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Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean

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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 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 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid- free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste. Contents 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 vi 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 aca- demic 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 stud- ies 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 schol- ars,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 seg- ments 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 trans- lation, 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 espe- cially 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 consid- erations 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.
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