedīde .45 Hezarfenn Hüse- yin’s work presents itself as a comprehensive Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish bibliography for medical books, a genre that is familiar because of Katip Çelebi’s universal bibliographic lexicon Keşfüʾẓ-ẓünūn, but Tuḥfetüʾl-Erīb is a more focused work. The very long preface of Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s book extolls the virtues of natural philosophy and presents the principles of nature (umūr-ı ṭabīʿiyye) as a necessary preamble to all learning, including the religious sciences.46 While Tuḥfetüʾl-Erīb articulates the main tenets of the Neoplatonic view of nature, it provides a descriptive account rather than following the deductive structure of systematic philosophy. Furthermore, the philosophical position that Hezarfenn Hüseyin takes is at odds both with al-Ghazālī’s and, far more importantly, with Birgili’s views on the study of nature. Birgili had argued that the study of natural philosophy was neither essential nor particularly helpful in the acquisition of true knowledge and in the practice of true religion. Much like al-Ghazālī, Birgili thought that a pious physics was a defense mechanism against apostasy, but the study of nature had no intrinsic worth, epistemic or otherwise. There was also an anti-systematic strand in seventeenth-century Ottoman naturalism, as evinced by the rising interest in the ʿajāʾib ve-ghar āʾib (wonders and curiosities) literature in court circles. As von Hees has argued, this genre is the Islamic equivalent of natural history, which, despite its Aristotelian pedigree, had no name in classical Arabic thought. Two complete Turkish translations of Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib al-makhluqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt appeared in the late seventeenth century alongside a constellation of works with similar content and titles. Qazwīnī’s work was a set of skeptical queries against Aristotle, where he argued that certain phenomena, sites, and creatures in the Islamic geography could not be explained away by systematic philosophy. According to Qazwīnī and some late seventeenth-century Ottoman authors, the creation was so vast and so mysterious that it was beyond human comprehension.47 Nevertheless, systematic philosophy, or ḥikmet, continued to be one of the stake- holders in Ottoman naturalism. Avicennisms continued to occupy the philosophical mainstream in the seventeenth century. The Köprülü Library, established in the late seventeenth century, included mostly Avicenna’s works under ḥikmet, where copies of al-Ishārāt wa-ʾl-tanbīhāt (Remarks and Admonitions) were exceptionally popular. The illuminationist philosophy ishrāq( ) of Shahrazūrī and Mulla Sadra, which I consider under the general rubric of Avicennism, also features prominently in the catalog.48 Illuminationism continued to pique interest in the eighteenth century, but aban- 232 doned its central status to Aristotelianism. Indeed, one of the most revealing texts of the early eighteenth century is Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi’s Turkish translation of Texts in the physics chapter in Shahrazūrī’s Shajarat al-Ilāhiyya , which compares the peripa- Transit tetic and illuminationist views of nature. The rise of Aristotelianism—or, arguably, Averroism—in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire was partly a response to the changing intellectual landscape of Istanbul. Greek physicians and dragomans who either had degrees from Padua or had received a Paduan training at the patriar- chal academies in Istanbul and elsewhere were vocal advocates of Aristotelianism. Witness testimony and robust circumstantial evidence even go so far as to suggest that Aristotle was the orthodox philosopher for eighteenth-century Greek scholars, some of whom occupied key positions at the Ottoman court.49 All of this meant that by the early eighteenth century, ḥikmet in general and ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye in particular had also evolved into an occupation for the lay elite. Consequently, the sultanic and vizierial courts played an important role in guiding and mediating natural philosophical debate. Because the private physician was an integral part of every large household, it stands to reason that ṭıbb-ı cedīd would become the subject of courtly concern, not only from a regulatory perspective, which is well documented, but also from a philosophical perspective.

The Philosophy of Ẓıbb-ı Cedīd

As ṭıbb-ı cedīd pushed the disciplinary limits of the craft of medicine and entered philosophical territory, the view that it espoused was none other than empiricism. By arguing that experience (tecrübe) yielded theoretical knowledge, the new physician was also refashioning a more prestigious identity for himself as a type of philosopher. While experiential knowledge had historically been a part of medicine in the Islamic world, saying that experience was a valid path to philosophical truth was a novel claim, one that emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ṭıbb-ı cedīd texts addressed to the courts by such authors as Ibn Sallūm, Ḥasan Efendi, and Ömer Şifai straddled the boundary between the theory of nature and the practice of medicine. Many of them were true to the ancient sense of “empirical medicine,” that is, they were primarily concerned with matching observed diseases with working cures without simultaneously delving into the causal structure or mechanism of disease. However, a few of these texts also included entire chapters devoted to natural philosophy, especially regarding astrology, the generation of life, and the theory of matter.50 Speaking about the relationship between natural philosophy and ṭıbb-ı cedīd, Ḥasan said,

Our Prophet, the Sultan of the entire universe, who is most wise in all matters and is the highest authority among those who study the bodies and the 233 heavens, may God bless his name, has said: “Science, it is two. First is the science of bodies, and second, the religious sciences.” . . . When it comes New Medicine to medicine, it is best to lend an ear only to the skilled [ḥādhıq] physician in Istanbul who has mastered the methods and the branches of this science, and who is known to be a virtuous man. . . . And, henceforth, let it also be known that Muslim learned physicians [ḥükemāʾ] and philosophers [feylesūfān] of all religions often agree that medicine is a part of natural philosophy ḥ[ ikmet-i tabīʿiyye], since the subject of natural philosophy is the principles behind all creation. . . . Both ancient medicine and new medicine draw from the philosophy of nature and from the secrets of nature. These two are stuck to one another like the seen and the hidden aspects of a single thing. In consideration of the parts that make up new medicine, learned physicians say that, on the surface, medicine is a branch of natural philosophy, but, in reality, natural philosophy is a branch of medicine. For, in new medicine, someone who has mastered the foundations of medicine can assess the qualities of things that are near him, and can abstract the qualities from other spirits, passions, appearances and accidents. He can also judge the qualities and natures of things in themselves, he can see the powers, the forces, and the quantities of simple and composite natures . . . he can reckon the secrets and essences in nature and observe the forces between the higher and lower worlds. . . . By virtue of these, he understands the truth and knows with certainty the entirety of natural philosophy.51

In this passage, Ḥasan leveled two very significant arguments. First, he reversed the hierarchy between theoretical knowledge (ʿilm) and practice (ʿamel). He claimed that practicing medicine made the textual study of natural philosophy superfluous. Second, he reversed the relationship of subordination between ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye and ṭıbb-ı cedīd. While regular medicine could have been one of the branches (fürūʿ) of natural philosophy, new medicine was superordinate to the theoretical knowledge of nature. Ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye and ṭıbb-ı cedīd were coextensive in terms of their content, but ṭıbb-ı cedīd’s empirical methodology was superior to philosophy’s deductive apparatus. Ḥasan’s attempt to monopolize natural philosophy clearly drew from the expansion of the physician’s skill set with the advent of ṭıbb-ı cedīd. In order to administer Paracelsian drugs effectively, the physician now also knew about vegetable, animal, and mineral worlds and about the heavens. Because ṭıbb-ı cedīd borrowed from esoteric practices of astrology and alchemy, it could also lay claim to knowledge about not only the phenomenal (ẓāhir) world but also the hidden aspects (bāṭın) of nature. Consequently, the new physician was superior to the old natural philosopher in every way. In the sixteenth century, philosophy (ḥikmet) represented the pinnacle of medical knowledge in the ʿilmiyye (the learned profession). In the eighteenth century, 234 as vernacular authors outnumbered the scholiasts, it was ḥadhāqat and not ḥikmet that made a physician perfect (kāmil). The most insipid and Whiggish translation Texts in of ḥadhāqat is “expertise.” Especially in medicine, the word carried quite a different Transit meaning and referred to a particular type of expertise: it meant the possession of technical skill.52 The word has a strange ring, and it definitely stands out from a wide variety of words that also denote different types of expertise:ehliyyet , which means the mastery of a craft, such as baking;m aʿrifet, which means grasping the practical wisdom of something, especially jurisprudence; ḥikmet, which means wisdom and shares the same root with the ambiguous word ḥakīm, which can mean both a philosopher and a learned physician; and, finally,ʿi lm, which is similar to the Greek episteme and Latin scientia. The first printed Arabic-Turkish dictionary, which came out in 1732, definedḥ adhāqat as the mastery of an art, especially an art pertaining to nature.53 Ṭıbb-ı cedīd provided not only a methodology that was superior to that of ḥik- met, but also greater potential utility. The physicians offered, albeit with meager success, something that everyone wanted: fast and effective cures for practically any illness. Fast cures and reproducibility, thanks to detailed recipes that formed the bulk of nearly all ṭıbb-ı cedīd texts, were two of the movement’s greatest advantages. As Shefer-Mossensohn remarked, staying healthy at all times was essential to a successful administrative career. Ottoman grandees always kept good physicians— sometimes foreign ones—in their households.54 According to both Ibn Sallūm and Ḥasan, medicine was more important than fiqh for the same reasons that it was inexpedient to indulge in too much coffee, tobacco, or alcohol: being unhealthy and being drunk both made men incapable of carrying out their duties and of acting in a refined manner.55 In line with the needs of the elite, Rhazes’s medical writings also experienced a revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.56 Nonphysicians sought to learn a modicum of medicine in order to take care of themselves.57 Süleyman Efendi, in his Aqrabādhīn-i Cedīd, went so far as to call the Paracelsian recipes the “water of life” and “ḥalāl magic.” 58 The technically skilled (ḥādhıq) physician could provide just what the grandees needed. If this physician was also a practitioner of new medicine, the rewards were great, but so were the risks. A number of other important changes also took place at the turn of the eighteenth century that brought natural philosophy and ṭıbb-ı cedīd closer together. Süleyman Efendi, a nephew of Ibn Sallūm’s who served as one of the many palace physicians and, as noted above, completed his uncle’s Aqrabādhīn-i Cedīd, called the physicians ʿulemāʾ-i ṣınāʿat (scholars of the arts).59 Nuh b. Abdülmennan, who served as ḥekīmbaşı until 1707 and remained a vocal opponent of ṭıbb-ı cedīd, said that the physicians were now among the ʿulemāʾ-i ḥikmet (scholars of philosophy).60 Other developments, such as the prevalence of ex-müneccimbaşı s (chief astrologers) in the post of ḥekīmbaşı at the turn of the century, suggest that the occupation of being a palace physician now required the post-holders to be competent in all fields pertaining to nature.61 235 As physicians grew closer to the political center, medicine’s cultural and epistemic value underwent a parallel improvement. Medical manuscripts from the late New Medicine seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries suggest that the general post-classical in Istanbul image of the physician was changing in Istanbul in step with the developments in Europe. Medicine became both very prestigious and very lucrative for Muslims at the turn of the eighteenth century. It is easy to see this change not only from those who switched out of a teaching or judicial career in order to become a palace physician, but also from the rising ranks (paye) of the ḥekīmbaşı: while a ḥekīmbaşı could expect to get sizeable but not stellar income as a retainer (arpalık) in Edirne or Tekfurdağı (Tekirdağ/Rodosto) in the seventeenth century, many ḥekīmbaşıs in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries rose to the rank of chief judge of Rumelia or Anatolia—the second- and third-highest-ranking positions, respectively, in the ʿilmiyye.62 In 1748, Hayatizade Mehmed Emin (another grandson of Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi) even became the top scholar of the empire, the sheik al-Islam, after having served as ḥekīmbaşı.63

The Emerging “Two Cultures” Problem in the Eighteenth Century

The refashioning ofṭ ıbb-ı cedīd and the changing status of the ḥekīmbaşı within the learned establishment also signaled a budding “two cultures” problem. While the medrese and the Arabic language continued to dominate religious learning, the court and the Turkish language became the center of Ottoman naturalism. Tradition ruled the former; innovation inspired the latter. Natural knowledge became a subject of special interest for the Ottoman state, as demonstrated not only by eighteenth-century natural philosopher–turned–grand viziers such as Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa and Mehmed Said, but also by the numerous ventures of the state to control the natural world.64 The prefatory material in all medical texts, however, “new” or not, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invariably included a treatment of the truth and dignity of medicine, and many of them propounded the idea that medicine belonged with other branches of naturalism, not with the medrese sciences. These texts repur- posed a well-known false hadith, “Science, ’tis two: the science of bodies and the science of religions,” to strengthen their claims to priority over and independence from the religious sciences, that is, the sciences of medrese.65 This phrase had deep roots in Islamic medicine, but historically, emphasis had been on the utility of medicine for the Islamic community. In the eighteenth century, the phrase expressed a more thoroughgoing epistemological and cultural agenda that bordered on materialism. The physicians’ attempts to improve their standing both socially and epistemi- cally were successful. An edict from 1729 revoked the prior ban on chemical medicine.66 Other developments in the late 1720s also suggest that medicine, particularly ṭıbb-ı cedīd, had begun to infiltrate the palace and to dominate the discourse on naturalism. Johann Christian Kundmann, a physician from Breslau who was particularly interested in disease outbreaks in Ottoman port towns, reported that his friend 236 Johann Friedrich Bachstrom, a Pietist doctor and naturalist, proposed to establish a medico-physical academy at the palace. Marquis de Villeneuve, who was the French Texts in ambassador to the Porte at this time, called the same enterprise an “université de Transit médecine.” While the academy never came to pass because of the revolt of 1730, the plans to establish such an academy are certainly in line with broader trends in Ottoman naturalism. Considering that a group of ṭıbb-ı cedīd texts were presented to the sultan around the same time, it is also possible that they were the subject of fruitful courtly debate.67 It is therefore not surprising that it was yet another ḥekīmbaşı, Abbas Vesim (d. 1767), who wrote easily the most radical philosophical text of the early eighteenth century: The Opinions of Vesim (ca. 1740). In the preface, Abbas Vesim made his sympathies for new philosophies clear by saying that the aspiring physician first had to master mechanics and the laws of chemistry before embarking on medical training, as “the human body [was] similar to a recirculating fountain.”68 Vesim argued that air moved the human body, which accounted for the similarity between the body and a machine, and that the human body was composed of atoms, not Aristotelian elements. While he was clearly aware of the atomism of the kelām, he believed that most theologians were engrossed in the details of logic and in idle disputation.69 While the corpuscularian theory had a history in Islam, Muslim philosophers had to operationalize the doctrine. In other words, the custodians of philosophy lacked the experiential power of ṭıbb-ı cedīd. Thus, instead of providing a theological argument in favor of atomism, Vesim simply said, “the four-element theory of the ancients c[ould] not stand up to experimental verification.” Vesim cited Robert Boyle in support of his corpuscularian conviction. He claimed that the Englishman had conclusively proved that water and fire did not mix—and that it was obvious (belli) that bodies were composed of very small particles, or corpuscles.70 According to Vesim, European naturalists had long surpassed traditional Muslim learning because they did not waste time on religious studies but could focus instead on gaining valuable experiential knowledge about nature. The Ottoman naturalists had to gain more experience and to read books in Latin, where one could truly learn about experimental philosophy.71 With Vesim, ṭıbb-ı cedīd had finally matured as the main element in Ottoman ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye.

Notes

1. Terceme-i Ṭıbb-ı Cedīd, Milli Yazmalar ms 112. On this work, see Natalia Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert im fruhneuzeitlichen Istanbul: Studien zur Rezeption des Paracelsismus im Werk des osmanischen Arztes Ṣaliḥ b. Naṣrullah Ibn Sallum al-Ḥalabi (Freiburg im Breisgau: Centaurus, 2012), 365–66. On the identification of this manuscript, see Talat Dinar, “Ṭıbb-ı cedīd Yazmaları Üzerine Bazı Tespitler,” Turkish Studies 7, no. 4 (2012): 1541–46. 2. See Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 364, and Nil Sarı and M. Bedizel Zülfikar, “The Paracelsian Influence on Ottoman Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Transfer of Modern Science and Technology to the Muslim World, ed. Ekmeleddin İhsanoglu (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1992), 157–79. Other important examples include Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi the Younger’s Düstūrü ʾl-ṭabīb fī qavānīn mīzān al-terkīb and Mehmed Said’s Mizānüʾl-Nabıḍ. 3. Johann Christian Kundmann, Rariora naturae et artis, item in re medica (Breslau and Leipzig: 237 Hubert, 1737), 710–11. Also see French ambassador de Villeneuve’s letters to the keeper of the seals, BnF Suppl. Fr. 2272B, 19v–20r. New Medicine 4. A recent notable study other than Bachour’s is Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, “An Ottoman Physi- in Istanbul cian and His Social and Intellectual Milieu: The Case of Salih bin Nasrallah Ibn Sallum,”Studia Islamica, n.s., 1 (2011): 133–58. 5. Paul Richter, “Paracelsus im Lichte des Orients,” Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissen- schaften und der Technik 6 (1913): 294–304. 6. See, in addition to the works listed above, Manfred Ullmann, Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970); Felix Klein-Franke, “Paracelsus Arabus. Eine Studie zur ‘alchemistischen Medizin’ im Orient,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 10, no. 1 (1975): 50–54; and Emilie Savage-Smith, “Drug Therapy of Eye Diseases in Seventeenth-Century Islamic Medicine: The Influence of the ‘New Chemistry’ of the Para- celsians,” Pharmacy in History 29, no. 1 (1987): 3–28. Ayten Aydın has published extensively on ṭıbb-ı cedīd; for a synoptic overview, see her “Reflections of Iatrochemistry on Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Medicine,” Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 22 (2009): 52–59. 7. Currently, I am also working on Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s (d. 1691) Tuḥfetüʾl-Erīb üʾn-Nāf iʿa Rūḥānī ve-Ṭabīb. Another well-known humanist and naturalist of the late seventeenth century is Rodosizade Mehmed (d. 1701). 8. On Greek humanism, see G. P. Henderson, The Revival of Greek Thought, 1620–1830 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1970). On Ottoman Hellenism, see Gülçin Tunalı, “Another Kind of Hellenism? Appro- priation of Ancient Athens via Greek Channels for the Sake of Good Advice as Reflected inTarih- i Medinetüʾl-Hükema ” (diss., Ruhr Universität Bochum, 2012). On the proliferation of Greek Aristotelian- ism in the Ottoman Empire, see my “Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Eighteenth Century: Esad of Ioannina and Greek Aristotelianism at the Ottoman Court,”Journal of Ottoman Studies 41 (2013): 125–59. 9. Savage-Smith, “Drug Therapy,” 6–7. Bachour,Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 60–62. 10. For a brief discussion of Abbas Vesim’s Düstūrüʾl-Vesīm fi Ṭıbbüʾl-Cedīd veʾl-Qadīm , see below. 11. Nil Sarı, “Educating the Ottoman Physician,”Yeni Tıp Tarihi Araştırmaları 1 (1995): 11–54. 12. Rhoads Murphey, “Ottoman Medicine and Transculturalism from the Sixteenth Through the Eighteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66 (1992): 376–403. For an accessible period survey of seventeenth-century ʿulemāʾ, see Ali Uğur’s The Ottoman ʿUlemā in the Mid-17th Century: An Analysis of the Vaḳāʾi ʿüʾl-fużalā of Meḥmed Şeyḫī Ef. (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1986). 13. The most famous example is Alexander Mavrocordato (d. 1710), but Panagiotes Nikousios (d. 1673), Daniel de Fonseca, and many others seem to have followed this route. See Andrei Pippidi, Hommes et idées du Sud-Est européen à l’aube de l’âge moderne (Paris: CNRS, 1980). 14. See the preface (1v–4r) to Nuh b. Abdülmennan, Terceme-i aqrābādhīn-i Melichio, Şehid Ali Paşa ms 2012. 15. Well-known examples include Nuh b. Abdülmennan and Israel Conegliano in the late seventeenth century and Daniel de Fonseca and Diamantes Vlastos in the early eighteenth century. 16. Laurence Brockliss, “Medical Education and Centres of Excellence in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Towards an Identification,” in Centres of Medical Excellence? Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500–1789, ed. Ole Peter Grell et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 17–46; see 20. 17. For example, the Ottoman administrative elite often employed European physicians. Such physicians included Capuchin monks, Jesuits, Portuguese Jews, Italians, and Frenchmen, some of whom ended up converting to Islam. See, for instance, Nouveaux Mémoires de la Compagnie de Jesus, dans le Levant, vol. 8 (Paris: Frères Guerin, 1745), 28–29. 18. Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, 50. 19. “Next to the Bayezid Han mosque is a hospital set in a heavenly garden. There, one also finds a medical medrese. Its cloisters are filled with students, expert physicians ḥ[ ükemā-i ḥādhiqī] and perfect surgeons, who dispute about divine Plato, Hippocrates, Socrates, Aristotle, Galen and Pythagoras the Monotheist all day. Their methods are many times superior to that of Aristotle himself. The prophet has said: ‘Science, it is two: First comes the science of bodies, and then comes the science of religions.’ All of them religiously study the time-honored books in the science of medicine, and try to find a cure for the ailments of the son of man.” Evliya Çelebi, Seyāhatnāmeh, vol. 3, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi, 2000), 363. 238 20. Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, 34. 21. Bachour claims that it was Nicholas who actually did the translations under Ibn Sallūm’s supervision. Ibn Sallūm himself seems to have tested the recipes and added some of his own into the Texts in final products. Transit 22. On Venetian drugs in the Ottoman marketplace, see Robert Mantran, La vie quotidienne à Constantinople au temps de Soliman le Magnifique et de ses successeurs (XVI et XVII siècles) (Paris: Hachette, 1965), 154. On French drugs, see Edhem Eldem, “Le commerce des herbes, drogues et épices à Istanbul (XVIIIe siècle),” in Herbes, drogues et épices en Méditerranée (Paris: CNRS, 1988), 125–38. 23. For example, it was Süleyman Efendi (d. 1715), Ibn Sallūm’s nephew and Hayatizade’s son in law, who prepared Aqrābādhīn-i Cedīd (The new pharmacopoeia) in the late seventeenth century. Ṭıbb-ı cedīd gained widespread acceptance when Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi’s grandson, who bore the same name, was the ḥekīmbaşı between 1724 and 1738. 24. See Markus Köhbach, “Europaische Arzte im Osmanischen Reich am Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts—der Fall Sinasi,” Sudhoffs Archiv 64, no. 1 (1980): 79–85. 25. Aqrābādhīn-i Cedīd, Nuruosmaniye ms 3481, 2r–4r. 26. Köhbach’s “Europaische Arzte” transliterates and translates into German the following entry from an anonymous chronicle located in Diez Quarto ms 75/4:

It is clear that there is no one who has drawn any benefit from those that follow the path of chemical medicine, since their treatments seem innocent at first and one suffers harm only later. These are the ones who try to say that they can draw out the essence of every medicine and every object, and do the job with an ounce of medicine rather than ten. However, the people of our lands are not well versed in these practices. According to the principles of medicine, the fruit of the golden shower tree is collected when ripe, pressed with almond oil, added to an ounce of melon seed and half an ounce of cinnamon and mixed with chicken stock. This is the absolutely correct way [qāʿide-i kulliyye] to prepare this medicine in our lands, whereas those whom chemical medicine afflicts extract the essence of the fruit of the golden shower tree, and serve a dirham of it as medicine. It is more effective than the 10-dirham recipe, but because it is effective many times over and agitates other conditions, it does more harm than good. And it is not just the golden shower tree that they treat this way, they use the same principle in other types of medicine as well. Some French and English physicians of this sort came to Edirne as a group this year, and made a reputation for themselves. [T]here was a talented scribe who went by the nickname of Şinasi. Once he began to show symptoms of illness, he received services from one of these physicians. Once he was cured, he said to them, “I am now well, glory be to God in the highest, but I feel somewhat weak.” They began to discuss his condition and told him that he should take one of their pills [habb] and that he would surely be pleased with the results. He took the pill and within twenty-four hours, he was dead. The chief physician Nuh Efendi brought in one of them and forced him to take two of the pills that he had given to Şinasi, but nothing happened. However, because they are not beyond suspicion, I hereby order their shop shut down, and they are hereby ordered not to open up a shop in Istanbul, Edirne or anywhere else in the lands of Islam.

The edict of 1704 reads:

The Municipal Governor and the Judge of Istanbul, as well as the Head of the Police Corps [Sekbanbaşı] are hereby ordered: Some European [Frenk] physicians have abandoned the path of ancient medicine, and those they medicate in the fashion that goes by the name of new medicine have suffered harm as a result of their practices. I have already banished Mehmed the Convert as well as his company, which includes a European physician, from Edirne. It is my sublime order that you search for European physicians in the vicinity of Istanbul and that you banish them. And, as long as I am in power in this city, you are to keep searching for European physicians. Furthermore, you are to examine all practicing physicians at once, and close the shops of incompetent physicians. Those whose skill ḥ[ adhāqat] and virtue are clear are to report to the most felicitous scholar among scholars, Nuh, who is serving as the Chief Physician at 239 a level of authority equivalent to that of the Chief Judge of Rumelia [Ottoman Europe], for a sealed certificate. Except for those who have been examined by the aforementioned scholar, physicians who have come to these lands from Europe and set up medical shops will likewise be New Medicine banished. Even those in possession of a sealed certificate will be advised not to employ anyone in Istanbul else to work in their shops. After you have completed these duties, you are hereby informed of my sublime desire through this Imperial Edict, you must report to the palace.

See Ahmet Refik,On İkinci Asr-ı Hicride İstanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1930), 37–38. 27. Hamidiye ms 1020, 3r. 28. Mizānüʾl-Terkīb , Nuruosmaniye ms 2602, 6r–8r. 29. Hezarfenn Hüseyin wrote a dictionary of herbs in the late seventeenth century. See Ekrem Demir, “Hezarfen Hüseyin b. Caʾfer İstanköyiʾnin Fihrisüʾl-Ervam Adlı Eserinde Geçen Bitki Adları,” Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 46 (2012): 1–28. Mehmed Said, erstwhile scribe and future grand vizier, also wrote a very large polyglot medical dictionary, Ferāʾidüʾl-Müfredāt (Esad Efendi ms 2489), possibly with the help of his personal physician. 30. Köhbach, “Europaische Arzte”; Aydın, “Reflections,” 53; Bachour,Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 374–78. 31. Shefer-Mossensohn’s “Ibn Sallum” situates the movement in its historical context. 32. Küçük, “Natural Philosophy and Politics.” 33. Cevat İzgi, Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim (Istanbul: İz, 1997), 2:115–27. Also see Uğur, Ottoman ʿUlemā, passim. 34. Mehmed b. Mustafa El-Vani, Tercemetüʾṣ-Ṣıḥāḥüʾl-Cevherī, trans. İbrahim Müteferrika et al. (Istanbul, 1729), n.p. 35. Katip Çelebi, “Mīzānü ʾl-ḥaqq fī Ikhtiyārū ʾl-aḥaqq,” Mecmua-i Ulum, 2, 1297 [1880], 1–97; see 3–4. Mustafa Sait Yazıcıoğlu, “XV. ve XVI. Yüzyıllarda Osmanlı Medreselerinde Ilm-i Kelam Öğretimi ve Genel Eğitim Içindeki Yeri,” Islam Ilimleri Enstitüsü Dergisi 4 (1980): 273–83. For examples of individual courses of study in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Izgi, Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim, 1:99–102. 36. On Birgili, see Hans Georg Majer, “Sozialgeschichtliche Probleme um Ulema und Derwische im Osmanischen Reich,” in I. Milletlerarası Türkoloji Kongresi, Istanbul, 15–20.10.1973, Tebliğler 1: Türk Tarihi (Istanbul: Tercüman, 1979), 218–33. Michael A. Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 323–30. Khaled El-Rouayheb, for good reasons drawn from his own research on logic, does not share this sentiment. See Khaled El-Rouayheb, “The Myth of ‘The Triumph of Fanaticism’ in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire,”Die Welt des Islams 48 (2008): 196–221. 37. Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 35–63. Derin Terzioğlu, “Where ʿİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization,”Past and Present 220 (2013): 79–114. 38. Günter Frank, “Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560): Reformer and Philosopher,” in Philoso- phers of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Richard Blum, trans. Brian McNeil (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 148–63. Ricardo Pozzo, “Logic and Metaphysics in German Philosophy from Melanchthon to Hegel,” in Approaches to Metaphysics, ed. William Sweet (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 62: “Melanchthon‚ like many other Renaissance philosophers‚ completely neglected the systematic role played by metaphysics arguing that (a) logic can take the place of metaphysics with regard to assessing principles; (b) metaphysics is not only useless with regard to the concept of God‚ it is pernicious; and (c) the main advantage of metaphysics is to be seen in grammar—one needs only to think about the 32 definitions of logical concepts given by Aristotle inMetaphysica Delta or about the criteria for truth and certainty in Lambda.” 39. See Nicholas Jardine, “Keeping Order in the School of Padua: Jacopo Zabarella and Francesco Piccolomini on the Offices of Philosophy,” in Method and Order in Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotle Commentary Tradition, ed. Daniel Di Liscia, Eckhard Kessler, and Charlotte Methuen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 183–210; in the same volume, see also Heikki Mikkeli, “The Foundation of 240 an Autonomous Natural Philosophy: Zabarella on the Classification of Arts and Sciences,” 211–28. 40. This revival was also potentially a competitive response to similar developments in the Safa- vid Empire, which Sabine Schmidtke calls an Islamic Renaissance. However, more research is needed Texts in before articulating a causal mechanism for the Ottoman intellectual trends in the seventeenth century. Transit 41. See Murphey, “Ottoman Medicine and Transculturalism.” 42. F. Jamil Ragep, “Freeing Astronomy from Philosophy: An Aspect of Islamic Influence of Sci- ence,” Osiris 16 (2001): 49–64, 66–72; İhsan Fazlıoğlu, “The Samarqand Mathematical-Astronomical School: A Basis for Ottoman Philosophy and Science,”Journal for the History of Arabic Science 14, no. 3 (2008): 3–68. 43. Reşid Efendi ms 710. This item is bound with two pharmacopoeia, one based on ṭıbb-ı cedīd and written by Ibn Sallūm, and another in the Galenic tradition written by Derviş Siyahi. 44. The sultanic press printed an edition of this work in 1732. On Cihannüma, see Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit. Entstehung und Gedankenwelt von Katib Celebis Gihannüma (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2003). 45. Askeri Müze ms 1456. 46. Reşid Efendi ms 710, 92v: “Students must know about the principles of nature. It is not permis- sible for a student to engage in the higher sciences without having mastered these principles” (Ṭāliblere umūr-ı ṭabīʿeyeyi bilmek ghāyet mühimm ve elzemdir. Bu umūr-ı ṭabīʿiyyeyi bilmeden ʿalīyle mübāşeret etmek itmek cāʾiz değildir). 47. Syrinx von Hees has published a number of books and articles on Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt. At least some ʿajāʾib ve-gharāʾib books are essentially about geography. See, for example, Hüseyin b. Mehmed’s (Esaf Efendi ms 1892) and Rodosizade Mehmed’s (Fatih ms 4158) Turkish translations. For an overview of the Ottoman context, see Günay Kut,Acaibüʾl- Mahlukat (Istanbul: Simurg, 2011). Also see Marinos Sariyannis, “Of Ottoman Ghosts, Vampires, and Sorcerers: An Old Discussion Dis- interred,” Archivum Ottomanicum 30 (2013): 195–220. 48. Ramazan Şeşen et al., eds., Fihris Makhṭūtāt maktabat Köprūlū = Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Koprulu Library (Istanbul: Research Center for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 1986), 1:422–47. In his recent edition of Katip Çelebi’s Balance of Truth, Süleyman Uludağ situates this key thinker as well as many others among the adherents of ishrāq: see Katip Çelebi, Mīzānü ʾl-ḥaqq fī Ikhtiyārū ʾl-a ḥaqq, trans. and ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay and Süleyman Uludağ (Istanbul: Kabalcı, 2008). This evidence suggests that, at some level, there was a Persian inflection onḥ ikmet in the seventeenth century. 49. Küçük, “Natural Philosophy and Politics.” 50. One notable example is Ömer b. Sinan’s (d. 1707) Künūzü ḥayātū ʾl-insān ve-qavānīn- i eṭibbāʾ feylesūfān (The book of the treasures of human life and the canons of philosopher-physicians), Şehid Ali Paşa ms 2085; see 1r–12r for Ömer’s discussion of the origins of life. For judicial astrology, see 154v–157v. Also see Sarı and Bedizel Zülfikar, “Paracelsian Influence,” 158–9. 51. Milli Yazmalar ms 112, 2r–v. 52. Ḩadhāqat is not specific to medicine, but encompasses other areas as well. See, for example, Abbas Vesim, Zic-i Uluğ Beg, Hamidiye ms 858. 53. Tercemetuʾṣ-Ṣıḥaḥuʾl-Cevheri, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Sultanic Press, 1729), 2:165. 54. Shefer, Ottoman Medicine, 47–48. 55. Ibid., 44; Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 67. 56. On the seventeenth-century revival often attributed to Ibn Sallūm, see Bachour,Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 136–37. Ali Münşi (d. 1742), an eighteenth-century adherent of ṭıbb-ı cedīd, also translated the work: see Hamidiye ms 1013. 57. On the general popularity of medicine, see Shefer-Mossensohn, “Ibn Sallum.” A more specific example is reported by Israel Conegliano. His memoirs suggest that even Ottoman nonphysicians were quite aware of the medical book market in Europe. For example, a certain Ali Efendi requested a copy of Johann Helffrich Jüncken’sDer sichere Medicus oder Leib-Arzt, welcher lehret wie ein Mensch, ob er schon von der Medicin keine Profession macht; dennoch so wohl seine eigene Constitution leicht erkennen als in anfallenden Kranckheiten sich finden und mit rathen kan as soon as the book was published in 1698. David Kaufmann, Dr. Israel Conegliano und seine Verdienste um die Republik Venedig bis nach dem Frieden von Carlowitz (Budapest: Alkalay, 1895), xcvii. 241 58. Hekimoğlu ms 565, 7r. 59. Ibid., 3v. 60. Nuh b. Abdülmennan, Şehid Ali Paşa ms 2012, 20r. New Medicine 61. Ali Haydar Bayat, Osmanlı Devletinde Ḥekīmbaşılık Kurumu ve Ḥekīmbaşılar (Ankara: Atatürk in Istanbul Kültür Merkezi Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2000), 82–83. On the post of ḥekīmbaşı, also see Tayyip Gökbilgin, “Ḥekīm-bashī,” in EI2, vol. 3, 339–40. 62. Bayat, Ḥekīmbaşılık, 84. 63. Ibid., 100–101. 64. On Hekimoğlu and Mehmed Said, see Osmanzade Taʾib et al., Ḥadīqatü ʾl-vüzerā (Istanbul: Ceride-i Havadis, 1854), 34, 41, 43, 84. On the firefighting brigade, see Turgut Kut, “Ülkemizde Yangın Tulumbasını İlk Kez İmal Eden Gerçek Davudʾun ve Bazı Tulumbacıların Mezar Taşları,” Tarih Dergisi 32 (2011): 771–88. For a synoptic overview of the court’s industrial ventures, see Mehmet Genç, “18. Yüzyılda Osmanlı Sanayiinde Gelişmeler ve Devletin Rolü,” Yeni Türkiye 32 (2000): 179–84. 65. Bachour, Oswaldus Crollius und Daniel Sennert, 67. Of course, one of the primary targets of this saying would have been prophetic medicine, which had experienced a revival especially in the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire (e.g., ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulsī). 66. My [Ahmed III’s] order to Ḥekīmbaşı Hayatizade Mustafa Feyzi (the Younger):

It is imperative that physicians follow the canons of medicine and use the knowledge they have gained through experience to prescribe the remedies to the patients. Many of those who have recently opened medical shops in Istanbul are not aware of the practical and theoretical foundations of medicine. Furthermore, they appear unwilling to learn and lack the relevant talents. They have opened shops wherever they like through their contacts with the administration and they have caused deaths as a result of the ill-conceived remedies and harmful cures that they have prescribed. One can no longer tell the competent physician from the incompetent one, and the profession has fallen out of favor with the people. Consequently, one can hardly find a student who aspires to be a physician. In the great city of Istanbul, it is imperative to have doctors who earn the respect of the medical community with their skill and talent, since they are the ones who honor and draw attention to the medical profession. You are hereby ordered to draw up a list of Muslim, Christian and Jewish physicians who have shops in Istanbul, Galata and Uskudar. Those who are medical apprentices are to be issued a certificate of apprenticeship, are not to be allowed to prescribe medicine before they have completed their training, and are to be punished if they do not comply. . . . Henceforth, when a physician dies, it will be the most advanced one of the five journeymen physicians who work under him that shall replace him, and those whose skill [ḥadhāqat] is not proven shall never receive an appointment as a favor.

67. Kundmann, Rariora, 710–11: “The late Grand Vizier was a peculiar lover of learning who had a complete mastery of the Latin language, since he had translated Julius Caesar, Curtius [Quintus Curtius Rufus, historian, author of Historiae Alexandri Magni—trans.] as well as Justinus [Marcus Junianus Justinus, historian, author of Libri XLIV historiarum Philippicarum—trans.], and incorporated the lives and deeds of Turkish Sultans (Kayser) [into his translations]. He held Mathematics in particularly high esteem. He also often observed referiren( ) physical experiments (experimenta physica) and mathematical demonstrations from the French Journal des Sçavans. At the same time, he wondered if such a society could not be sustained in Istanbul. And, indeed, the Director [Mehmed Said Efendi, Yirmisekiz Mehmed Celebi’s son] had brought in a few learned Frenchmen, and also those Turks who were better acquainted with such studies.” 68. Ragıppaşa ms 946, 2v. 69. Ibid., 616r. 70. Ibid., 4r. 71. Ibid., 618r–v.

242

Texts in Transit Contributors

Mushegh Asatryan is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Muslim Cultures at the Uni- versity of Calgary. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale in 2012, and his research interests include the religious and social history of the medieval Islamic Middle East. His book on the history of the early Shiite Ghulat is forthcoming in 2016, and his publications include “Bankers and Politics: The Network of Shiʿi Moneychangers in Eighth–Ninth Century Kufa and Their Role in the Shiʿi Community,” Journal of Persianate Studies 7 (2014), and “An Early Shiʿi Cosmology: Kitāb al-ashbāḥ wa l-aẓilla and Its Milieu,” Studia Islamica 110 (2015).

Brian N. Becker is Assistant Professor of History at Delta State University. He is the author of “New Evidence for Genoese Cryptography in the Late Fifteenth Cen- tury: Antonio De Montaldo’s Cifrario of 1477 and the Defense of Chios Against the Ottomans,” in the edited collectionThe Ottomans and Europe: Travel, Encounter, and Interaction from the Early Classical Period Until the End of the 18th Century (2010). His research focuses on cross-cultural and cross-confessional interaction and exchange in the medieval Mediterranean world.

Leonardo Capezzone is Associate Professor of Islamic History at Sapienza–Univer- sity of Rome. His main interests are focused on the history of early Shiism and the history of the forms of intellectual rebellion in medieval Islam. Among his publications are “Religions of Love: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (with David Niren- berg) in The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions (2015), and Medioevo arabo: Una storia dell’islam medievale (2016).

Leigh Chipman (Ph.D. 2006, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is currently Adjunct Lecturer at the Rothberg International School, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Chipman’s research interests are the social and intellectual history of medicine and science in the Islamicate world, and she is working at present on the reception of Galen in pharmacology. Her recent book (co-authored with Efraim Lev) is Medical Prescriptions in the Cambridge Genizah Collections: Practical Medicine and Pharma- cology in Medieval Egypt (2012).

Ofer Elior is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main research interest is the reception of science and philosophy among Jews in the middle ages and early modern period. His A Spirit of Grace Passed Before My Face: Jews, Science, and Reading, 1210–1896 (in Hebrew) is forthcoming. Zohar Hadromi-Allouche is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Aber- deen. She specializes in medieval Islam, with particular attention to religious sources, such as the Qurʾan and commentary, and Muhammad’s prophetic tradition. Her research applies literary and comparative approaches to these religious texts as a means of exploring literary paradigms within them and highlighting the transitions and transformations of ideas—both within the Islamic context and between Islam and other traditions. Her current work focuses on the image of Eve in the Muslim tradition. She is also the co-editor of Fall Narratives (forthcoming).

B. Harun Küçük is Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on philosophies of nature and scientific practices in the early modern Ottoman Empire. He is currently finishing a book on Ottoman science between 1650 and 1750.

Y. Tzvi Langermann earned his doctorate in History of Science at Harvard. He currently teaches in the Department of Arabic, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. Among his most recent publications are two texts and studies, co-authored with Gerrit Bos: The Jawāmiʾ (“Alexandrian Summaries”) of Galen’s “On Critical Days”: Editions and Translations of the Two Extant Versions (2014), and Maimonides: On Rules Regarding the Practical Part of the Medical Art (2014).

Robert G. Morrison is Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His most recent publication is The Light of the World: Astronomy in al-Andalus (2016), and his current research focuses on scholarly intermediaries between the Ottoman Empire and the Veneto during the Renaissance.

Israel M. Sandman is Researcher at University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He researches medieval Hebrew manuscripts and medieval Jewish thought, critically editing medieval Jewish religious-scientific works, reconstructing their urtexts, and tracing their transmission. His recent publications include “Critical Method of Editing Used by a Late Medieval Ashkenazi Scribe,” Journal of Jewish Studies 65, no. 2 (2014), and “Beyond the Generic: Contextual Interpretations of Mediaeval Jewish Female Iconography,” in the edited collection 244 Visualising Jews Through the Ages: Literary and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism (2015). Contributors Tamás Visi is Associate Professor at the Kurt and Ursula Schubert Centre for Jewish Studies at Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. His main interests are Moravian Jewish history (especially rabbinic literature and other Hebrew sources), medieval Jewish philosophy, and intellectual history. Recent publications include “Berechiah ben Naṭronai ha-Naqdan’s Dodi ve-Neḵdi and the Transfer of Scientific Knowledge from Latin to Hebrew in the Twelfth Century,”Aleph 14, no. 2 (2014). Index of Manuscripts Cited

MS Budapest, Kaufmann 173, 206 MS New York, JTS 2596, 213 MS Florence, Medici 491, 201–2, 203, 206, 215, MS New York, JTS 5512, 202, 203–4, 206, 212, 219 n. 15 213–14, 219 n. 16 MS Istanbul, Ayasofya 4832 MS Oxford-Bodleian, Michael 545, 206–7 MS Istanbul, Reşid Efendi 710, 240 n. 43, 241 MS Oxford-Bodleian, Oppenheimer 182, 219 n. 46 n. 28 MS London, BL Add. 26899, 203–4, 206, 213–14, MS Oxford-Bodleian, Oppenheimer 183, 212–13 218 n. 5 MS Paris, BNF héb 1129, 185–90, 191 MS London, BL Or. 10538, 202, 204, 206, 211–12, MS Vatican, Neofiti 30, 202–3, 204, 206, 211–13, 214–15 214–15, 220 n. 39 MS London, Montefiore 279, 206 MS Vatican, Urbinati 48, 202, 203–4, 205, 206, MS Moscow, Günzburg 321, 206, 207 213–14 MS Moscow, Günzburg 509, 203–4, 206, 212, 213–14, 218 n. 5

Index

Abbasid Caliphate, 140–41, 146 ʿAlawi. See Nusayris Abbasid court, 67–68 Albania, 199 Abbasid naturalists, 231 Alberti, Leon Battista, 73, 80 ʿAbdallāh of Grenada (king), 28 n. 100 Albigensian heresy, 59 ʿAbdān, 59 Albo, Joseph, 65 n. 49 Abdulsater, Hussein, 151 n. 8 alchemy, 92–96, 226–27, 234 Abraham, 14 alchemy of the physicians (kimyā-i ḥükemāʾ), 227 abridgment (qiṣṣur), 12. See also Sefer Mezuqqaq Aleppo, Syria, 153 n. 28, 158 n. 139 Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Shuʿba, 157 Alexander the Great, 12–13 n. 108 Alfraganus, 19, 209. See also al-Farghānī ʾAbu ʿAli, 209 algorithm, 71, 76–77 Abū Mūsā, 130 Ali (Efendi), 241 n. 57 Abū Ṣāliḥ Muḥammad Abū l-Ḥasan, 136, 155 ʿAlī, 157 n. 106 n. 68 Alighieri, Dante, 103 Account of the Chariot, 32 alignment point, 18–22, 27 n. 82 Acre, Israel, 6, 101. See also Five Letters on the Ali Paşa, Hekimoğlu, 236 Fall of Acre Allāh. See God Actuarius, Johannes, 163 all-brightness, 54 adab culture, 87–90 Almagest (Ptolemy), 13, 14, 19, 23, 26 n. 40, 27 al-Adab al-kabīr (Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ), 85–86 n. 96 al-Adab al-ṣaghīr (Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ), 5, Almanach Perpetuum, 25 n. 34 87–90, 98 n. 20 alphabet, 140, 144 Adab al-shuʿarāʾ , 74, 75, 76 amāra. See signic quality Adam, 6, 60, 116–25, 126 n. 25, 149–50, 160 n. 180, ambassador and consul (bailo), 80 160 nn. 194–95 ʿamel. See practice Adam’s Contract with Satan: The Legend of the Amir-Moezzi, Mohammad, 155 n. 79 Cheirograph of Adam (Stone), 126 n. 25 Amitai-Preiss, Reuven, 78 adīb, 69 ʿamud he-ʿanan. See pillar of cloud Adıvar, Abdülhak Adnan, 10–11 Anabi, Shalom, 44 n. 18 Adlam. See Dulām analytical glosses, 207–10 adwār. See cycles Anatoli, Jacob, 38 Afghanistan, 143 Anatolia, 236 agricultural guidance, 120 Anaximander, 66 n. 60 Ahmad, 114 n. 35 angelic guidance, 120 al-Aḥmar, Isḥāq, 138, 140–41, 143, 144, 145–46, angels, 160 n. 183 147, 152 n. 22 angle, 220 n. 32 Ahmed III (sultan), 227, 231, 242 n. 66 ʿanan. See cloud Aḥmeṭ, Mevlānā, 10–11, 13, 16, 23, 24, 24 n. 5 anomaly, 19–20, 27 n. 72, 27 n. 76 Ahrūn, 168 A.n.qūr.s, 93, 94 Ahudemmeh, 168–70 Anselm of Canterbury (saint), 102, 112 n. 10 aikhuyot. See qualities Antegnati, Gasapino, 219 n. 17 Airs, Waters, Places (Hippocrates), 163, 165 al-anwār . See lights ʿAjāʾib al-makhluqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt Aphorisms (Hippocrates), 7, 165, 167, 171–72, 183, (al-Qazwīnī), 232 185, 195 n. 90 ʿajāʾib ve-gharāʾib . See wonders and curiosities 4.69–83, 163, 176, 178, 179, 180–81 akhbār, 89 7.31–35, 163, 164, 178 akwār. See turns uroscopic rule in, 179 al-Aʿlām , 69 Apocrypha, 120 appearance (marʾeh), 173, 176 mathematical, 18–23 aqbil adbir report, 141–42, 143 in Ottoman Empire, 21–22 al-ʿāqil. See wise man physical, 18–23 Aqivah (rabbi), 59 theoretical, 23 ʿaql. See intelligence atomism, 237 Aqrabādhīn-i Cedīd (Süleyman), 227, 235, 238 Augustine (saint), 114 n. 48 n. 23 authority, 6 Aquinas, Thomas, 102–3, 112 n. 11 avarim. See members Arabic, 7, 9 n. 6, 236. See also Sefer Mezuqqaq Averroes, 30, 41, 103. See also Compendium of combinatories based on, 70 Aristotle’s De Anima Frederick II’s proficiency in, 113 n. 19 Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Porphyry’s Hebrew and, 164–65 Isagoge, 38 Latin and, 25 n. 34, 81 Avicenna, 165, 223, 224, 232 medical compendia, 167 Aydın, Ayten, 229 Montecroce on, 114 n. 27 al-ʿAyyāshī, Muḥammad Ibn Masʿūd, 143 world names, 48, 49 Ayyubid period, 68, 71, 78–80 Arabic culture, 6 al-Azdī, ʿAlī Ibn Ḥammād, 155 n. 68 Arabic-Turkish dictionary, 235 aẓilla. See shadows Arab world, 103–4 aẓilla wa-ashbāḥ . See shadows, and phantoms ʿarafel. See fog al-ʿAzīz ʿUthmān, al-Malik, 68, 69 Arberry, A., 114 n. 35 azyāj, 23 arc. See samt-i qīblā Aristotelians, 231, 232–33 Baʿalei ha-Tosafot , 120 Aristotle, 4, 32, 39–40, 48, 66 n. 63, 93, 99 n. 41, Babylonian Talmud, 120, 171, 174, 183 146, 223, 232–33, 240 n. 38. See also Pseudo- Bachour, Natalia, 229, 238 n. 21 Aristotle; sounds Bachstrom, Johann Friedrich, 236 Arles, France, 31 Baghdad, Iraq, 79, 101, 104, 143, 158 n. 134, 189 Armenian(s), 72, 231 al-Baghdādī, 138, 157 n. 106 arpalık. See retainer bahir. See primal light Articella, 163, 164–65 bailo. See ambassador and consul artificial creature, 95–96 Balance of Truth (Çelebi), 230 al-Asadī, Abū l-Khaṭṭāb, 151 n. 4, 152 n. 18, 154 Balbo, Michael, 4 n. 56 Maimonides and, 33–42, 44 n. 25, 45 n. 39 Asaf ben Berakhyahu, 166 objections of, 33–39 Asaf ha-rofe, 177–78, 184, 185, 188. See also Book Rakh, Y.’s, correspondence with, 30–42, 43 of Remedies nn. 16–17, 44 n. 18, 44 n. 22, 44 n. 26, 45 Asatryan, Mushegh, 3, 6, 7 n. 39 al-Ashʿarī, 156 n. 97 Balkh, Afghanistan, 143 ashbāḥ. See phantoms Balmes, Abraham De, 28 n. 100 Ashkenazi, Byzantium immigrated to by, 46 n. 65 Banū l-Furāt, 129 Ashkenazi, Moses ha-Kohen, 46 n. 65 al-Bāqir, Muḥammad, 138 al-Ashraf Mūsā, al-Malik, 69, 71 Bar Ḥāyyā, Abraham. See Bar Ḥiyya, Abraham 248 ashyāʾ. See things Bar Hebraeus, Gregory, 78, 168 al-ʿAskarī, Abū l-Ḥasan, 136 Bar Ḥiyya, Abraham, 4–5, 47–62, 49, 62 n. 6, 63 al-ʿAskarī, Ḥasan, 129 n. 7, 63 n. 9, 63 n. 13, 63 n. 17, 64 n. 33, 198, Index asmāʾ. See names 218 n. 13, 218 n. 14. See also calendrical work; asmāʾ al-ḥurūf. See names of letters Higayon ha-Nefesh ; The Scroll of the Revealer Assyria, 6, 107–10, 168 barley (dêai), 6–7, 116–25 astrologers, 235 al-Barqī, Aḥmad, 141–42, 143 astrologische Kleinliteratur, 191 Baṣāʾir (al-Ṣaffār), 155 n. 79 astrology, 17, 234 Basilica chymica (Croll), 222–23, 226 astronomy. See also Islamic astronomy; medie- Basra, Iraq, 143 val astronomy; al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa ; bāṭın. See hidden aspects Ptolemaic astronomy; Sefer Mezuqqaq Bayezid II (sultan), 24, 24 n. 5, 28 n. 100, 81 bayt al-dhikr . See seat of memory introduction, 166–67 beads, 73 later layer, 177–78 Becker, Brian, 3, 6 linguistic background, 182–85 Beit-Arié, Malachi, 191, 200, 203, 218 n. 11 minor medical tradition, 190–92 belief, 45 n. 31 models, 167 believers, 160 n. 183 MS Paris 1129 evidence, 185–90 Bet El. See house of God nature of, 165–67 Bhayro, Siam, 168 non-Galenic Hippocratism, 179–82 Bible and Apocrypha, 30, 47, 64 n. 32, 166. See provenance, 182–85 also Ecclesiastes; Ezekiel; Genesis; Isaiah; rules in, 171–72 Moses; Psalms Syriac sources of, 167–71 2 Enoch in, 127 n. 31 uroscopy in, 165–85 2 Kings 7:1 in, 119 The Book of Shadows (Kitāb al-aẓilla ) (KA), 7, God divulging, 110 128–50, 135, 155 n. 70, 156 n. 97, 159 n. 165, Proverbs in, 52 160 n. 178 bin Sulaymān, Muqātil, 125 n. 2 The Book of the Throne (Kitāb al-kursī ), 131–35, Birgili, Mehmed, 230–32 143, 144, 146, 147, 154 n. 43 Al-Birjandī, 13 Book of urine. See Kitāb al-bawl bodies, 194 n. 64, 237 The Books of Contemplation: Medieval Jewish Book of Remedies on, 170–71 Mystical Sources (Verman), 63 n. 17 God resembling, 55–56 Bosworth, C., 67, 68 gradations of, 56 Bowman, Steven B., 24 n. 5 bones, 170, 171 Boyle, Robert, 237 The book of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb’s killing. See Kitāb brain, 92–96 maqtal Abī l-Khaṭṭāb branches (furūʿ), 44 n. 26, 234 Book of Asaf. See Book of Remedies bread, 119, 121–22 The book of creation. See Sefer Yeṣira breath (nafas), 53–55, 154 n. 48, 160 nn. 177–78 The book of cycles. See Kitāb al-qibāb Breeze, Andrew, 120–21, 126 n. 28, 127 n. 29 Book of Jubilees, 167 bringing into existence (ījād), 93 The Book of Knowledge (Maimonides), 38 Bronson, Catherine, 117 Book of Medicine, 169–70 Buonafalce, Augusto, 84 n. 53 The book of norms, pairedness, and rankings. Burman, Thomas, 104, 113 n. 24 See Kitāb al-Rusūm waʾl-izdiwāj waʾl-tartīb Burnett, Charles, 219 n. 17 Book of Principles (Sefer ha-ʾIqqarim) (Albo), Bursa, Turkey, 227 65 n. 49 Buzurj, 136, 155 n. 68 The book of refutation of the Muḥammadiyya Byzantine Empire, 171, 185 extremists. See Kitāb al-radd ʿalā l-ghāliyya Byzantine Jews, 4, 26 n. 40. See also Spanish- l-muḥammadiyya Provençal Jewish philosophical-scientific Book of Remedies (Sefer ha-refuʾot ) (Asaf), 193 culture, Byzantine Jews’ reception of n. 32 Byzantine uroscopy, 164 authorship, 166 Byzantium, 46 n. 65, 207. See also Byzantine on body, 170–71 Jews 249 chapter 281, 178 chapter 285, 181 Cain, 123 chapter 469, 182 calamities (ghawāshin), 135 Index chapters 471-72, 182 calendrical work, 7–8, 198. See also glosses content, 167 clarity, 203–6, 215 dating, 182–85 disambiguation, 203–6, 215 earlier layer, 177, 178 Italian family of, 201–15, 203, 218 n. 7, 221 n. 47 France’s reception of, 185–90 locators, 206 Greek sources, 171–77, 178–82 manuscript families, 202 Hebrew paraphrases, 171–77, 178–82 margins, 206 Hippocratic corpus’s importance to, 171–72, number symbols, 205 177 overview, 207 calendrical work (cont’d ) Muslims inflicting atrocities on, 107 stemma, 203 Nuṣayrīs recruiting, 145 vowels, 204–5 Christian sources, 186–87 Cameron, Averil, 122 Christian Spain, 53 camphor, 125 n. 8 Christian texts, 6, 123. See also Five Letters on the Candia, Crete, 4, 30, 81 Fall of Acre Canon (Avicenna), 165 barley in, 119–21 Capezzone, Leonardo, 5–6, 152 n. 22 wheat in, 119–21 Caraka Saṃhitā, 167 Christian translators, 104 Catholic Church, 109–10 Christ’s apostles (al-ḥawāriyyūn), 145 Catholic Reformation, 231 chroia. See color cedāvil. See tables chronic disease, 179 Çelebi (emir), 225 chronograms, 80 Çelebi, Ahi, 24 Church of the East, 168 Çelebi, Evliya, 238 n. 19 Church of Santa Lucia, 219 n. 17 Çelebi, Katip, 230, 231–32, 241 n. 48 “Cicco Simonetta’s Cipher-Breaking Rules” Çelebi, Maḥmūd, 11 (Buonafalce), 84 n. 53 Çelebi, Yirmisekiz Mehmed, 232, 242 n. 67 Cihannüma (Çelebi), 231 celestial court, 109–10 ciphers, 80–81 celestial sounds, 4, 30, 31–42, 46 n. 59, 46 n. 65 categories of, 72 centenaries (muʿammarūn), 97 n. 9 composite, 72–73 centers (in astronomy), 18–23, 27 n. 72, 27 n. 82, definition of, 68 27 n. 88 disk, 73 Cevherüʾl-Ferīd fī Ṭıbbüʾl-Cedīd (Şifai), 227 polyalphabetical, 73 Chabot, Jean-Baptiste, 168–70, 194 n. 54 simple, 72–73 A chapter about the apostle of God, that steganographical, 73 he knew what he saw in the shadows, city (the virtuous), 99 n. 43, 99 n. 53 particles, and so on. See “Bāb fī rasūl Allāh The clarifying chapters on the solution of annahu ʿarafa mā raʾā fī l-aẓilla wa l-dharr ciphers. See al-Fuṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall wa ghayrih” al-tarjama chemical medicine. See Paracelsus’s new clay tablets, 192 n. 1 medicine Cleft of the Rock, 31–42 chessboards, 73 clot, 180 chief astrologers (müneccimbaşıs), 235 cloud (ʿanan), 173 chief military judge, 24, 25 n. 34, 28 n. 101 The Cloud of Unknowing, 64 n. 32 chief physicians (ḥekīmbaşıs), 225, 227, 235–37, Coan Prenotions, 164 238 n. 23, 242 n. 66. See also Ibn Sallūm, code, 68 Salih coin (dīnār) (dirham), 70 China, 80 Collectio Salernitana, 186–87 Chipman, Leigh, 5 colophon, 218 n. 5, 218 n. 7 Christian communities, 109–10 color (chroia), 173–76, 177, 188 The Christian epistle. See al-Risāla l-masīḥiyya colors, theory of, 7 250 Christianity, 7. See also Adam; Eve; Montecroce, The Colors of Urine (Israeli), 185–86 Riccoldo da combinatories, 70 Islam as inferior to, 103 commentaries to Qur’an (tafsīr), 117 Index miracles confirming, 103, 113 n. 13 commentary (sharḥ), 13–14, 53 Western, 10, 127 n. 30 Commentary on Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān Christian physicians, 186–87 (Narboni), 45 n. 31 A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo da Commentary on Job (Gersonides), 44 n. 30 Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam (George- communal libraries, 219 n. 17 Tvrtković), 113 n. 19 communally organized copying, 8, 218 n. 11, 219 Christians. See also Five Letters on the Fall of n. 17. See also calendrical work; Meshovev Acre Netivot Eastern, 115 n. 44 overview, 198–200, 216 pervasiveness, 199–200 Crow, Douglas, 141–42, 143, 157 n. 118 phenomenon, 198–200 crude humors, 175 process, 199 Crusader States, 113 n. 14 Compendium of Aristotle’s De Anima (Averroes), Crusades, 121 40, 45 n. 48 cryptanalysis, 80–82. See also Ibn ʿAdlān, Afīf Compendium of Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia al-Dīn ʿAlī; Ibn Dunaynīr, Ibrāhīm Ibn (Averroes), 41 Muḥammad; Ibn al-Durayhim, Tāj al-Dīn complementary circle (ʿiggulat ha-matmim ), 16 ʿAlī Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz composite ciphers, 72–73 definition of, 68 The composition for al-Malik al-Ashraf on methods, 70–77 the solution of ciphers. See al-Muʾallaf poetry, 73–77 lil-Malik al-Ashraf fī ḥall al-tarājim prose, 70–73 Conegliano, Israel, 238 n. 15, 241 n. 57 cryptography, 5, 80–82. See also Ibn Dunaynīr, confessional communities, 231 Ibrāhīm Ibn Muḥammad; Ibn al- Confessions (Augustine), 114 n. 48 Durayhim, Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn Muḥammad conjugate opposites. See opposites, pairs of Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz conjunctions, 17 definition of, 68 consistency (sustasis) (mayim muglim), 173–74, Hebrew, 72 176, 188 languages, 72 consort (zawja), 160 n. 195 overview, 67–77 Constantine the African, 92, 99 n. 39 cryptology, 80–82. See also Ibn ʿAdlān, Afīf Constantinople 80. See also Istanbul al-Dīn ʿAlī; Ibn Dunaynīr, Ibrāhīm Ibn Constantinus Africanus, 163 Muḥammad; Ibn al-Durayhim, Tāj al-Dīn consul and ambassador (bailo), 80 ʿAlī Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz contemplatives, 64 n. 32 as militarized, 71 Continens Rasis (al-Rāzī), 91, 197 n. 41 poetic, 74–77, 80 copying, 8 prose, 70–73, 74 copyists, 8, 200. See also communally organized cult, 65 n. 44 copying cultures. See also Spanish-Provençal Jewish corporeality, 55–56 philosophical-scientific culture, Byzantine corpuscularian theory, 237 Jews’ reception of corrections, 214–15 adab, 87–90 correspondence, 30–42 texts preserving, 2 cosmic days, 61 cuneiform texts, 192 n. 1 cosmogony, 56–62. See also light, gradations of; cures, 235 opposites, pairs of cycles (adwār) (qibāb), 144, 152 n. 18 courts, 232, 233, 236 Abbasid, 67–68 Daʿat Zeqenim, 126 n. 27 celestial, 109–10 Damad Ibrahim (grand vizier), 222 new medicine appearing at, 225 Damascus, 184 physicians, 24, 28 n. 100 darkness, light differentiated from, 52 created light, 56 ḍawʾ. See illumination 251 Creation, 61. See also Genesis dawla, 98 n. 18 creation day, 61 Day Four, 49, 51–52, 61 creation story, 133–35, 137–43, 147–50, 157 n. 118. al-Daylamī, Abū Ṣāliḥ, 153 n. 28 Index See also The Book of Shadows; Genesis Day One, 49, 51–52, 61, 64 n. 33 creative power, 94 Day Seven, 61 creator of things (al-makān), 140–41, 144, 157 Day Two, 52 n. 109 De aeris transmutationibus (della Porta), 81 creature, 95–96, 139–41 dêai. See barley Cremona, Italy, 219 n. 17 De anima (Aristotle), 93 Crete, 4, 46 n. 65. See also Candia, Crete De chymicorum (Sennert), 222–23, 226 crisis, 179 De cifris (Alberti), 73, 80 Croll, Oswald, 222–23, 226 deconfessionalization, 231 De crisibus (Galen), 163, 164, 165, 176 Domnus, 184 deferent, 27 n. 82 Donolo, Shabbatai, 182 definition of memory ḥadd( al-dhikr ), 94 Doresh Reshumot, 53 De furtivis literatum notis (della Porta), 80 dosage, 226–27 Degen, Rainer, 183 dragomans, 225, 233 deity, 7, 56 dreams, 45 n. 48 Delacrut, Matthias, 207, 219 n. 28 drugs, 226–27 Delacrut, Solomon, 207 Dulām, 150, 161 n. 202 deletions, 214–15 Dundes, Alan, 116 della Porta, Giambattista, 80, 81 dung, 56 De melancholia (Rufus of Ephesus), 91 De memoria (Rufus of Ephesus), 91 Early Ghulat, 128–50 Demeter, 6, 116, 122–25 early Hebrew uroscopic texts, 165. See also Book De natura hominis (Nemesius of Emesa), 5, of Remedies 92–96, 100 n. 50 East, 104. See also Five Letters on the Fall of Acre; Dēnkard, 6, 121–22 Near East De oblivione (Constantine the African), 99 n. 39 Eastern Christians, 115 n. 44 De oblivione (Ibn al-Jazzār), 92 Ecclesiastes, 59 deposit (paruphistamenon), 173, 176, 180, 182 edict (maʾmar), 51, 236, 239 n. 26 deputy (safīr), 129. See also Ibn Nuṣayr, Edirne, 235–36, 239 n. 26 Muḥammad editorial glosses, 199, 208, 209, 211–13 derived light (nogah), 54, 64 n. 32 Efodi (Profiat Duran), 57 De signis ex urinis (Galen), 172, 177 Efros, Israel, 62 n. 6, 66 n. 62 De simplicibus (Galen), 168 eighteenth century, 229–33, 236–37 de-Taybuteh, Shemon, 168–70 Eleazar of Worms, 193 n. 32 De urinis (Galen), 172 Elieser ben Yehuda, 62 n. 6 De urinis compendium (Galen), 172–73 Elior, Ofer, 4, 46 n. 65 De urinis compendium (Pseudo-Galen), 184 Elisha, 119 al-Dhahabī, 97 n. 6 embolism, 221 n. 47 dharr. See particles embryo, 168–70, 182–83, 194 n. 43 al-dhikr . See memory Emin, Hayatizade Mehmed, 236 “Diagnostic Handbook,” 192 n. 1 empirical medicine, 233 Diatessaron (Tatian), 184 Enneads (Plotinus), 53 dictionaries, 229, 235, 239 n. 29 epicycle, 18–23, 27 n. 72, 27 n. 88 Diez Quarto MS 75/4, 239 n. 26 Epidemics (Hippocrates), 164 difficulties (of Ptolemaic astronomy; ishkālāt), epistemological frame of knowledge (ʿilm), 23 90–95 dīnār. See coin Epistle on cryptanalysis. See Risāla fī istikhrāj Dionysus, 124–25 al-muʿammā Dioscorides, 167, 168, 185 Epistolae (Montecroce), 6 diplomatic ciphers, 80 Epitome of plain hayʾa. See al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī diplomatic dispatches, 83 n. 27 al-hayʾa 252 dirham. See coin equant point (mū‘adīl al-masīr ), 20, 21 dirigent (in astronomy; mūdīr), 21 equation (in astronomy- tiqqun), 19 discourse (kalām), 88–89, 96, 231 eschatology, 58–62 Index Divine Comedy (Alighieri), 103 esoteric monotheism al-tawḥīd al-bāṭin , 159 n. 155 divine delegation (tafwīḍ), 146, 159 n. 155 ethics division (maḥloqet), 179 knowledge and, 87–90 dīwān, 69 religion and, 87–90 Doeg the Edomite, 164–65, 185 ethics (tahdhīb al-akhlāq), 87–90 Dominic (saint), 105 Ethiopic, 167 Dominican order, 105–6. See also Montecroce, Europe, 5, 81–82, 121, 185, 225–26, 229, 230–31, Riccoldo da 235–36, 241 n. 57. See also Albania; France; dominion, world of, 63 n. 7 Germany; Italy; Poland; Spain; Turkey European naturalists, 237 Five Letters on the Fall of Acre (Montecroce), European (Frenk) physicians, 225, 238 n. 17, 239 102–3, 104–10, 112 n. 3, 112 n. 9, 112 nn. 11–12, n. 26 113 n. 14, 114 n. 28 Eve, 6, 116–25. See also Ḥawwāʾ excerpts, 113 n. 16, 114 n. 29, 114 nn. 32–37, 115 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 193 n. 15 nn. 38–50 exact sciences (riyāḍiyye), 227 overview, 101, 110–11 existence (qayyama), 60 five presences, 50 exoteric knowledge (ʿilm al-ẓāhir), 146 five worlds, 48–57,49 , 63 n. 7 experience (tecrübe), 225–26, 233 fixed stars, 209–10 Expulsion from Paradise, 117. See also Adam; flashes nitzotzot( ), 56 Eve flask, 180 extremism. See Ghulūw Flavius, Josephus, 166 extremists. See Ghulat Florence, Italy, 102–4, 111 Ezekiel, 4, 30, 32, 41–42, 45 n. 31, 45 n. 39. See Florence Medici 491. See MS Medici 491 also Maimonides, Moses; prophecy; fog (ʿarafel), 64 n. 32 sounds Fonseca, Daniel de, 238 n. 13, 238 n. 15 “Ezekiel Is Preferable to Aristotle” (Elior), 46 food production, 119 n. 65 forbidden fruit, 6 form (ṣura), 60, 63 n. 13 faculty of memory (quwwat al-dhikr ), 93 Form of the earth. See Ṣurat ha-Areṣ faculty of remembering what has been (quwwat four humors, theory of, 175, 188 al-dhikr li-mā qad kāna), 93 four temperaments, theory of, 189, 194 n. 43 al-fahm (understanding), 93–96 fourth millennium, 52 falak. See orb fourth world of light, 52 Fall, 116–25 frame (shabaka), 75 falsafa. See philosophy France, 6–7, 185–90, 226. See also Provence false belief, 45 n. 31 Francis (saint), 102 false knowledge, 39 Frederick II (emperor), 79, 103, 113 n. 19 fanṭasiyā, 99 n. 40 freethinker (mulḥid wa-zindīq ), 69 al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr, 55, 85, 92, 96, 99 n. 40, 99 French, 72, 190 n. 43 Frenk physicians. See European physicians al-Farghānī, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥam- Friar Preachers, 105–6, 109–10 mad ibn Kathīr, 19, 209 friction, 40 Fāṭimids, 145 Friedman, Yaron, 132, 152 n. 22, 153 n. 33, 154 Fazlıoğlu, İhsan, 21–22 n. 40, 159 n. 152 feminine fertility, 116–25 fruit, 116–25 Ferāʾidüʾl-Müfredāt (Mehmed Said), 239 n. 29 imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila), 92 Ferdinand of Aragon, 28 n. 100 Fürstenspiegel formulation, 98 n. 18 fertility, 116–25, 125 n. 8 furūʿ. See branches Feyzi, Hayatizade Mustafa, 226, 227, 228, 238 al-Fuṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall al-tarjama (Ibn n. 23, 242 n. 66 Dunaynīr), 69 The fiery comet in the science of composing 253 ciphers. See al-Shihāb al-nājim fī ʿilm waḍʿ Gabriel, 118, 119, 121 al-tarājim Gabrieli, Francesco, 85–86 fig, 120, 125 n. 8 Galeano, Moses, 25 n. 34 Index Fihrist (Ibn al-Nadīm), 91–92 Galeano, Moses ben Judah, 23, 24, 28 n. 103, 81 fikr. See thought Galen, 7, 64 n. 39, 163, 167, 172, 180–81, 183–85, Finzi, Mordecai, 81 189, 195 n. 94. See also De crisibus; four fiqh. See religious law temperaments, theory of; Hippocratic- first anomaly (in astronomy), 19, 27 n. 72 Galenic corpus first creature, 139–41. See also aqbil adbir report Galenism, 163, 225–26, 229, 240 n. 43 first group ṭāʾifa( ), 96 Gaon, Saadia, 60, 65 n. 44 first light, 51 The Gate of Heaven (ben Solomon), 45 n. 49 Fishman, David, 219 n. 28 gê mêtêr. See Mother Earth gender, 6 pure soul infusion of, 60 Genesis, 54, 57, 60–61 Saracens on, 106–7 1, 56 shadows created by, 137–39 1:1–5, 49 son of, 106–7, 114 n. 35 1:4, 52 space created by, 156 n. 97 3, 117 voice of, 154 n. 56 3:7, 120 “God of the Philosophers” (Ravitzky), 46 n. 65 28:19, 15 God’s breath (nafkha), 160 n. 180, 160 Day One, 49, 51–52, 64 n. 33 nn. 177–78 Day Two, 52 God’s manifestation in human flesh ḥulūl( ), 129 Day Four, 49, 51–52 Goitein, Shelomo, 1 Rabba, 117, 184 Goldstein, Bernard, 210 genus, 178–79 gradations (maʿalot), 47–62, 63 n. 9 George-Tvrtković, Rita, 113 n. 19 gradations of light. See light, gradations of Gerard of Cremona, 219 n. 17 grand vizier, 242 n. 67 Germany, 185, 190 grapes, 122–25, 125 n. 8 Gershom ben Solomon, 45 n. 49 Greece, 84 n. 55, 89–90. See also Crete and Gersonides, 40, 41, 44 n. 30 Rhodes Ghālib, Muṣṭafā, 153 n. 24 Greek, 7, 122–25 ghāshiyya. See swoon Jewish community using, 15, 26 n. 40 ghawāshin. See calamities manuscript, 189 Al-Ghazālī, 50, 230, 232 medical compendia, 167 Ghulat (ghulāt), 7, 128–50, 152 n. 18, 152 n. 22. medicine, 162 See also Mufawwiḍa Ghulāt; Twelver Orthodox, 225 orthodoxy philosophy, 4–5 Ghulat spiritual hierarchy degree (nuqabāʾ), 145 physicians, 226, 232 Ghulūw, 143 sources, 90–95, 171–77, 178–82 giddin. See nerves texts, 7, 99 n. 46 gift, 97 n. 8 traditions, 6 Gignoux, Philip, 168 Turkish translation of, 10 gilgul ha-ḥiddush. See recurrent coming-to-be uroscopy sources, 171–77 Gilles of Corbeil, 163 Greeks, 225, 231 Ginzberg, Louis, 120, 126 n. 27 Gregory of Nazanius, 65 n. 44 glosses, 207–15, 216 Gregory the Great, 108, 109–10 Gnosticism, 143 Guadalajara, Spain, 206 Gnostics, 137 guf. See matter God (Allāh), 61, 76–77, 101, 109–10, 111, 113 n. 13, The Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides), 4, 145–46, 160 n. 191. See also Ādam; creation 31–41, 55–57, 64 n. 35, 64 n. 39, 65 n. 49 story; Genesis; Jesus Christ Guttmann, Julius, 63 n. 7 Adam and, 60, 117, 118, 122–23 Bible divulged by, 110 Habakkuk, 54 bodies resembled by, 55–56 Ḥabash al-Ḥāsib, 13 254 corporeality of, 55–56 Hadar Zeqenim, 126 n. 27 Eve and, 117, 118, 122–23 Haddad, Yvonne, 117 house of, 14–15 ḥadd al-dhikr . See definition of memory Index impossibility of resemblance of, 55–56 Hades, 123 as life’s author, 54 ḥadhāqat. See skill light influenced by, 52 ḥādhıq. See skilled message of, 113 n. 14 Hadish, 121–22 messenger of, 154 n. 56 hadith, 81–82, 117, 130, 236. See also intelligence; Moses’s conversation with, 31–42 phantoms; shadows; shadows, and Muhammad sent by, 102, 112 n. 11 phantoms Ohrmazd as, 121–22 Hadromi-Allouche, Zohar, 3, 6 plants created by, 53 Ḥai, Rabbeinu, 50–51, 64 n. 32 Hai ben Sherira, 50 scribal activity, 198–200 Ḥai Gaon, 50 world names, 48, 49 ḥakhemei ha-meḥqar . See rational investigators Hebrew texts, 218 n. 9. See also communally Halevi, Judah, 60 organized copying; medieval Hebrew Halm, Heinz, 155 n. 70 uroscopic texts; The Scroll of the Revealer al-Hamadānī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, 90–91, 92 Hebrew uroscopic literature, 164–65. See also Ḥamai Gaon, 50 early Hebrew uroscopic texts; medieval Ḥamdānids, 145, 146 Hebrew uroscopic texts ha-Meati, Nathan, 165 ḥekīmbaşıs. See chief physicians ha-Meati, Shlomo, 165 heliotropic plants, 53 Ḥammai, 63 n. 17, 64 n. 32 Hermogenes, 173, 175–76, 185 Hamon, Isaac, 28 n. 100 Ḥeshbon Mahalakhot ha-Kokhavim (Bar Ḥiyya), Hamon family, 24, 28 n. 100 62 n. 6 ha-or ha-bahir, 55 heterodox desire, 96 ha-or ha-murgash . See sensible light he who imagines (al-mutawahhim), 94 ha-or ha-muskal . See intelligible light Heyʾetüʾl-qadīme veʾl-Cedīde (İbrahim Mütefer- Ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-dīn (al-Ḥarrānī, H.), 132, 135, rika), 231 137, 139, 146, 147, 160 n. 183, 160 n. 190 al-Hidāya al-kubrā (al-Khaṣībī), 130 Ḥarbiyya, 138 hidden aspects (bāṭın), 234 Ḥārithiyya, 138 Hidden Imam, 151 n. 8 Harizi, Judah ben Solomon, 57 al-ḥifẓ. See memory; retentive memory al-Harizi, Yehuda, 57 al-ḥifẓ waʾl-dhikr . See memory and remembering Ḥarrān, Syria, 146, 159 n. 152 al-ḥifẓ waʾl-fahm . See memory and al-Ḥarrānī, ʿAlī Ibn Ḥamza, 132–33, 135, 147, 154 understanding n. 40, 157 n. 109 Higayon ha-Nefesh (Bar Ḥiyya), 53, 54, 64 n. 33, al-Ḥarrānī, Ḥasan Ibn ʿAlī Ibn al-Ḥusayn Ibn 64 n. 35 Shuʿba, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146–47, ḥijāb. See veils 159 n. 154, 159 n. 162, 160 n. 183, 160 n. 190 Hijaz, 6 al-Ḥarrānī, Muḥammad Ibn Shuʿba, 147 ḥikmet. See philosophy; systematic philosophy Ḥasan (efendi), 222–23, 233–34, 235. See also ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye. See natural philosophy Terceme-i Ṭıbb-ı Cedīd ḥilluf, 61 ḥashshasha. See reality Hippocrates, 7, 177–78, 184, 189. See also Airs, al-ḥawāriyyūn. See Christ’s apostles Waters, Places; Aphorisms; Hippocratic al-Ḥāwī (al-Rāzī), 91, 145, 160 n. 183, 160 n. 192, corpus; Hippocratic-Galenic corpus; 160 n. 195, 197 n. 41 Prognostics Ḥāwī l-asrār (al-Jillī), 131–32, 135, 137, 139 Hippocratic corpus, 7, 162–63, 171–72, 177, al-Ḥāwī al-ṣaghīr (al-Qazwīnī), 79 179–82, 193 n. 32 Ḥawwāʾ (Eve), 117, 125 n. 2 Hippocratic-Galenic corpus, 163–64, 171–73, hayʾa mujassama. See solid orbs 176–77. See also De crisibus; Hebrew Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān (Ibn Ṭufayl), 45 n. 31 uroscopic literature heavenly spheres, 4 hired scribes, 200. See also communally orga- heavens (raqiʿa), 49, 51–52, 62 n. 6, 63 n. 21, 64 nized copying 255 n. 33. See also sounds; stars Hirschler, Konrad, 159 n. 154 Die hebraischen Ubersetzungen (Steinschneider), historiographer, 87–90 26 n. 56, 164 history Index Hebrew, 7–8, 9 n. 6, 63 n. 20, 81. See also Book of of knowledge, 90 Remedies; communally organized copying; making of, 90 Sefer Mezuqqaq uroscopy, 162–63 Arabic and, 164–65 ḥokhma. See third world cryptography, 72 Ḥokmat ha-yad (ben Elijah Galeano), 18 Latin and, 103, 164–65, 209–10 Holy Scripture. See Bible Montecroce’s familiarity with, 103, 113 n. 14 Holy Spirit, 102 paraphrases, 171–77, 178–82, 195 n. 94 Homeric hymn, 124–25 Schoolmen, 220 n. 29 Homs, Syria, 153 n. 24 honourable imam (al-imām al-fāḍil ), 69 teachers of, 79 horizon, 14 treatise of, 71, 72, 73, 75–77 hour (šāʿā), 211–12 Ibn al-Durayhim, Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn Muḥam- house of God (Bet El) (qibla), 14–15, 25 n. 34 mad Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, 68, 76 Ḥujjat al-ʿārif (al-Ḥarrānī, A.), 132–33, 135, 157 characteristics of, 78, 79–80 n. 109 Ibn Dunaynīr compared with, 70 ḥujub. See veils intellectual context of, 78–79 ḥulūl. See God’s manifestation in human flesh overview, 69–70 humanism, 86 poetry mentioned by, 77 humors, 175, 188 teachers of, 79 Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, 183, 231 treatises of, 71–73 huperouranios aster. See supercelestial Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 17, 59, 208, 217 n. 4 constellation Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, 79 Hezarfenn Hüseyin, 231–32, 239 n. 29 Ibn al-Ḥakam, Hishām, 156 n. 97 ḥusn al-waʿī . See virtues ibn Ḥayyān, Jābir, 5, 92, 116 hymn, 124–25 ibn Ḥunayn, Isḥāq, 92 hypercosmic light, 54, 63 n. 14 Ibn Jaʿfar, Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī, 133 hypostasis, 7 Ibn al-Jahm, Muḥammad, 74 Ibn al-Jazzār, 92, 99 n. 39 Iamblichus, 50 Ibn Jumhūr, Muḥammad, 152 n. 18 Iberian Peninsula, 4, 30, 55 Ibn Kaspi, 41 ibn ʿAbbās, ʿAlī, 18, 27 n. 62 Ibn Kathīr, 120 Ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Qummī, Saʿd, 138 Ibn Kathīr al-Hāshimī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 136 Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, al-Ḥusayn, 74 Ibn Khallikān, 79 Ibn Abdülmennan, Nuh, 235, 238 n. 15 Ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, ʿUmar, 150, 161 n. 202 Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, 79, 91 Ibn Mahrān, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd Allāh, 152 Ibn ʿAdlān, Afīf al-Dīn ʿAlī Ibn, 68, 73 n. 18 algorithm, 71, 77 Ibn Matut, Samuel, 206. See also Meshovev characteristics of, 78, 79–80 Netivot intellectual context of, 78–79 Ibn Muʿāwiya, ʿAbdallāh, 138, 142 overview, 69 Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿĪsā, Kufan Aḥmad, 136 poetic cryptology, 74–75 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 85–86, 90, 98 n. 27.See also teachers of, 79 Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ treatise of, 70–71, 75 Ibn al-Nadīm, 91–92 Ibn Aḥmad, al-Khalīl, 70 Ibn Nuṣayr, Muḥammad, 129, 131, 132, 135, Ibn ʿAlī, Ibrāhīm Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Ibrāhīm, 143, 144, 147, 153 n. 33, 158 n. 132. See also 69 Nuṣayrīs Ibn ʿAlī al-Ṭabīb, Aḥmad, 189 Ibn Qalāwūn, al-Malik al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, 70 Ibn al-Muẓaffar, Abu Dulaf al-Azdī al-Kātib Ibn al-Qifṭi, 91 Muḥammad, 140 Ibn Ṣahl, 26 n. 56 Ibn al-Shāʿir, 69 Ibn Sallūm, Salih, 222–23, 226, 233, 235, 238 n. 21, Ibn al-Athīr, 78 240 n. 43 256 Ibn Ayyūb, al-Malik al-Kāmil Nāṣir al-Dīn Ibn al-Sāʿī’, 69 Muḥammad, 69 Ibn Saʿīd, Mughīra, 140 Ibn Ayyūb, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Yūsuf, 69 Ibn Sīnā, 51 Index Ibn Bābawayhi, 118, 119, 120–22 Ibn Ṭabaṭabā, 74, 75 Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī, 143 Ibn Tibbon, Moses, 41, 45 n. 48, 56, 57 Ibn Bābūya, 132 Ibn Tibbon, Samuel, 31, 40 Ibn Dunaynīr, Ibrāhīm Ibn Muḥammad Ibn Ṭufayl, 45 n. 31 algorithm, 76–77 Ibn Yūnus, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAbdallāh, 79 characteristics of, 78, 79–80 Ibn Ẓabyān, Yūnus, 135–37, 154 n. 56 Ibn al-Durayhim compared with, 70 Ideler, Julius, 173, 175, 176 intellectual context of, 78–79 ʿiggulat ha-matmim . See complementary circle overview, 68–69 ījād. See bringing into existence al-ʿIjlī, Mughīra Ibn Saʿīd, 137–38, 142 Isḥaq ibn ʿImrān, 92 Ikhtiṣāṣ (Mufīd), 142 Isḥāqīs, 138, 143 Ikhtiyār maʿrijat al-rijāl (al-Kashshī), 154 n. 56 al-Ishārāt wa-ʾl-tanbīhāt . See Remarks and Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 92–96 Admonitions Ilkhanid Mongols, 113 n. 15 ishkālāt. See difficulties illumination (ḍawʾ), 57 Ishmael (rabbi), 59 illuminationist philosophy (ishrāq), 232–33, 241 ishrāq. See hadith natural order view; illumina- n. 48 tionist philosophy ʿilm. See epistemological frame of knowledge; Islam. See also medieval Islam theoretical knowledge Christianity as superior to, 103 ʿilm al-hayʾa , 17 miracles confirming, 102–3, 113 n. 13 ʿilmiyye. See learned profession Islamic astronomy, 81. See also al-Mulakhkhaṣ ʿilm al-ẓāhir. See exoteric knowledge fī al-hayʾa imagination (khayāl) (wahm), 37–38, 96, 99 Islamic culture, 6, 85–96 n. 43 Islamic Middle Ages, 86 functions of, 92 Islamic Renaissance, 240 n. 40 seat of, 95 Islamic societies, memories depended on by, imagination (al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila), 94 5–6 imagining (takhayyul) (tawahhum), 93-6, 99 Islamic texts, 116–25. See also Adam; The Book of n. 40 Shadows; Eve; Kitāb al-Rusūm waʾl-izdiwāj al-imām al-fāḍil . See honourable imam waʾl-tartīb ; Qur’an imams, 100 n. 53, 128–50, 151 n. 4, 154 n. 56 Islamic traditions, 6–7, 116–25 immediate branches, 202–3 Ismā‘īlīs, 7, 130, 153 n. 25 impossibility of resemblance, 55–56 Ismā‘īliyya, 5 imsāk. See retention Israel, Torah given to, 52, 61. See also Acre, individual (shakhṣ), 95 Israel; Sages of Israel indwelling (shekhinah), 56 Israeli, Isaac, 24, 163, 165, 175, 185–86, 189, 217 information piece (khabar), 88–89 n. 2, 219 n. 28. See also Kitāb al-bawl intellect, 7, 37, 93 Istanbul, 8, 84 n. 55, 222–37, 239 n. 26, 242 n. 66. intellectual knowledge, 39 See also Paracelsus’s new medicine; Sefer intelligence (ʿaql), 134, 137, 141–42, 157 n. 118 Mezuqqaq intelligible light (ha-or ha-muskal ), 55 Italian city-states, 78. See also Venice intelligibles, 93–94 Italian copies, 7–8 intercalation, 58 Italianisms, 219 n. 15 interlineal gloss, 212–13 Italian Jews, 184, 208 interpretive glosses, 207–10 Italy, 6, 81–82, 102, 165, 182, 184, 217 n. 4, 219 intertextuality, 3 n. 17, 219 n. 28, 231. See also calendrical intoxicating drinks, 122 work; Florence; Meshovev Netivot; Milan; Introduction to Arithmetic (Nicomachus), 26 Salerno; Venice n. 40 ʿIyyun circle, 50–51, 55, 57, 59 Introduction to the Commentary on the Mishnah (Maimonides), 38 al-Jabbār, ʿAbd, 85 257 invisible inks, 68 Jabirian community, 95–96, 100 n. 53 Iran, 89–90. See also Qum and Tabriz Jabirian corpus, 100 n. 58 “The Iranian Component in the Bible, Apoc- Jabrāʾīl, 149, 150 Index rypha, and Qumran: A Review of the Jacob, 60 Evidence” (Winston), 127 n. 31 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, 95, 129–30, 135, 136, 138, 151 n. 4, Iraq, 7, 95–96, 128–50. See also Baghdad and 155 n. 67 Mosul Jaghmīnī, Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Irbilī, al-Ṣalāḥ Ibn Shaʿbān, 75 ʿUmar, 13–17, 20, 25 n. 19, 27 n. 76; See also Irosolimitano, Dominico, 206–7 al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa, mi-Ṣagmān, Isaac ben Moses ha-Levi 57 ‘Umar ibn Maḥmūd Isaiah, 35, 38 jāmiʿ. See mosque 28:13, 113 n. 14 al-Jawād, Muḥammad, 136 Jawāmiʿ (Farghānī), 19 Kafka, Franz, 190 al-Jazāʾirī, 119 Kahn, David, 67, 78 Jellinek, Adolph, 59–60 kalām, 55, 64 n. 39. See also discourse; orality; Jesus Christ, 106–7, 114 n. 35, 145, 158 n. 140, 218 philosophical theology n. 5 kalima. See word Jewish communities, 184, 219 n. 17. See also Sefer Kamāliyya madrasa, 79 Mezuqqaq al-Kamil (sultan), 113 n. 19 Greek used by, 15, 26 n. 40 Kappler, René, 113 n. 14 Rhodian, 30 Karkhiyyūn, 129, 138, 143 Jewish esotericism, 143 al-Kashshī, 154 n. 56, 155 n. 68 Jewish philosopher. See Gersonides; Narboni, al-Kāẓim, Mūsā, 129–30 Moses Keşfüʾẓ-ẓünūn (Çelebi), 231–32 Jewish physicians, 184–85, 190. See also ben Kessel, Grigory, 168 Abin, Shlomo; Israeli, Isaac The key to the treasures that make clear what Jewish scholars, 17, 23–24, 40. See also Rakh, is hidden. See Miftāh al-kunūz li-īdāḥ Yedidyah al-marmūz Jewish texts, 6, 123. See also communally orga- khabar. See information piece nized copying; Sephardic scientific works; Khalifé, Ignace, 153 n. 24 Talmud; Torah al-Khalqānī, Muḥammad Ibn, 155 n. 67 barley in, 119–21 al-Khaṣībī, Ḥusayn Ibn Ḥamdān, 129, 130, 132, wheat in, 119–21 145, 147, 158 n. 134, 159 n. 162 Jewish thinkers, 54. See also Halevi, Judah; light, khayāl. See imagination gradations of; opposites, pairs of; The Kharaqī, 13 Scroll of the Revealer Khomṭiano, Mordekhai, 14, 17, 23, 28 n. 101 Jews, 4, 81, 225, 231. See also Ashkenazi; Byzan- kimyā-i ḥükemāʾ. See alchemy of the physicians tine Jews; Provençal Jews; Romaniot Jews; kind (min), 179 Sephardic Jews al-Kindī, 66 n. 63, 68, 71, 74, 75, 99 n. 40 cult’s connection with, 65 n. 44 al-Kisāʾī, 118, 119 Italian, 184, 208 kitāb, 159 n. 154 in Ottoman Empire, 23–24 kitāba. See writing Syriac medical texts used by, 168 Kitāb ādāb al-dīn, 146 al-Jillī, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAlī, 131–32, 135, 137, 139, Kitāb al-akwār al-nūrāniyya wa l-adwār 142, 145–46, 147, 153 n. 28, 157 n. 108, 158 al-rūḥāniyya (Ibn Nuṣayr), 144, 158 n. 132 n. 139 Kitāb al-ashbāḥ wa l-aẓilla, 132, 137, 139, 143, 145, al-Jisrī, Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī Ibn ʿĪsā, 158 n. 134 147, 155 n. 70 Job, 110 Kitāb al-aẓilla . See also The Book of Shadows Job of Edessa, 183 Kitāb al-aẓilla (Abū Ṣāliḥ Muḥammad Abū John (saint), 166 l-Ḥasan), 136 Jones, W. H. S., 180 Kitāb al-aẓilla (Ibn Kathīr al-Hāshimī), 136 Judah, 113 n. 14 Kitāb al-aẓilla (Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿĪsā), 136 Judaism. See also Adam; Eve Kitāb al-aẓilla (Ibn Sinān), 136–37, 155 n. 70 cult’s connection with, 65 n. 44 Kitāb al-aẓilla (Ibn Ẓabyān), 135–37 258 worship of light’s affinity with, 65 n. 44 Kitāb al-aẓilla wa’l-ashbāḥ , 139 Judeo-Syriac fragment, 168 Kitāb al-bawl (Israeli), 163, 165 al-Juʿfī, Mufaḍḍal Ibn ʿUmar, 130, 136, 140, 143, Kitāb al-dalāʾil fī l-masāʾil (al-Ṭabarānī), 158 Index 152 n. 22 n. 132 Julian (emperor), 50 Kitāb al-dhikr (Rufus of Ephesus), 91 Jüncken, Johann Helffrich, 241 n. 57 Kitāb fī wasāyā ḥifẓ al-ṣiḥḥa (Rufus of Ephesus), al-Jurhumī, 74 91 Kitāb al-haft , 130, 139, 140, 143, 145, 147, 153 KA. SeeThe Book of Shadows nn. 24–25 Kabbalah, 55. See also Meshovev Netivot Kitāb al-haft al-sharīf , 130 al-Kāfī , 155 n. 68 Kitāb al-haft wa l-aẓilla (Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal), 137, al-Kāfī fī ʿulūm al-qawāfī (Ibn Dunaynīr), 69 154 n. 43, 155 n. 70 Kitāb al-Ḥāwī (al-Rāzī), 5, 188–89 Köprülü Library, 232 Kitāb al-Ḥiss waʾl-maḥsūs, 99 n. 41 Krstić, Tijana, 230 Kitāb al-Kāmil fī al-ṣināʿa (Ibn ʿAbbās), 27 n. 62 Küçük, Harun, 3, 4, 8 Kitāb al-kawr wa l-dawr (Ibn Sinān), 144 Kufa, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143 Kitāb al-kursī . See The Book of the Throne Kufans, 136–37, 143 Kitāb al-maḥmūdīn wa l-madhmūmīn, 146 al-Kūfī, Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī Ibn Aḥmad, 152 n. 18 Kitāb majmaʿ al-akhbār (Abū Ṣāliḥ al-Daylamī), al-Kūfī, Furāt, 143 153 n. 28 Kühn, Karl, 172, 175 Kitāb maqtal Abī l-Khaṭṭāb (Ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Kulaynī, 122–23, 143 Mahrān), 152 n. 18 Kundmann, Johann Christian, 236, 242 n. 67 Kitāb al-marātib wa l-daraj, 144, 145 kurkāmā. See saffron Kitāb maʿrifat al-bārī, 146 kurkum. See saffron Kitāb al-mithāl wa l-ṣūra (al-Jillī), 145, 153 n. 33 Kitāb al-mithāl wa l-ṣūra (Ibn Nuṣayr), 131, 132, laicization, 231–32 135, 144, 145, 147 Langermann, Tzvi, 3, 4, 25 n. 34, 26 n. 40, 217 Kitāb al-qibāb (Ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Mahrān), n. 2 152 n. 18 language of Ishmael (lashon Yishmaʿʾel), 15 Kitāb al-radd ʿalā l-ghāliyya l-muḥammadiyya languages, 72, 104, 229 (Ibn Shādhān al-Naysābūrī), 136 Laroux, Nicole, 86 Kitāb al-risāla (al-Khaṣībī), 147 lashon Yishmaʿʾel. See language of Ishmael Kitāb al-Rusūm waʾl-izdiwāj waʾl-tartīb (ʿAbdān), Latin, 72, 220 n. 29 59–60 Arabic and, 25 n. 34, 81 Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ, 130, 145–46, 153 n. 24 Hebrew and, 103, 164–65, 209–10 Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ (al-Aḥmar), 152 n. 22 medical compendia, 167 Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ (Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal), 145–46 Qur’an translated into, 113 n. 22, 113 n. 24 Kitāb Sirr al-asrār (Pseudo-Aristotle), 27 n. 62 Latin West, 164 Kitāb Sirr al-khalīqa (Pseudo-Apollonius of Lawee, Eric, 42 n. 5 Tyana), 92–95 learned profession (ʿilmiyye), 234, 236 Kitāb al-tajmī , 95 learning, 98 n. 19 Kitāb al-tanbīh (al-Aḥmar), 140–41, 144, 145 Lebanese scholars, 7 Kitāb al-tawḥīd (Ibn Sinān), 144, 145 Lebanon, 130 Kitāb al-uṣayfir (al-Ḥarrānī), 147 Leicht, Reimund, 191 Kitāb al-usūs , 130, 145, 147 Leino, Marika, 219 n. 17 kleine Literatur. See minor literature Leon, Moses de, 55 knowing Levi ben Gershom. See Gersonides as imagining, 96 Liber medicine orinalibus (Hermogenes), 173, as remembering, 90–96 175–76, 185 knowledge (maʿrifa), 43 n. 17, 91, 124–25, 160 Liber peregrinationis (Montecroce), 104, 105 n. 192. See also false knowledge; intellec- Librande, L., 87, 97 n. 10 tual knowledge libraries, 102–3, 112 n. 7, 146–47, 219 n. 17, 232 dreams conveying, 45 n. 48 Lieber, Elinor, 166, 167, 182, 184 ethics and, 87–90 life 259 Eve transferring, 118 God as author of, 54 exoteric, 146 light linked with, 52–54 historiographer’s, 87–90 of plants, 52–53 Index history of, 90 life-breath (pneuma), 54–55 oral transmission of, 81–82 Life of Adam and Eve, 126 n. 25 religion and, 87–90 light (or) (phos) (nūr), 4–5, 65 n. 49, 208–9 theoretical, 234–35 as created, 56 tree of, 60–61 darkness differentiated from, 52 writing transmitting, 97 n. 6 as derived, 54, 64 n. 32 Köhbach, Markus, 229, 239 n. 26 first, 51 Kohen, Elli, 28 n. 100 form of, 63 n. 13 Kohlberg, Etan, 161 n. 202 fourth world of, 52 light (cont’d ) Rakh, Y., and, 35–42, 45 n. 39, 46 n. 65 God influencing, 52 majmūʿa, 67–68. See also Ibn ʿAdlān, Afīf al- as higher, 55 Dīn ʿAlī Ibn; Ibn Dunaynīr, Ibrāhīm Ibn as hypercosmic, 54, 63 n. 14 Muḥammad; Ibn al-Durayhim, Tāj al-Dīn as intelligible, 55 ʿAlī Ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz life linked with, 52–54 Majmūʿ al-aʿyād (al-Ṭabarānī), 158 n. 132 as lower, 55 al-makān. See creator of things Moses on, 53–55 maʾmar. See edict as overflowing, 55 Mamluk period, 68, 71, 72, 78–82 phases of, 63 n. 14 Mamluks, 80. See also Five Letters on the Fall of as primal, 54 Acre as sensible, 55 Mamluk Sultanate, 81 shining of, 52–53, 63 n. 25 al-maʿnā. See meaning as supercelestial, 54 Manāqib Abī l-Khaṭṭāb (Ibn ʿAbd Allāh Ibn types of, 64 n. 32 Mahrān), 152 n. 18 world of, 63 n. 7 Manichean text, 63 n. 13 worship of, 65 n. 44 Manicheism, 50 zohar and theory of, 48–57 Man lā yaḥḍuruhu l-faqīh (Ibn Bābawayh light, gradations of, 4–5 al-Qummī), 143 opposites, pairs of, and, 47–62 manqūlāt, 79 overview, 47–48 manuscripts light of life (or ha-ḥayyim), 55 Bodleian, 17 lights (al-anwār ), 55–56 calendrical work, 202 lines, 18–23, 27 n. 72, 27 n. 88 families, 202 literary polysystem, 163 Greek, 189 locators, 206 historical contexts, 218 n. 12 logic, 231 Munich, 166 logical-discursive thought (al-quwwa al-nāṭiqa ), older, 211–12 92 Oxford, 166, 169–70, 177 logical thought (al-quwwa al-mutafakkira ), 94 younger, 211–12 longevity, 97 n. 9 Maqāla fīʾl-ḥifẓ (Rufus of Ephesus), 91 Löw, Immanuel, 167–68 Maqāla fīʾl-mālīkhūliyā (Ibn ʿImrān), 92 Luʾluʾ, Badr al-Dīn, 78, 79 Maqāṣid al-fuṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall al-tarjama lunar model, 19–23 (Ibn Dunaynīr), 71, 72, 73, 75–77 maqom. See place Maʿānī al-Akhbār (Ibn Bābawayhi), 118 maʿqūlāt, 79 al-madār bi-ʾl-wāqiʿ , 17 mara aduma. See red bile Madelung, Wilferd, 59 Marāgha observatory, 14 al-Madīna al-fāḍila (al-Fārābī), 92 marʾeh. See appearance madrasas, 13, 26 n. 38, 79 Māsarjawayh, 168, 184 Magia naturalis (della Porta), 81 masculine fertility, 117–25 Magnus of Emesa/Homs, 162, 164, 172–73, 176, Mashī, 121–22, 127 n. 31 260 177–78, 184, 190 mashīʾa. See will Mahdi, 60 Mashiyānī, 121–22, 127 n. 31 maḥloqet. See division maskh. See transformation into subhuman Index Maimonideans, 47–48 forms Maimonides, Moses, 4, 5, 30, 42 n. 5, 47–48, 164. al-Masmūl, Ismāʿīl, 75 See also The Guide of the Perplexed master, 97 n. 8 Balbo and, 33–42, 44 n. 25, 45 n. 39 Master John of St. David’s, 126 n. 28, 127 n. 29 cult traces reaching, 65 n. 44 masūkhiyya. See transformation into subhuman defense, 35–39 forms interpretation of, 31–42 materialism, 236 objections, 33–40 Materia medica (Dioscorides), 167 philosophy of, 54–57 mathematical astronomy, 18–23 matter (guf), 63 n. 21, 63 n. 24 mertā summāqtā, 176 Mauro of Salerno, 163, 165, 186–87 meshawweh, 27 n. 87 Mavrocordato, Alexander, 238 n. 13 Meshovev Netivot (Ibn Matut), 198 mayim muglim. See water with pus Italian family of, 206–7 maʿalot. See gradations overview, 207 maʿrifa. See knowledge Mesopotamian medicine, 162 meaning (al-maʿnā), 146 messiah, 60 measures, 227 Metaneira (queen), 124–25 medical academy, 222, 236 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 240 n. 38 Medical Aphorisms (Maimonides), 164 metaphysics, 230, 231, 240 n. 38 medical dictionaries, 229, 239 n. 29 metempsychosis, 46 n. 65, 153 n. 25 medical faculties, 225 Meteorology (Aristotle), 66 n. 63 medical medrese, 238 n. 19 methods (qawāʿid), 70–77 medical novelty, 226–29 Michael, 120–21 medical texts, 7, 91–92, 235–37, 241 n. 57. See also Michael ben Shabbetai ha-Cohen. See Balbo, Hippocratic corpus; Hippocratic-Galenic Michael corpus; uroscopy Michaelmas, 127 n. 30 medicine, 8, 28 n. 103, 162, 169–70, 222–37, 242 midrash, 117, 123 n. 65. See also new medicine; uroscopy Midrash Tanḥuma, 120 medieval astronomy, 10-28, 46 n. 63, 81 Midrash Temurah, 5, 58–59, 60 medieval Hebrew uroscopic texts, 162 Miftāḥ al-kunūz li-īdāḥ al-marmūz (Ibn medieval Jewish Italy, 198, 216, 219 n. 17. See also al-Durayhim), 71–73 communally organized copying al-Mihrānī, Asad al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn ʿAbdallāh, medieval Neoplatonism, 49–50 69 medieval texts, 58, 162 Milan, 84 n. 53 Meditation of soul. See Higgayon ha-Nefesh militarization, of cryptology, 71 Mediterranean, 1–2, 48. See also Eastern min. See kind Mediterranean minor culture, 191 medrese, 222, 223, 224–25, 229, 230–31, 236, 238 minor literature (kleine Literatur), 190 n. 19 minor medical tradition, 190–92 Megillat ha-Megalleh (Bar Ḥiyya). See The Scroll minutes. See rega‘im of the Revealer miracles, 102–3, 112 n. 12, 113 n. 13 Mehmed IV (sultan), 223, 226, 231 mi-Ṣagmān,ʿUmar ibn Maḥmūd, 10, 11, 15. Mehmed the Conqueror (sultan), 4, 10, 12–13, See also Sefer Mezuqqaq, al-Jaghmīnī, 19, 23, 24, 28 n. 100 Maḥmūd ibn Muḥammad ibn ‘Umar Melanchthon, Philipp, 231, 240 n. 38 Mishnah, 170, 171 Melzer, Aviv, 166, 195 n. 83 Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim (Galeano), 17, 26 n. 56 members (avarim), 170, 171 mission, 103–11, 113 n. 15, 158 n. 134 memorization (tadhakkur), 94 Misyaf, Syria, 153 nn. 24–25 memorization of single parts (tadhakkur Mitchell, Stephen, 65 n. 44 al-ajzāʾ), 94 mīthāq. See primordial covenant memory (ḥifẓ) (al-ḥifẓ) (al-dhikr fī-hā ) Mizraḥi, Elijah, 14, 19, 26 n. 40 261 (al-dhikr) (dhikr), 5–6, 85–96, 97 n. 9, 99 Modarressi, Hossein, 144–45 n. 41, 99 n. 43 moderation (taqṣīr), 146 memory and remembering (al-ḥifẓ wa l-dhikr), Mongolian, 72 Index 92 Mongols, 113 n. 15 memory and understanding (al-ḥifẓ wa l-fahm), monoalphabetic substitution, 68 89 monotheists (al-muwaḥḥidūn ), 159 n. 155 men, 124–25, 144–47 Montecassino abbey, 173 Menocal, María, 103 Montecroce, Riccoldo da, 6, 101–11, 111 n. 1, 114 merchandise, 115 n. 44 n. 27. See also Five Letters on the Fall of Acre Mercury, 18, 19–23 moon, 212–14 meridian, 14 Moralia in Job (Gregory the Great), 108, 109–10 Merkabah, 44 n. 30 Moraux, Paul, 172, 177 Morrison, Robert, 4, 46 n. 65 Mūsā Jālīnūs. See ben Judah Galeano, Moses; Moses, 218 n. 5 Galeano, Moses on breath, 53–55 Muslims, 6, 225, 231. See also Five Letters on the God’s conversation with, 31–42 Fall of Acre on light, 53–55 Christian atrocities from, 107 Moses ben Elijah, 15–18. See also Sefer slaves, 108–10, 111 Mezuqqaq mutakallimūn, 55–56, 64 n. 39 Moses ben Elijah Galeano, 4, 6, 17–18, 23–24, al-mutawahhim. See he who imagines 26 n. 56. See also Mishpeṭei ha-mabbaṭim ; Müteferrika, İbrahim, 230, 231 Tol edot Adam al-Muttaqī, 129 Moshe ben Abravanel, 226. See also Feyzi, al-muwaḥḥidūn . See monotheists Hayatizade Mustafa myglym. See pus mosque (jāmiʿ), 69 Mysteries of Eleusis, 124–25 Mosul, Iraq, 5, 68–70, 78–82 myth, 116. See also Adam; creation story; Deme- Mother Earth (gê mêtêr), 124 ter; Eve Motot. See Ibn Matut, Samuel Mourad, Suleiman, 122 nafas. See breath al-Muʾallaf lil-Malik al-Ashraf fī ḥall al-tarājim nafkha. See God’s breath (Ibn ʿAdlān), 69, 70–71, 75 al-naḥwī, 69 muʿammarūn. See centenaries al-Najāshī, Aḥmad Ibn ʿAlī, 136, 154 n. 56 Al-Mubtadaʾ fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (Ibn Isḥāq), 125 al-Nakhaʿī, Isḥāq al-Aḥmar, 132 n. 2 names (asmāʾ), 144, 146 Mufaḍḍal tradition, 129–30, 155 n. 68 names of letters asmāʾ( al-ḥurūf), 140 Mufawwiḍa Ghulat, 136, 140–41, 143, 144, 146, nāmūsī al-ṭibāʿ. See natural disposition to law 157 n. 106. See also divine delegation; Narboni, Moses, 32, 34–42, 45 n. 31 pentadism natural disposition (min ṭabīʿatinā), 93 Mufīd (shaykh), 142 natural disposition to law (nāmūsī al-ṭibāʿ), 95 muflaʾ, 63 n. 17 naturalists, 231, 237 mugla. See pus natural philosophers, 230 Muḥammad, 129 natural philosophy (ḥikmet-i ṭabīʿiyye), 222–37 Muhammad (prophet), 7, 102–3, 112 n. 11, 113 nature, 231, 241 n. 46 n. 13, 114 n. 35, 157 n. 106, 233–34. See also al-Naysābūrī, Faḍl Ibn Shādhān, 136 creation story; imams naẓar, 91 Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq, 125 n. 2 Nemesius of Emesa, 5, 85, 92–96, 100 n. 50 Muḥammadiyya Ghulat, 136 Neo-Assyrian clay tablets, 192 n. 1 Muhammad story (miʿrāj), 103 Neoplatonism, 49–50, 52–53, 63 n. 7, 143, 232 Mühlhausen, Yomtov, 46 n. 65 Neoplatonists, 49, 53, 184 Mukhammisa Ghulat, 136, 138, 140, 143, 146. See nerves (giddin), 170–71 also divine delegation; pentadism Netton, Ian, 160 n. 194 al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa (Jaghmīnī), 23, 27 n. 88 Neubauer, Adolf, 18 Sefer Mezuqqaq and, 13–15, 20, 26 n. 36, 26 New Chemical Medicine (Ṭıbbu’l-Cedīd n. 38 al-Kimyevī) (Ibn Sallūm), 222–23 262 technical terms, 15–17 new medicine (ṭıbb-ı cedīd), 8, 222–37, 239 n. 26, mulḥid wa-zindīq . See freethinker 240 n. 43, 242 n. 66 Mulla Sadra, 232 The new pharmacopoeia. See Aqrabādhīn-i Index multiconfessional cliques, 231 Cedīd müneccimbaşıs. See chief astrologers Newton, Isaac, 84 n. 61 Munich manuscript, 166 Nicholas, 226, 238 n. 21 Munk, Salomon, 56, 57 Nicholas (friar), 109–10 Muntner, Suessman, 165–66, 170, 171–72. See Nicomachus, 26 n. 40 also Book of Remedies niflaʾ, 63 n. 17 muqaṣṣira. See those who fall short night (noche), 64 n. 32 Murdoch, Brian, 120 Nihāyat al-idrāk (Shīrāzī), 14 Mūsā (shaykh), 130 Nikousios, Panagiotes, 238 n. 13 Nineveh, Assyria, 6, 107–10 oral transmission, 81–82, 85–96 ninth orb, 46 n. 59 orb(s) (falak, pl. aflāk), 18–23, 27 n. 72, 32, 46 Nisibis, Assyria, 168 n. 59, 46 n. 63, 49, 57. See also Ezekiel; niṭāq. See sector Maimonides, Moses nitzotzot. See flashes; sparks or ha-ḥayyim. See light of life nitzutzei ha-or ha-‘elyon. See rays of supernal light Origen, 93 Niẓāmiyya madrasa, 79 Orlandi, Stefano, 102, 112 n. 7 Noah, 120 Ottoman Empire, 81, 222–37, 242 n. 65 noche. See night astronomy in, 21–22 nogah. See derived light Jews in, 23–24 nomos, 100 n. 53 Venice focusing on, 80 non-Galenic Hippocratism, 179–82 Ottoman naturalists, 237 non-noble working classes (popolo), 102, 112 n. 4 Ottoman physicians.See new medicine non-Ptolemaic models, 14 Ottomans.See also chief military judge North Africa, 91–92, 197 n. 149 administrative elite, 238 n. 17 northern France, 185–90 Jewish scholars learned from by, 24 Nuh (ḥekīmbaşı) (efendi), 225, 239 n. 26 madrasas, 13, 26 n. 38 null letters, 73 Oxford manuscript, 166, 169–70, 177 number symbols, 205 nuqabāʾ. See Ghulat spiritual hierarchy degree Padua, Italy, 231 nūr. See light pairs (zugot), 58–62 al-nūriyyāt , 56 pairs of opposites. See opposites, pairs of Nuṣayrīs, 7, 129, 130–31, 138, 144–47, 153 n. 23, 153 Palacios, Miguel, 103 n. 25, 156 n. 97, 159 n. 152, 159 n. 155. See also pale faces (panim mekhurkamot), 184 The Book of Shadows Palestine, 184 panim mekhurkamot. See pale faces Ohrmazd, 121–22 Paoli, Bruno, 153 n. 28, 158 n. 139 oil, 195 n. 99 Paracelsus, 163, 224, 226–27, 229 ʿolamot. See worlds Paracelsus’s new medicine (ṭıbb-ı cedīd), 8, Old French, 190 222–37, 239 n. 26, 240 n. 43, 242 n. 66 old medicine (ṭıbb-ı qadīm), 224–25 Paradise, 125 n. 8. See also Adam; Eve Öljaytü, 113 n. 15 particle (dharr), 155 n. 79 Olszowy-Schlanger, Judith, 219 n. 17 partner (shutaf), 59–60 On ciphers. See De cifris paruphistamenon. See deposit On memory and recollection. See Fiʾl-dhikr Parva naturalia (Aristotle), 99 n. 41 waʾl-tadhakkur pathology, 227 onomatopoeia, 103, 113 n. 14 patient deaths, 227, 229 On Opinions and Religions (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ), 94 Patriarch of Jerusalem, 109–10 On the Creation (Philo), 53–54 Paul (saint), 106–7 On the Heavens (Aristotle), 32 paye. See ranks On the Second Disease (Hippocrates), 193 n. 32 pentadism (takhmīs), 146, 159 n. 155 On the writing hidden in books. See De furtivis pentads, 50 263 literatum notis Pentateuchal pericopies, 214–15 The Opinions of Vesim (Vesim), 237 periodization, 86 opposites Persephone, 122–25 Index as reality, 4–5 Persian, 9 n. 6, 81, 167, 189, 241 n. 48 theory of, 66 n. 60 Pesiqta de-Rabbi Eliʿezer, 126 n. 27 opposites, pairs of, 4–5 Pesiqta de-Rabbi Tobiah b. Elīʿezer, 126 n. 27 light, gradations of, and, 47–62 Peter of Santa Lucia, 219 n. 17 overview, 47–48, 58–62 phantasia, 99 n. 40 optics, 52 phantoms (ashbāḥ), 138–39 or. See light phases of light, 63 n. 14 orality (kalām), 91 phenomenal (ẓāhir), 234 oral texts, 3, 86–87 Philo of Alexandria, 4, 53–54, 55 philosophers, 99 n. 43, 237, 240 n. 38. See also Prato, Italy, 102 Gersonides; Maimonides, Moses; Nar- presences, 50 boni, Moses preservation, 87–90 first group of, 96 primal light (rishon) (bahir), 54, 64 n. 33 Neoplatonic, 184 primordial covenant (mīthāq), 138 philosophical theology (kelām, kalām), 230–31 principles of nature (umūr-ı ṭabīʿiyye), 232 philosophy (falsafa) (ḥikmet), 22, 42 n. 5, printing business, 84 n. 55 91, 230–31. See also natural philosophy; printing press, 230, 241 n. 44 philosophers; Spanish-Provençal Jewish priory, 102–3 philosophical-scientific culture, Byzantine private physician, 233 Jews’ reception of Proclus, 53, 63 n. 14 of Maimonides, 54–57 professors, 230 of new medicine, 233–36 Prognostics (Hippocrates), 163, 165, 167, 172, phonetic quality (ṣawt), 91 181–82 phos. See light prophecy, 31–42, 43 n. 17, 99 n. 43 phrenetis, 179 prophet, 34–35, 37, 43 n. 17 physical astronomy, 18–23 prophetic medicine (ṭıbb-ı nebevī), 223, 242 n. 65 physicians, 24, 28 n. 100, 184–85, 186–87, 238 prose cryptology, 70–73, 74 n. 17. See also Ibn Sallūm, Salih; Jewish Proslogion (Anselm of Canterbury), 102, 112 n. 10 physicians; new medicine Protestant Reformation, 230–31 Physici et Medici Graeci Minora (Ideler), 173 protomedicato, 225 physics, 230 Provençal Jewish cultures. See Spanish- physiognomy, 18, 27 n. 62 Provençal Jewish philosophical-scientific piety, 97 n. 10 culture, Byzantine Jews’ reception of pilgrimage, 103–11 Provençal Jews, 59 pillar of cloud (ʿamud he-ʿanan), 56, 64 n. 32 Provençal scholars, 30 Pines, Shlomo, 57 Provence, 4, 165. See also Spanish-Provençal Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliʿezer, 126 n. 27 Jewish philosophical-scientific culture, Pirtea, A., 64 n. 32 Byzantine Jews’ reception of Pisa, Italy, 102 Proverbs, 52 place (maqom), 176 Psalms planets, 17, 18–23 119, 104–5, 111 plants 119:59, 114 n. 29 God creating, 53 Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana, 92–95 heliotropic, 53 Pseudo-Aristotle, 27 n. 62 life of, 52–53 Pseudo-Galen, 184 Plato, 48, 93, 94–95 pseudo-Galenic dialogue, 59 Platonists, 137 Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 5, 85, 87–90, 92, 98 n. 20 Plotinus, 53 Pseudo-Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, 85, 95, 96, 100 n. 58 pneuma. See life-breath Pseudo-Mufaḍḍal, 137, 145–46, 152 n. 22, 154 poem, 120–21, 126 n. 28, 163 n. 43, 155 n. 70 poetic cryptology, 74–77, 80 Pseudo-Porphyry, 95 264 poetry, 152 n. 18 Ptholomei. See Ptolemy Pognon, H., 183 Ptolemaic astronomy, 14, 20–23 Poland, 219 n. 28 Ptolemy, 209, 210. See also Almagest; Ptolemaic Index Polo, Marco, 80 astronomy polyalphabetical cipher, 73 pure soul, 60 polyalphabetic substitution, 68, 80 The purified book. See Sefer Mezuqqaq polyglot medical dictionaries, 229 The purposes of the clarifying chapters about pomegranates, 122–25 the solution of ciphers. See Maqāṣid popolo. See non-noble working classes al-fuṣūl al-mutarjama fī ḥall al-tarjama position (taqwīm), 19 pus (tri) (triyyah) (myglym) (mugla), 179, 183, positive theology (ʿaqāʾid), 230 195 n. 90 Pozzo, Ricardo, 240 n. 38 Puzzles of Wisdom (Moses ben Judah Galeano), practice (ʿamel), 234 23, 28 n. 103 qāḍī, 90–91. See also al-Ḥamadānī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār defense of, 35–39 al-Qāḍī, Wadād, 79 on dreams, 45 n. 48 Qāḍī Zādah, 15, 16, 21–23, 27 n. 72, 27 n. 88, 27 Maimonides and, 35–42, 45 n. 39, 46 n. 65 n. 91 objection of, 39–40 Qadmus region, 153 n. 24, 153 n. 25 overview, 29, 30 Qafih, Yosef, 56, 57 ranks (paye), 235–36 Qalonymos, 26 n. 40 raqiʿa. See heavens al-Qalqashandī, 67, 68, 76, 77 Rariora (Kundmann), 242 n. 67 Qānūn (Avicenna), 224 Rasāʾil al-ḥikma l-ʿalawiyya, 157 n. 108 qawāʿid. See methods R. Asher ben Meshullam, 50 qawl, 88–89 Rashi, 42 n. 5 qayyama. See existence rational investigators (ḥakhemei ha-meḥqar ), 49 al-Qazwīnī, Zakariyyā’, 232 rationalism, 41–42. See also Maimonides, Moses al-Qazwīnī, ʿAbd al-Ghaffār, 79 Ravitzky, Aviezer, 46 n. 65 qibāb. See cycles rays of supernal light (nitzutzei ha-or ha-‘elyon), qibla. See house of God 51 qirāʾāt. See Qurʾan reading al-Rāzī, Muḥammad Ibn Zakariyyā’, 91, 145, 160 qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ . See stories of prophets’ n. 183, 160 n. 192, 160 n. 195, 197 n. 41, 231, collections 235. See also Kitāb al-Ḥāwī Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ (al-Kisāʾī’), 118 reality (ḥashshasha), 66 n. 62 Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyāʾ (al-Thaʿlabī), 118–19 intervention in, 96 qiṣṣur. See abridgment as opposites, 4–5 qualities (aikhuyot), 60 as pairs, 4–5 quasi-body, 40 rebellion, 137, 138, 142 Qum, Iran, 143, 144–45 recipes, 227–28, 235, 238 n. 21 al-Qummī, ʿAlī Ibn Ibrāhīm, 143 recollection (tadhakkur), 93, 99 n. 41 al-Qummī, Saʿd Ibn ʿAbdallāh, 138, 143 recurrent coming-to-be (gilgul ha-ḥiddush), 61 al-Qummī, Ṣaffār, 143 red bile (mara aduma), 176, 183, 188 Qur’an, 6, 104, 106–7, 160 n. 191. See also Adam red melancholy, 176 61:6, 114 n. 35 red urines, 188 on Adam, 117 Regulae Urinarum Magistri Mauri (Mauro of on Eve, 117 Salerno), 186–87 Expulsion from Paradise, 117 Reinink, Gerrit, 168 Greek parallels, 122–25 relazione. See report Latin translation of, 113 n. 22, 113 n. 24 religion, as social bond, 98 n. 18 spirit, 160 n. 171 religion, knowledge, ethics (al-dīn waʾl-ʿilm waʾl- Torah confirmed by, 114 n. 35 akhlāq), 87–90 Qurʾan reading (qirāʾāt), 70 religious law (fiqh), 79, 222, 235 Qushjī, ʿAlī, 19, 22 Remarks and Admonitions (al-Ishārāt wa-ʾl- al-quwwa al-ḥāfiẓa. See definition of memory tanbīhāt) (Avicenna), 232 quwwa muṣawwira, 99 n. 40 Remedies from the Uncircumcised Sages of Mont- al-quwwa al-mutafakkira . See logical thought pellier, 186 265 al-quwwa al-mutakhayyila. See functions of remembering (tadhakkur) imagination; imagination creative power knowing as, 90–96 al-quwwa al-nāṭiqa . See logical-discursive memory and, 92 Index thought Renaissance, 78, 81–82, 86, 240 n. 40 quwwat al-dhikr . See faculty of memory Renzi, Salvatore de, 186–87 report (relazione), 80 Rabban-Shabur monastery, 168 retainer (arpalık), 235–36 al-Rāḍī, 129 retaining, 98 n. 19 Rakh, Joseph, 30 retention (imsāk) (ḥifẓ), 93, 94 Rakh, Yedidyah, 4, 45 n. 46, 45 n. 49, 46 n. 65 retentive memory (al-ḥifẓ), 91–92, 97 n. 10, 99 Anabi’s correspondence with, 44 n. 18 n. 41 Balbo’s correspondence with, 30–42, 43 return, 49 nn. 16–17, 44 n. 18, 44 n. 22, 44 n. 26, 45 n. 39 revolt, 236 rGyud bzhi, 167 Saudi scholars, 67–68 Rhazes. See al-Rāzī, Muḥammad Ibn Zakariyyā ṣawt. See phonetic quality Rhodes, Greece, 4, 30 Sayf al-Dawla, 129, 145 Richard, Jean, 103 Schilling, Heinz, 230 Richler, Benjamin, 217 n. 2 Schipperges, Heinrich, 99 n. 39 Richter, Gerhard, 87 Schmidtke, Sabine, 240 n. 40 al-Riḍā, ʿAlī, 130, 154 n. 56 Scholarios, Gennadios, 10–11, 24 n. 5 Rijāl (al-Najāshī), 154 n. 56, 155 n. 68 scholars, 7, 200. See also communally organized al-Risāla al-Fatḥiyya (Qushjī), 19 copying; Jewish scholars; Lebanese schol- Risāla fī istikhrāj al-muʿammā (al-Kindī), 71 ars; Provençal scholars; Saudi scholars; al-Risāla l-masīḥiyya , 145 Spanish scholars al-Risāla l-nuʿmāniyya (al-Jillī), 145 scholars of arts (ʿulemāʾ-i ṣınāʿat), 235 Risālat al-fatq wa l-ratq (al-Jillī), 141, 142 scholars of philosophy (ʿulemāʾ-i ḥikmet), 235 Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn (al-Ḥarrānī), 147 Scholem, Gershom, 50–51, 59, 63 n. 13, 66 n. 62 Risālat ikhtilāf al-ʿālamayn (Muḥammad Ibn Schwartz, Dov, 30, 41, 42 n. 5 Shuʿba), 157 n. 108 Schwartz, Kathryn, 71, 74 Risālat al-tawḥīd , 144, 145 Schwartz, Michael, 64 n. 39 rishon. See primal light scribes, 8, 199, 200, 239 n. 26. See also commu- riyāḍiyye. See exact sciences nally organized copying Romaniot Jews, 24, 26 n. 40. See also Sefer The Scroll of the Revealer (Megillat ha-Megalleh ) Mezuqqaq (Bar Ḥiyya), 4–5, 47–62. See also light, Rome, Italy, 165 gradations of; opposites, pairs of Ruah Ḥen, 37, 45 n. 46, 45 n. 49 scum, 180 Rufus of Ephesus, 5, 85, 91–92 scuola siciliana. See Sicilian Arabic poetry rūḥ. See spirit seat of memory (bayt al-dhikr ), 95 ruler, 98 n. 18, 99 n. 43 second anomaly, 19, 27 n. 76 Rumelia, 236 Second Temple, 61, 167 ruʾaḥ ha-ḥayyim. See spirit of life Secretum Secretorum, 18 rye, 121–22 secret writing, 67–68, 80. See also cryptography; rәgāʿīm (minutes), 221 n. 49 invisible inks sector (niṭāq), 27 n. 71 šāʿā. See hour sediment, 180 “Sabbath Epistle” (Ibn Ezra), 217 n. 4 Sefardi, Samuel, 30 al-Ṣafadī, Khalīl Ibn Aybak, 69, 70, 74–75 Sefer Asaf. See Book of Remedies Safavid Empire, 240 n. 40 Sefer ha-Bahir , 54, 57, 63 n. 13, 64 n. 32 al-Ṣaffār, Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥasan, 155 n. 79 Sefer ha-Eshkol (Mühlhausen), 46 n. 65 saffron (kurkum) (kurkāmā), 184 Sefer ha-Ḥizzayon—Ṣurat ha-Areṣ, 209–10 safīr. See deputy Sefer ha-ʿIbbur. See calendrical work Sages of Israel, 31–32, 40, 45 n. 31, 120 Sefer ha-ʿIbbur (Bar Ḥiyya), 62 n. 6 Said, Mehmed, 236, 239 n. 29, 242 n. 67 Sefer ha-refuʾot . See Book of Remedies Saleh, Walid, 122 Sefer ha-shalem ba-mal’akah , 27 n. 62 Salerno, Italy, 163, 165, 186–87, 189 Sefer ḥokhmat ha-nefesh (Eleazar of Worms), 266 Salonika, Greece, 84 n. 55 193 n. 32 samt-i qīblā (azimuth of Mecca), 14 Sefer Mezuqqaq (Moses ben Elijah Galeano), Samuel, 213 27 n. 96 Index šānā. See year author identity, 17–18 Sandman, Israel, 8, 9 n. 6, 58, 217 n. 2 composition, 11–13 Sanskrit texts, 167 mathematical astronomy, 18–23 Santa Maria Novella, 102–3, 111, 112 n. 7 motivation, 11–12 Saracens, 106–7 al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa and, 13–15, 20, 26 al-Sarakhsī, Aḥmad ibn al-Ṭayyib, 189 n. 36, 26 n. 38 Sassanid Persian Empire, 122 overview, 10–13, 23–24 Satan. See Adam; Eve physical astronomy, 18–23 Saturn, 12, 13 production, 11–13 Sefer Yeṣira, 50, 58–59, 60, 63 n. 9. See also Shuʿba, Banū, 146 Meshovev Netivot shutaf. See partner Sefer Yosippon, 182 Der sichere Medicus oder Leib-Arzt, welcher lehret sefirot, 50 wie ein Mensch, ob er schon von der Medicin sekhel. See third world keine Profession macht; dennoch so wohl Selim, 28 n. 100 seine eigene Constitution leicht erkennen als Semitic texts, 7 in anfallenden Kranckheiten sich finden und Sennert, Daniel, 222–23, 226 mit rathen kan (Jüncken), 241 n. 57 senses, 64 n. 39 Sicilian Arabic poetry (scuola siciliana), 103 sensible light (ha-or ha-murgash ), 55 Şifai, Ömer, 227, 233 Sephardic Jews, 15, 226 sign (sīmān), 211–12 Sephardic scientific works. See calendrical work signic quality (amāra), 91 Sephardic scientific works, transmission of, Silk Road, 80 198–216 Silsila, 132–33, 152 n. 22 seven cosmic days, 61 Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī, 130 seven days, 61 Silverstein, Adam, 78 seventeenth century, 229–33 sīmān. See sign Seyāhatnāmeh (Çelebi), 238 n. 19 Simonetta, Cicco, 84 n. 53 shabaka. See frame simple enciphering, 72–73 shadow (ẓill), 7, 137–39 Sinān, Rāshid al-Dīn, 153 n. 25 shadows (aẓilla), 137–39, 155 n. 68, 155 n. 79 Şinasi, 239 n. 26 shadows, and phantoms (aẓilla wa-ashbāḥ ), 130, Singh, Simon, 68 142–43 Sirach, 56, 64 n. 32 Shāfiʿī, 79 Sittig, Kineret, 217 n. 4 al-Shahrastānī, Abū l-Fatḥ, 138, 143 Siyahi, Derviş, 240 n. 43 al-Shahrazūrī, Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn skill (ḥadhāqat), 225–26, 234–35, 239 n. 26, 241 Mahmud, 232 n. 52, 242 n. 66 Shajarat al-Ilāhiyya (Shahrazūrī), 232 skilled (ḥādhıq), 235 shakhṣ. See individual sky, 62 n. 6 al-Shalmaghānī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad Ibn ʿAlī, slaves, Muslim, 108–10, 111 151 n. 8 Smith, Jane, 117 sharḥ. See commentary social bond, religion as, 98 n. 18 Sharḥ (Zādah), 15, 16 solar year, 213 sharīʿa, 100 n. 53 solid orbs (hayʾa mujassama), 22 Shatzmiller, Joseph, 185, 187, 190 Solomon (king), 166 Al-Shaykh, Fakhr al-Dīn, 113 n. 19 Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor, 219 n. 28 Shefer-Mossensohn, Miri, 229, 235 Soncino family, 84 n. 55 shaykh al-Islam , 236 soul faculties (to phantastikòn kai dianoetikòn shekhinah. See indwelling kai mnemoneutikòn), 92–96 Shia, 100 n. 58, 128–50, 151 n. 8, 161 n. 202. See souls. See also transmigration of souls also Jabirian community; Nusayris fourth world of light corresponding to, 52 Shia traditions, 7 as pure, 60 267 al-Shihāb al-nājim fī ʿilm waḍʿ al-tarājim (Ibn sounds, 4, 30, 31–42, 46 n. 59, 46 n. 65 Dunaynīr), 69 Source of Wisdom, 59 Shiism, 128–50. See also imams space, 156 n. 97 Index Shiite texts, 128–50. See also Kitāb al-Rusūm Spain, 42 n. 5, 53, 206, 219 n. 17, 225. See also waʾl-izdiwāj waʾl-tartīb Spanish scholars Shiite underground literature, 128–50 Spanish-Provençal Jewish philosophical- shining of light (zohar ha-or ), 52–53, 63 n. 25 scientific culture, Byzantine Jews’ al-Shīrāzī, Qutb al-Din, 14 reception of, 29–30, 41–42. See also Balbo, Shlomo ben Abin, 175, 186, 187–90, 195 n. 83 Michael; Ezekiel; Maimonides, Moses; Shlomo ben Abun, 188 Rakh, Yedidyah Shmuelevitz, Aryeh, 24 n. 5 Spanish scholars, 30, 220 n. 29 Shtober, Shimon, 15 sparks (nitzotzot), 56 species, 178–79 systematicity, 231–33 Spellberg, Denise, 117 systematic philosophy (ḥikmet), 231–33, 241 sperm, 168–70 n. 48 sphere, 62 n. 6 spirit (rūḥ), 160 n. 171, 160 nn. 194–95 al-taʿahhud li-mā ukhtīra wa-uʿtuqida . See virtues spirit of life (ruʾaḥ ha-ḥayyim), 52–53 al-Ṭabarānī, Maymūn Ibn Qāsim, 145, 158 n. 132 stars, 46 n. 59, 64 n. 35, 208–10, 211. See also al-Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad Ibn Jarīr, 117, Maimonides, Moses 119 steganographical ciphers, 73 al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Rabbān, 194 n. 44 steganography, 68 tables (cedāvil), 227–28 Steinschneider, Moritz, 17, 26 n. 56, 164, 168, 188, Tabriz, 104, 114 n. 27 218 n. 9 Al-Tabṣira (al-Kharaqī), 13 Stephen of Athens, 162, 164, 180, 181 tabula recta. See Vigenère tables Stone, Michael, 126 n. 25 tadhakkur. See memorization; recollection; stories of prophets’ collections (qiṣaṣ remembering al-anbiyāʾ), 117 tadhakkur al-ajzā ʾ. See memorization of single Stowasser, Barbara, 117 parts The strings of pearls of the poets of this period. Tadhkira (Ṭūsī), 13 See ʿUqūd al-jumān fī shuʿarāʾ hādhā tafsīr. See commentaries to Qur’an al-zamān Tafsīr (al-Ṭabarī), 117 Strothmann, Rudolph, 153 n. 24 Tafsīr Muqātil bin Sulaymān, 125 n. 2 studium generale, 102–3 tafwīḍ. See divine delegation Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī ṣināʿat al-inshāʾ (al-Qalqashandī), tahdhīb al-akhlāq. See ethics 67, 68 takhayyul. See imagining subjects, 98 n. 18 takhmīs. See pentadism substitute (temurah), 58–62 Talmud, 50, 117. See also Babylonian Talmud The sufficient in the sciences of versification. Taʿlūmot ḥokhma (Moses ben Judah Galeano), 81 See al-Kāfī fī ʿulūm al-qawāfī Tamar Ben Shoshan, 123 Sufis, 50 Tamir, Arif, 153 nn. 24–25 Sufism, 230–31 tanāsukh. See transmigration of souls Süleyman (efendi), 227, 235, 238 n. 23 taqṣīr. See moderation sultan, 19, 69, 70, 113 n. 19, 222, 236. See taqwīm. See position also Ahmed III; Bayezid II; courts; Targum (Pseudo-Jonathan), 170–71 Mehmed IV; Mehmed the Conqueror; Targum Neofiti, 171 printing press; Sefer Mezuqqaq taʾrīkh, 89 sultanic press, 241 n. 44 Taʾrīkh (al-Ṭabarī), 119 Summa contra Gentiles (Aquinas), 102, 112 n. 11 Tārīkh Dimashq (Ibn al-Sāʿī’), 69 Sunnism, 230–31 Taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ (al-Suyūṭī), 97 n. 6 supercelestial constellation (huperouranios Tatian, 184 aster), 54 tawahhum. See imagining supercelestial light, 54 al-tawḥīd al-bāṭin. See esoteric monotheism supercommentaries, 13–14 Taylor, Cheryl, 64 n. 32 268 ṣura. See form teachers, 79 Ṣurat ha-Areṣ (Bar Ḥiyya), 207. See also glosses tecrübe. See experience Suśruta Saṃhitā, 167 Tekfurdağı, Turkey, 235–36 Index sustasis. See consistency temurah. See substitute al-Suyūṭī, Abū al-Faḍl ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ibn tenth century. See fourth/tenth century Abī Bakr ibn Muḥammad Jalāl al-Dīn Terceme-i Ṭıbb-ı Cedīd (Ḥasan), 223 al-Khuḍayrī, 97 n. 6 Terzioğlu, Derin, 230 swoon (ghāshiyya), 135 texts, 2, 97 n. 8, 105–6. See also Hippocratic Syria, 7, 128–50, 153 nn. 24–25. See also Aleppo, corpus Syria textual transmission. See transmission Syriac, 7, 9 n. 6, 167–71, 183–85, 189, 194 n. 43, al-Thaʿlabī, Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad Ibn Muḥammad 195 n. 90 Ibn Ibrāhīm al-Naysābūrī, 118–19 theological compendia, 230 Paradise, 125 n. 8 Theology of Aristotle, 93 tri. See pus Theophilus, 162, 164, 165, 180, 181, 185 tripartite brain theory, 92–96 theoretical astronomy, 23 tripartite intelligible world, 63 n. 7 theoretical knowledge (ʿilm), 234–35 Triptolemus, 124–25 Theoricae novae planetarum (Peuerbach), 219 Trithemius, 81 n. 28 triyyah. See pus theos hypsistos, 65 n. 44 al-Tuḥfa al-shāhiyya (Shīrāzī), 14 theriac, 228 Tuḥfetüʾl-Erībüʾn-Nāfiʿa Rūḥanī ve Ṭıbbī (Hüse- Thesaurus Totius Hebraitatis et veteris et recentio- yin), 231–32 ris (ben Yehuda), 62 n. 6 Turkey, 80. See also Istanbul; new medicine thin urines, 188 Turkish, 9 n. 6, 10, 15, 72, 236 third anomaly, 19–20 turns (akwār), 144 third world (ḥokhma) (sekhel) (madaʿ), 47, al-Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn, 13, 27 n. 76, 78, 140 50–51 Twelver orthodoxy, 145, 158 n. 135 those who fall short (muqaṣṣira), 128–29, Twelver Shiite canon, 130 144–46 Twelver writings, 146 thought (fikr), 95 two cultures problem, 236–37 Tibet, 163, 167 timahon, 179 ʿUbayd, Aḥmad, 69 time (zeman), 176 al-ʿUkbarī, Abū al-Baqāʾ, 69 tiqqun. See equation ʿulemāʾ-i ṣınāʿat. See scholars of arts tithes, 127 n. 29 ʿulemāʾ-i ḥikmet. See scholars of philosophy ṭıbb-ı cedīd. See new medicine Uludağ, Süleyman, 241 n. 48 ṭıbb-ı cedīd li-Baraqlīsūs . See Paracelsus’s new ʿUmar ben Maḥmūd mi-Ṣagmān, 11–12 medicine Umm al-kitāb , 129 ṭıbb-ı nebevī. See prophetic medicine umūr-ı ṭabīʿiyye. See principles of nature ṭıbb-ı qadīm. See old medicine undecipherable cipher, 80 Ṭıbbu’l-Cedīd al-Kimyevī . See New Chemical université de médecine, 236 Medicine University of Bologna, 103 Tolan, John, 113 n. 15 al-ʿUqaylī, Kamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Maʿālī Mūsā Ibn Toledo, Spain, 219 n. 17 Yūnus al-Mawṣilī, 78–79 Tol edot Adam (Moses ben Elijah Galeano), 18, ʿUqūd al-jumān fī shuʿarāʾ hādhā al-zamān (Ibn 27 n. 62 al-Shāʿir), 69 to phantastikòn kai dianoetikòn kai mnemoneu- urines. See also deposit; uroscopy tikòn. See soul faculties analysis, 164, 179 Torah color of, 164, 173–76, 177 Babylonian Talmud on, 171 in flask, 180 commentary on, 53 red, 188 Israel receiving, 52, 61 thin, 188 Qur’an confirming, 114 n. 35 treatise on, 178–79 Tosafists, 6–7 uroscopy, 7. See also Hebrew uroscopic litera- 269 transformation into subhuman forms (maskh) ture; medieval Hebrew uroscopic texts (masūkhiyya), 129 ben Abin on, 187–90 transgression, 6 cuneiform texts, 192 n. 1 Index transits, 3–8 definition of, 162 transmigration of souls (tanāsukh), 60, 129, 153 earlier layer, 164 n. 25 Greek sources, 171–77 transmission, 3 Hebrew paraphrases, 171–77 as cultural index, 198 in Hippocratic-Galenic corpus, 163–64 of Sephardic scientific works, 198–216 history, 162–63 transposition, 73 later layer, 164 tree as minor medical tradition, 190–92 of knowledge, 60–61 overview, 162–63 uroscopy (cont’d ) wine, 124–25 rules, 171–72, 179 Winston, David, 127 n. 31 tract, 187–90, 195 n. 83 wise man (al-ʿāqil), 89 women, 124–25 vacuum, 63 n. 21 wonders and curiosities (ʿajāʾib ve-gharāʾib ), 232, Vajda, Georges, 10, 13, 14, 17, 23, 26 n. 38 241 n. 47 vegetation. See plants word (kalima), 140 veils (ḥujub), 139, 144 The work on astronomy—The work on the Venetianer, Ludwig, 166, 195 n. 94 form of the earth. See Sefer ha-Ḥizzayon— Venice, 80–82, 84 n. 55, 226 Ṣurat ha-Areṣ Verman, Mark, 63 n. 17, 64 n. 32 works, 207–10. See also calendrical work Vesim, Abbas, 236–37 worlds (ʿolamot), 27 n. 82. See also five worlds; Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 98 n. 27 third world Vigenère, Blaise de, 80, 83 n. 24 of dominion, 63 n. 7 Vigenère tables (tabula recta), 73, 83 n. 24 of light, 63 n. 7 Villanova, Arnaldo da, 24, 28 n. 103 tripartite intelligible, 63 n. 7 Villeneuve, Marquis de, 236 worship, of light, 65 n. 44 vine, 125 n. 8 writing (kitāba), 91, 97 n. 6 Virgin Mary, 101, 102, 107, 109–10 written texts, 3, 86–87 virtues, 87–90, 97 n. 10, 98 n. 19, 99 n. 43 The virtues of Abū Khaṭṭāb. l- See Manāqib Abī Yakub, Hekim, 28 n. 100 l-Khaṭṭāb year (šānā), 211–12, 213 Virtues of Printing (Müteferrika), 230 Yesod Mora (Ibn Ezra), 17 virtuous city, 99 n. 43 Yesod ʿOlam, 217 n. 2, 219 n. 28 Visi, Tamás, 7 Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit, 166, 168 Vlastos, Diamentes, 238 n. 15 Yoḥannan ben Zabda, 166, 172–73, 176, 177–78, Vlona/Vlore, Albania, 199 184, 185, 188, 190, 195 n. 83 von Hees, Syrinx, 232 von Peurbach, Georg, 219 n. 28 ẓāhir. See phenomenal Vorlage, 173, 175 al-Ẓāhir Ghāzī, al-Malik, 69 vowels, 204–5 al-Ẓahirī, Muḥammad Ibn Sinān, 136–37, 144, 145, 155 n. 70, 158 n. 132 Wāfī (al-Ṣafadī), 69 Zakeri, Mohsen, 87 wahm. See imagination Zamora, Muño de, 103 al-waʿī , 98 n. 19 zawja. See consort Wales, 6–7 Zayn al-Dīn, 79 Walker, Bethany, 83 n. 27 zehirot, 63 n. 22 Walker, Paul, 59 zeman. See time Wallis, Faith, 173, 175–76 zenith, 14 Warda, Giwargis, 170, 171 Zeus, 123 Wars of the Lord (Gersonides), 40 ẓill. See shadow Wartenberg, Ilana, 209 Ziyādat Allāh, 92 270 water with pus (mayim muglim), 174 Zohar, 55 wazīr, 129 zohar, light theory and, 48–57 weighted use of reason (lā ḥifẓ bi-ghayr ʿaql), 89 zohar ha-or . See shining of light Index weights, 227 zoharot, 63 n. 22 Welsh poem, 120–21, 126 n. 28 Zonta, Mauro, 207, 210, 220 n. 29 Western Christianity, 10, 127 n. 30 Zoroastrianism, 143 wheat, 6–7, 116–25, 125 n. 8 Zoroastrians, 137 will (mashīʾa), 140, 157 n. 118 Zoroastrian traditions, 6, 121–22 William the Englishman, 163 zugot. See pairs this collection of “Tzvi Langermann and Robert Morrison are to be essays studies the movement of congratulated for bringing together this wide-ranging texts in the Mediterranean basin in collection of essays relating to philosophical, religious, the medieval period from historical and scientific exchange in the Jewish-Muslim-Christian and philological perspectives. Mediterranean of the Middle Ages. The papers are Rejecting the presumption that rigorous and technical but the conclusions are far- texts simply travel without reaching, and the volume will be of use to scholars in a changing, the contributors examine variety of fields.” closely the nature of these writings, —Brian A. Catlos, author of Infidel Kings and Unholy which are concerned with such Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of topics as science and medicine, and Crusade and Jihad how they changed over the course of their journeys. “How did knowledge travel from one culture to another in the Middle Ages? Scholars increasingly appreciate Transit and transformation give that in parallel to the main vectors—texts, notably texts new subtexts and contexts, translations, transmitted in manuscripts—there were providing windows through which other, more elusive modes of transmission. This to study how memory, encryption, volume aims to draw attention to the phenomenon oral communication, cultural and and identify some of these modes. The eleven studies religious values, and knowledge by scholars from various specialties and countries shed traveled and were shared, new light on an important but underestimated cultural transformed, and preserved. This phenomenon.” volume broadens how we think —Gad Freudenthal, author of Science in the about texts, communication, and Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions knowledge in the medieval world.

“Texts in Transit is a pathbreaking collection of original Aside from the editors, the contributors studies, mostly in the history of science and medicine, are Mushegh Asatryan, Brian N. that trace the transmission of written and oral texts Becker, Leonardo Capezzone, Leigh around the Eastern Mediterranean basin in the Chipman, Ofer Elior, Zohar Hadromi- Middle Ages. Each essay considers how the texts were Allouche, B. Harun Küçük, Israel M. shared, altered, and preserved as they moved between Sandman, and Tamás Visi. cultural milieus. Theoretically sophisticated, the studies represent cutting-edge research and offer original Y. Tzvi Langermann is Professor of interpretations of the journeys taken by these texts.” Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. —Charles H. Manekin, editor of Medieval Jewish

Robert G. Morrison is Professor of Philosophical Writings Religion at Bowdoin College. The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania www.psupress.org