The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will
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The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253025968 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2017 |
| Series: | Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies |
| Pages: | 276 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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The Andalusi Literary & Intellectual Tradition
The Role of Arabic in Judah IBN Tibbon's Ethical Will
By S. J Pearce
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Sarah J. PearceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02596-8
CHAPTER 1
"PEN, I RECOUNT YOUR FAVOR!"
Reading, Writing, and Translating in Memory of al-Andalus
The natural and cultural wonders of al-Andalus are among the most powerful forces and prevalent tropes in the Arabic and Arabizing Hebrew literature of Spain's native sons and their descendants. In poetry and prose, Andalusis lavish high praise on their land and on the superiority of their landsmen in all respects — especially their cultural and literary skill. The place is, of course, lauded in works of futüh (conquest narratives), masalik wa-l-mamalik (geographic surveys), and tabaqat (sociological categorization). Poetry praises the lushness of the land and the wisdom and general superiority of the people; and when those authors and their intellectual descendants are forced to leave, we see loss, exile, and nostalgia as common refrains in Arabic and Arabizing Hebrew poetry. Ibn Shuhayd writes perhaps the most famous lament over the city of Córdoba after the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate. Ibn Hazm praises the lush land and the expressions of its cultural values in a work of courtly love and, subsequently, to counteract what he saw as the barbarity of the Almoravid and Almohad invasions, writes a treatise in the fadail al-Andalus (merits of al-Andalus) mode highlighting the achievements of the Andalusi literary class. And perhaps most salient for the discussion that follows, Abraham ibn 'Ezra' (ca. 1093-ca. 1170) wrote a mournful lament over the collective exilic fate of the Jews of al-Andalus and over the loss of the land:
Calamity came upon Spain from the skies, And my eyes pour forth their streams of tears. I moan like an owl for the town of Lucena, where Exile dwelled, guiltless and strong, for a thousand and seventy years unchanged — until the day that she was expelled, leaving her like a widow, forlorn, deprived of Scriptures and books of the Law ... I shave my head and bitterly keen for Seville's martyrs and sons who were taken, as daughters were forced into strangeness of faith. Cordoba's ruined, like the desolate sea ...
With respect to the general shift from praise to lament, Ross Brann comments: "The trope's persuasive power rests not only on the ritualized remembrance of experienced and imagined loss, but also and more particularly on the community's recollection of exactly what was lost." The lament over the land and the culture that sprang from it grows out of the praise that preceded it.
Judah ibn Tibbon was unabashedly a "cultural nationalist," elevating a national Israel above all others. For example, in the ethical will, he exhorts Samuel to charity so that he "will be respected by both great and small, and by Israel and the other nations," establishing a parallelism that equates a national Israel with great men and the other nations with lesser men; yet he was also a thoroughly Arabized thinker and writer, exiled from a place where those two things represented no contradiction. Even so, Judah never wrote any sort of explicit defense of or lament for al-Andalus and its Arabic literary culture; nor did he hold himself as an Andalusi apart from the Jewish communities in the north once he found himself in their midst as did his near contemporary, Moses ibn 'Ezra' (unrelated to the aforementioned Abraham ibn 'Ezra'), who, like many of his contemporaries, consistently tied the superiority of Andalusi Jewry to its lineage as the descendants of the exiles of Jerusalem. It is worth noting that Brann has described this type of nostalgia as motivating in Ibn 'Ezra' a desire "to present himself as a teacher and transmitter of Andalusian Jewish culture"; in other words, the model of an Andalusi cultural translator in exile already existed. Nevertheless, in time Judah adopted the pieces of that model that were useful to his textual program without ever explicitly taking on the mantle of the rhetoric of nostalgia. His program of translation serves the needs of his adopted community in medieval Lunel, a city in southern France just a few kilometers away from the modern city that bears the same name, for works of religion and philosophy in a language at least nominally accessible to them. In doing so, Judah telegraphs that same profound longing for and pride in al-Andalus to readers who have been receptive to it while writing a prideful defense of Arabic into his compositions; and he uses translation and his writing about translation to articulate these correlated sentiments.
The cornerstone of Judah's intellectual project was the translation of Arabic texts, word for word, into Hebrew. In doing so, he created philosophical and religious texts that preserved the features and complexities of the original work as well as the linguistic features of the source language, and he wrote about the importance of both of those aspects of textual conservation. By examining the relationships between Hebrew and Arabic and secular and sacred writing, this first chapter delves more deeply into Judah's program of literal translation and examines the ways in which it allowed him to transmit his ideas about Andalusi texts and textual culture. Furthermore, it sets the process of wordfor-word translation into a broader context of the transposition and adaptation of Andalusi literary models and cultural ideals for non-Arabophone audiences outside of the Islamicate world. As much as Judah was meticulously literal in his rendering of text, he was also a cultural conduit who channeled his belief in the superiority of the Arabic language and of al-Andalus to transmit and preserve a wide range of texts.
THE TIBBONID WORKSHOP
Judah ibn Tibbon was born in Granada around the year 1120, the scion of a family that, if the Arabic etymology of the family name is to be any guide, may have originally made their living as grain millers. Although he is most closely and regularly associated with the city of Granada (a place that factors into his thinking about the Andalusi character of Arabizing Hebrew poetry, as is discussed in chapter 4), there is also some evidence connecting his family's origins to the city of Seville. The first direct evidence that we have of Judah's presence in Lunel as a resident of that city comes, as do the whereabouts of so many itinerant thinkers and writers, in Benjamin of Tudela's Itineraries, in which he writes about the various scholars he meets in towns with substantial Jewish populations in the south of France:
From there [Montpellier] it is four parsangs (parsa'ot) to Lunel, where there is a Jewish community that studies Torah day and night. It includes the great rabbi Meshullam and his sons, all wise, great, and well-to-do: Joseph, Isaac, Jacob, Aaron, as well as the contrarian Asher, who rejects worldly matters and abstains from meat, always occupies himself with books, and is very learned in matters of Talmud. Also: Moses, the brother-in-law of the rabbi Samuel the Elder; and Ulsarnu; and Solomon ha-Cohen; and Judah ben Tibbon the Spaniard, a physician (Yehudah ha-rofe' ben Tibbon ha-Sefardi). They support, teach, and provision everyone who comes from a far-off land to study Torah, for as long as they study in the college there. They are wise, generous, and holy men who observe the commandments and have great munificence toward their brethren, wherever they are. There are about 300 Jews in this community; may the Rock preserve them. From there it is two parsangs to Posquieres.
However, it has long and consistently been suggested that by the time Benjamin encountered him there in such illustrious company, Judah would have already been living in Lunel for close to a decade, perhaps having left Granada as early as 1148 with the advent of Almohad rule in the Iberian Peninsula. Although the ethical will is a text of tremendous autobiographical character, James T. Robinson calls it "notable" that it never refers to the political and cultural changes that ostensibly drove Ibn Tibbon out of al-Andalus and north across the Pyrenees. In Judah's work we do not even see the kinds of hints to the political upheaval and advent of North African rule in al-Andalus that we find in the work of Abraham ibn 'Ezra', who wrote that he found himself in Rome to escape "the oppressors."
Once in Provence, Judah began to translate works of Arabic philosophy into Hebrew for his coreligionists there, since they were not uniformly literate in Arabic, and for a wider European audience as well. Some of his translations were created for specific patrons in response to specific requests: The first parts of Judah's Hovot ha-levavot, the Hebrew version of Bahya ibn Paquda's Hidaya ila faraid al-qulub (Duties of the Heart), are dedicated to Judah's teacher Meshullam ben Jacob (also mentioned in the passage of Benjamin of Tudela's Itineraries cited above and whose role in Judah's intellectual formation is discussed in chapter 3) and the other parts to Abraham ben David; Solomon ibn Gabirol's Kitab islah al-akhlaq (Improvement of Moral Qualities) was translated into Hebrew as Tiqqun Middot ha-Nefesh for Meshullam's son Asher (whose role as patron and fellow is discussed in further detail in chapter 4). The specific impetus behind some of his other translations is less clear — except perhaps to say that they were chosen "methodically and prudently, for he was writing for popular consumption" — but still form part of a coherent Andalusi philosophical and religious corpus: an additional work by Ibn Gabirol, namely his Kitab mukhtar al-jawahir (Choice of Pearls) translated into Hebrew as Mivhar ha-peninim; Judah Halevi's Kitab al-radd wa-l-dalil ft l-din al-dhalil (Book of Proofs and Refutations in Defense of the Despised Faith), which came to be known in both Arabic and Hebrew more simply as The Kuzari and, although not Andalusi in origin but certainly popular in the region, Sa'adya Ga'on's Kitab al-amanat wa-l-itiqadat (Book of Beliefs and Opinions) translated into Hebrew under the title Sefer emunot ve-de'ot. Judah also translated a pair of reference works for the study of the Hebrew Bible, known together in Hebrew as the Mahbarot ha-diqduq (The Grammatical Notebooks). These two works, originally compiled by Jonah ibn Janâh (b. ca. 985), were entitled Kitàb al-Lum'a (Book of Variegated Flower Beds), a style guide and grammatical resource that was translated into Hebrew as Sefer ha-riqmah (Book of Woven Patterns), and Kitàb al-Usul (Book of Roots), an Arabic-language lexicon of the Hebrew Bible translated into Hebrew as Sefer ha-Shorashim. As a translator, he coined many words for scientific and philosophical concepts that existed in Arabic, a consequence of the by-then longstanding Greek-to-Arabic translation movements, but that did not yet exist in Hebrew. Although Judah is not typically characterized in the scholarship as having been a writer in his own right, his considerable output of text paints a coherent and compelling picture that is worthy of further attention. He wrote prologues and epilogues to these works as well as epistles in which he delineated his own principles for translation. In addition to the prologues and epilogues, his original compositions included a letter to Asher ben Meshullam of Lunel describing his process of translating the Tiqqun Middot ha-Nefesh and the aforementioned letter to Samuel written in the genre of the ethical will, which generally advises on how to lead a correct personal and professional life, transmitting values from an older generation to a younger one. In the latter, Judah also references an original composition on grammar and style; but as far as is known, that work was never completed and does not survive even in quotations or fragments. Additional treatises are attributed more insecurely to Judah; so, too, is a Hebrew translation of one of al-Farâbï's treatises on logic, although that text is unknown other than in a reference to it by Judah's grandson Moses. The letter to Samuel also gives additional information about Judah's activities as a physician, merchant, and important participant in Andalusi and Provençal Jewish life, and offers a picture of Judah's ideals for a satisfying and harmonious family life.
Judah's nickname "the father of the Hebrew translators" was bestowed on him by the person who regularly called him father, the addressee of his ethical will, his son Samuel. As noted in the introduction, Judah turned to writing an ethical will as a way to transmit both his professional and personal values to Samuel and to other readers in the Provençal Jewish community who would encounter the text after his death. Judah's entrée into the genre is most often identified as a repository of over-the-top criticisms of a son deemed too indolent and dull for his own or anyone else's good. For example, Judah expresses his disappointment in Samuel by telling him: "But you, my son, belied my expectations and my hopes. You did not see fit to make use of your vision. You have separated yourself from your books, and have shown no interest in them — not even in their titles or tables of contents"; he also complained that "even now you rely on me to wake you from your lazy slumber." Judah laments that "God has not given you a heart with which to know, eyes through which to see, or ears through which to hear" until finally the document deteriorates into rhetoric of pure hysteria, crying out at the shame and humiliation wrought by his son's ineptitude. Judah does ultimately temper his criticisms with the concession that the reputation Samuel has earned in his father's eyes and in the wider world for his poor judgment and lousy work ethic is "mostly a lie" (rovo sheqer); however, despite such small concessions and the success and repute Samuel would ultimately enjoy in the profession his father chose for him, evidence internal and external to the ethical will suggests that Judah largely believed genuinely in the harder line.
After Jonathan of Lunel, a rabbi and the leader of the community in which Judah had relocated himself, commissioned its native son, Samuel, to translate Moses Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed (following Maimonides' own declining of the commission on the basis of his advancing age), Samuel wrote to Maimonides to ask him to resolve a series of questions and doubts he had about his Hebrew interpretation of the text. The pair corresponded over the course of at least four letters back and forth; of these, only two survive and only in Hebrew translation rather than in the polyglot of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic in which they were originally written. The surviving letter from Maimonides, which dates to the year 1199, a mere five years before his death and the same year in which he wrote the first of the two letters to Jonathan of Lunel, is the first one he wrote in reply to Samuel. Following typical salutations at the start of the letter, Maimonides writes:
Years ago, I had already heard of the honored prince, the sage, your father Judah and we all were aware of the breadth of his knowledge and the clarity of his language, both in Arabic and in Hebrew. Learned men from Granada, and one from Toledo, came here and told us about his great honor. The wise, dear Meir ... also gave us examples of your father's wisdom and showed me all of the books that he translated, from the grammar books to the works of wisdom literature. But I did not know that he had a son. However, since your letters in both Hebrew and Arabic arrived and I considered them and saw the places that caused you doubt in The Guide of the Perplexed and places where you thought there might have been a scribal error, I quoted an ancient poem: The father's excellence has passed to the son. Blessed is the One who compensated your father for his wisdom by giving him a son like this.
In a setting that might fairly be described as prosopographically obsessed, Maimonides' report of not even knowing that Judah had a son speaks to Samuel's extraordinary exclusion from the salons of Andalusi-exile high society. It also represents a slight that would seem to suggest that Judah very much believed what he wrote about Samuel's professional inadequacies and thus did not offer him entrée into the intellectual world that Judah himself inhabited. Where Maimonides praises the elegance of Samuel's handwriting, Judah lambastes its messiness and its non-conformity to the hand of his teachers. Furthermore, Judah describes contracting a certain Provençal teacher, Jacob ben Ovadiah, to teach Samuel to write in Hebrew and recounts the conversation between the two men. After writing about Samuel's lack of progress in learning good Arabic style, he adds: "Nor have you progressed as expected in your Hebrew writing. Do you not remember that I have been paying your wise teacher, Jacob, the son of the most generous Ovadiah, thirty gold dinars per year? When I pressed him into the service of teaching you how to write the letters, he said to me: 'Wouldn't it be enough for him to learn one letter per year?'" It seems that Jacob might have been cracking a joke about the generosity of the salary Judah was paying him and suggesting that he would like to collect it for the upward of two decades it would take to teach the Hebrew alphabet at the rate of one letter per year; yet Judah, predisposed to think ill of Samuel's skill, understands it as a deserved dig at his son's intelligence and abilities. Even as other medieval and (eventually) early modern and modern readers would consider Judah's criticisms to be unfair or inaccurate, that Judah believed them himself becomes more difficult to dispute in light of the external evidence.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Andalusi Literary & Intellectual Tradition by S. J Pearce. Copyright © 2017 Sarah J. Pearce. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsA Note on Translations and TransliterationsIntroduction: 'The Preface of Every Book Is Its First Part': A Brief Overview of Materials and Methodology1. 'Pen, I Recount Your Favor': Reading, Writing and Translating in Memory of al-Andalus2. 'Examine your Hebrew Books Monthly and Arabic Books Bimonthly': Autobiography and Bibliography in the Islamic West3. 'On Every Sabbath, Read from the Bible in Arabic': Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature4. 'The Words of the Ancient Poets': Poetics Between Jewish and Islamic Scripture5. 'The Arab Sage Said': Transmitting Arabic Wisdom in Translation6. 'From Vessel to Vessel': The Reception and Reimagining of the Tibbonid CorpusConclusion: "This Book Has Been Completed:" Looking Back and Ahead at al-Andalus in TranslationAppendix: Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will: A New TranslationBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
The study of the Hebrew afterlife of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic texts produced or consumed by Andalusi authors has become a growing field, and S. J. Pearce provides penetrating and engaging perspectives to questions of authorial voice, heteroglossia, paratexts, and fictionalized accounts of translation scenarios.
"The study of the Hebrew afterlife of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic texts produced or consumed by Andalusi authors has become a growing field, and S. J. Pearce provides penetrating and engaging perspectives to questions of authorial voice, heteroglossia, paratexts, and fictionalized accounts of translation scenarios."
S. J. Pearce demonstrates the cultural value of Arabic as a medium of learning and as a marker for Andalusi Jewish intellectual cutlure. A fascinating history of an important moment in the history of translation.
"S. J. Pearce demonstrates the cultural value of Arabic as a medium of learning and as a marker for Andalusi Jewish intellectual cutlure. A fascinating history of an important moment in the history of translation."