The Liber de parabolis et de mandatis and its Manuscript

The LiberPM exists in only one, somewhat faulty, late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century manuscript: Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne 601, fols. 1r–16v.Footnote ¹⁴ The introduction and “Liber de parabolis” section occupy the first four folios of the text, while the “Liber de mandatis,” the translation of the Guide, takes up the remaining twelve. The 1918 cataloguer of the manuscript named it as a whole, “Traductions de Michel Scot,” probably because it transmits Michael's translation of Averroes’ commentary on De caelo et mundo.Footnote ¹⁵ Until now, the Latin translation of the full Guide, known as the Dux neutrorum, has used up most of the scholarly oxygen dedicated to Maimonides Latinus.Footnote ¹⁶ Rendered into Latin from the Hebrew translation of Maimonides's Judeo-Arabic original completed by the Toledan Jew, Judah al-Ḥarizi, between 1204 and 1213, the Dux neutrorum was the version read by scholastics of the second half of the thirteenth century like Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and Meister Eckhardt.Footnote ¹⁷ Most scholars now agree that this Latin translation was completed around 1240, but vigorous debate remains about whether it was written in Paris, Provence, Italy, or Spain.Footnote ¹⁸

The LiberPM has been known to scholars of the Dux neutrorum, but it has not received the attention it deserves, neither as a witness to the Guide itself nor for the short introductory treatise that precedes the translation of the Guide. Wolfgang Kluxen identified the LiberPM as a work written for Christians by a Jewish compiler, working with a Latin translator who interjected occasional comments on differences between the Vulgate and the Hebrew Bible. The compiler's work, according to Kluxen, is broad, detailed, and exaggerated, and he is a lessor imitator of Maimonides. The translator's work is imperfect compared to the translation of the Dux neutrorum, and the translator shows no independent personality — he is merely a linguistic assistant, and one whose work is full of errors.Footnote ¹⁹ Görge Hasselhoff has followed Kluxen and is not convinced the text should be even considered Maimonidean, and other scholars have followed their lead and limited their attention to it.Footnote ²⁰

Kluxen's critique of the LiberPM is unwarranted. The translation is very good, and its divergence from the Dux neutrorum is a consequence of the fact that each Latin version used a different Hebrew base text. The LiberPM deserves significant attention both because of the value and interest of the text in itself and because of what it can tell us about communities of scholarship and lines of transmission of texts and ideas. Not only is its translation of a substantial section of the Guide deserving of attention, its treatise on parables is a precious and original testimony of the early reception of Maimonidean philosophical exegesis among Jews and Christians.

The LiberPM is best described as a hybrid text, merging translation, paraphrase, and original content in a blend that veils the contribution of Maimonides from its Christian Latinate audience. The singular authorial “I” of the colophon and introduction merges seamlessly with the “I” of the treatise on parables and with Maimonides's own use of the first person in the Guide translation. There is precedent for the extensive and silent use of uncited, non-Christian authors in, among others, the twelfth-century writings of another translator in Toledo, Dominicus Gundissalinus, and it does not mean that translators and readers did not know the origin of their texts.Footnote ²¹

The opening colophon dates the work to the eighth year of Pope Honorius III, July 1223 to July 1224, and its unnamed author addresses the text to Romanus, “powerful and humble.” This is Cardinal Romanus Bonaventura, who left Rome in 1225 to serve as papal legate in France.Footnote ²² The author states that he writes to answer a question Romanus supposedly posed about why Leviticus 2:11 forbids the use of honey in sacrifice and commands the use of salt, while at the same time, Solomon urges the eating of honey in Proverbs. The answer, we learn, is that honey means one thing in the commandment of Leviticus, as the author promises to explain in subsequent chapters on the commandments, which are those taken as a block from Maimonides's Guide III.29–30 and 32–49 (the “Liber de mandatis”), and another thing allegorically in Proverbs, which he will explain in several chapter on parables (the “Liber de parabolis”).Footnote ²³ The section of the Guide translated here falls just short of a natural subsection of that work, III. 25–29, which addresses the reasons for the commandments, ta'amei ha-mitzvot. The translation of the Guide in the commandments section is close to complete, but includes two significant additions. First, biblical quotations in the Guide are cited from the Latin Vulgate, but where the Vulgate differs from the Hebrew Bible enough to obscure Maimonides's point, the text translates the relevant Hebrew verses into Latin to make the meaning clear. Second, the text explains some practices enjoined by the Law that would have been obscure to a Christian audience.Footnote ²⁴

Samuel ibn Tibbon

The question of who is responsible for the LiberPM cannot be separated from its contents and the aims of its author-translators. The introduction and “Liber de parabolis” that precede the translation on the reasons for the commandments are Maimonidean in inspiration and source, and seem to be intended to replace both Maimonides's own introduction on parables which prefaces the Guide as a whole, and III.25–28 and 31, missing from the “Liber de mandatis.” Nevertheless, as we shall see in what follows, they represent original work. They weave together sections of the Guide, including a reordered III.31, with original philosophical biblical exegesis, some of which recurs in ibn Tibbon's own Commentary on Ecclesiastes. This prefatory material not only explains a key message of the Guide (that the Hebrew Bible and thus also the Christian Old Testament can be interpreted philosophically), but it also gives examples of what such philosophical exegesis looks like. It also presents an image of human perfection that diverges somewhat from its Maimonidean model which owes itself, as I will argue, to the work of both Samuel ibn Tibbon and Michael Scot.

I begin by making a case for Samuel ibn Tibbon's involvement with this project, which is the easiest to demonstrate. The LiberPM uses ibn Tibbon's translation, put into its final form only a decade before, as its base text. Moreover, ibn Tibbon is cited by name a half dozen times in the LiberPM as the source for some of the readings of the Hebrew Bible that differ from the Vulgate, and interpretations of points of Jewish law, like this example that touches on both law and biblical text (additions to the Guide in bold): “And I do not know the reason for the cedar wood and the hyssop and the tool and the scarlet and the red calf. And ibn Tibbon said that the word in Hebrew which we put as ‘hyssop’ means ‘tool,’ and this through the explanation of its name, and it is the aspersorium with which the paschal blood is sprinkled. I cannot find any reason why he chose rather these things.”Footnote ²⁵ Note the seamless use of the first person throughout in “I do not know,” “which we put,” and “I cannot find.” Ibn Tibbon's name is rendered relatively consistently wherever it appears, and is close to the Hebrew, though “p” in Latin has replaced the sound “b”, as is evident, for instance, in the common shift from al-Biṭrūjī to Alpetrugius in Latin. We do not know how “אבן תבון” was vocalized, and thus this Latin version, “Tabun” may be a closer rendering of his name than the conventional pronunciation, “Tibbon.” In another example, on the types and preparations of acceptable sacrifices in Leviticus 2, the text reads, “And he who did not have enough to buy a bird, sacrificed bread prepared in the manner of the preparations of that time, like breads cooked <in an oven> and in a pan and in a frying pan, as Leviticus says in chapter 2 near the beginning. And all of these are almost the same as a clay oven, according to ibn Tibbon.”Footnote ²⁶ The observation attributed to ibn Tibbon is banal until we realize that taboun is Arabic for a clay oven, a clibanus in Latin. Perhaps the author makes a joke on ibn Tibbon's name here. In any case, all these passages surely reflect oral communication between Samuel and the Latin translator.Footnote ²⁷

Another sign of ibn Tibbon's involvement is that the treatment of how to interpret parables in the “Liber de parabolis” section reflects both ibn Tibbon's own interpretation of Maimonides's ideas about philosophical exegesis and examples of exegesis from his Commentary on Ecclesiastes, dated by James Robinson to definitely after 1204, probably after 1213, and possibly no later than 1221.Footnote ²⁸ The extended discussion of allegorical interpretation in the “Liber de parabolis” presents itself as a guide for how to interpret the Bible in a way that goes beyond the plain sense of the text. In effect, through its examples, it is also a treatise on what those interpretations should be. It reads as a series of verses, that, taken together, present an image of the human person and their faculties designed to build justice here on earth and ultimately for speculative contemplation of creation and the Creator, but thwarted by the draw of the human faculties to the demands of the body. This picture is intended to shape our reading of the section of the Guide on the reasons for the commandments that follows, commandments that have as their aim the tempering of our basest impulses and the inculcation of moderation. While the overall reading strategy and many of the same biblical verses and the exegesis used to outline this strategy in the LiberPM can also be found in ibn Tibbon's Commentary on Ecclesiastes, others cannot and may reflect hitherto unknown material from Samuel ibn Tibbon, now surviving only in Latin. This section on parables is thus a precious early witness of the method and application of Maimonidean philosophical biblical interpretation.

This section begins by explaining what a parable is and how it creates meaning: “A parable is a discourse explaining one thing from the import of the meaning of the words in the parable, which meaning the words had drawn from human volitional imposition, and also a parable is a discourse meaning something other than that which is signified by the words.”Footnote ²⁹ It does this in two ways: “And this signification of another thing sometimes follows from a deficiency in the words in the expression of the parable, and sometimes through the words placed in the parable.”Footnote ³⁰

The text offers an example of the first type of signification — the notion that spaces or gaps within the text are productive sites for interpretation — from Ecclesiastes 9:14: “There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it.” The LiberPM asks why Solomon says here that there were a “few men” inside the city, but says nothing about any men who came with the besieging king. It concludes, “I say that in the part of the discourse where he is silent, namely about the multitude of besiegers, there appears for me a hole through which I might discern the spiritual meaning which the parable silenced. Just like in a gap in a wall, there is a cavity or hole through which one can see something that before was hidden.”Footnote ³¹ The analogy between reading through the gaps in scripture and looking through a physical hole through a surface that conceals something behind it derives from Maimonides's principle of exegesis that compares the understanding of the internal meaning of a parable from its external meaning to the words of Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.” Maimonides, in his introduction to the Guide, draws on this image, describing the setting of silver as a kind of filigree work with very small holes. From a distance, the apple looks to be made of silver, but up close, the interior becomes visible, and is seen to be made of gold.Footnote ³² So too, the exterior meaning of a well-constructed parable “ought to be as beautiful as silver, while the internal meaning ought to be more beautiful than the external one. The external meaning of the parable contains wisdom useful for all for the conduct of human society, but the internal meaning “contains wisdom that is useful for beliefs concerned with the truth as it is,” for those who know how to look through the surface.Footnote ³³

As observed by James Robinson, Samuel ibn Tibbon develops Maimonides's use of this verse to speak of “widening the holes in the settings of silver,” so that more of the gold can be seen, that is, more of the hidden meaning can be understood. Solomon himself widened the holes in the way the biblical books attributed to his authorship, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, revealed more than had been disclosed by the Torah. He did this by adding new parables. But readers also can “widen the holes” when reading. Maimonides himself did this, according to Samuel, “adding further explanation.”Footnote ³⁴ The LiberPM uses ibn Tibbon's characteristic language, speaking of goldsmiths who make a golden apple and “[i]n a circuitous tracery of metalwork they widen (amplicant) linked silver holes one after the other.”Footnote ³⁵ Its Hebrew and Latinate authors collaborate here on textual criticism of Proverbs 25:11, which is given first according to the Vulgate: Mala aurea in lectis argenteis qui loquitur verbum in tempore suo (“To speak a word in due time is like apples of gold on beds of silver”). But the Liber states that both Poma aurea in circulis argenteis, vir qui profert verbum in convenienti suo (“A man who puts forth a word suitable for him is like apples of gold in settings of silver”), and a version that has in sculturis argenteis, present more accurate renderings of the Hebrew, following Maimonides who emphasizes that maskkiyot (the circulis or sculturis of the verse) represent filigree that can be seen through.Footnote ³⁶

Samuel also explains that in order to “widen the holes” you must mention “words of the sages fitly spoken,” bringing “one thing close to another,” that is, by bringing new verses to bear on the verse you seek to interpret, to discern its hidden meaning, crediting this work to Maimonides.Footnote ³⁷ These verses themselves contain parables, and thus the LiberPM teaches us the meaning of the “small city” and “great king” of Ecclesiastes 9:14, by interpreting it through Eccles. 7:19 (Vulgate 7:20): “Wisdom comforts the wise more than ten rulers of the city.” It takes the “ten rulers” of this verse as powers of the soul and this unlocks the meaning of the rest of both verses. The “city” is the human body, and the “king” who comes against it is the human appetite or sensual concupiscence, “which the vulgar call sensuality.” The city/body is inhabited by the “ten rulers” of Ecclesiastes 7:19, who are also the “few men” of Ecclesisastes 9:14. They are powers belonging to the non-rational parts of the human soul, the “earthly” and “bestial” parts, that is to say, Aristotle's vegetative and animal souls, which are named explicitly in the text and described as multipartite, as opposed to the rational soul. The text lists the five exterior senses among these powers, along with the inner senses of imagination and memory.Footnote ³⁸

Having given us an example of an interpretation of a parable through a deficiency in its words, the text then presents an example where the words that are present, rather than absent, call for interpretation. But the example itself, Ecclesiastes 4:13–14 (“Better is the boy, poor and wise, than the king, foolish and aged, who does not know how to provide for the future. The one comes from prison and chains into the kingdom; the other, born to the kingdom, is consumed by want”), allows the author to continue to build on his psychological interpretation of the previous verses. The “boy” is rational human intelligence, which is still young when a person is old because it is slow to develop, and the “king” remains concupiscence.Footnote ³⁹ And the same is true for the third example, which takes both kinds of parabolic interpretation together in an extended discussion of the story of Lot, his wife, and his daughters leaving Sodom at the behest of the two angels in Genesis 19. The various elements of the human soul that were touched on in the foregoing are now developed into a virtuosic image of the struggles of a person, torn by different impulses. Lot dwelling in Sodom is the rational human intelligence dwelling in the human body. The two angels are purified imagination and illuminated reason, and they draw him away from the body towards Zoar, which is called the “city of intelligence, which a man enters for the sake of contemplation when he flees from the flesh,” and from the onslaught of the ten “rulers” discussed above.Footnote ⁴⁰ However Lot's wife, who is sensuality, and two daughters, the concupiscible and irascible faculties, draw him away again.Footnote ⁴¹ This is because, “Unless the sun, that is divine illumination, rises over the earth, that is, over him who has the earth as his foundation, he is the inhabitor of a house of clay, not at all entering Zoar.”Footnote ⁴² That is to say, without the sun, the revolving sphere, we are just matter, “inhabitors of the house of clay.”

Samuel ibn Tibbon makes extensive use in his Commentary on Ecclesiastes of the juxtaposition of three of the verses at the heart of this explanation of parabolic interpretation — the “small city” of Ecclesiastes 9:14; the “ten rulers” of Ecclesiastes 7:19 (Vulgate 7:20); and the “boy” and “king” of Ecclesiastes 4:13–14 — and his interpretation of them is the same as that in the LiberPM.Footnote ⁴³ He provides several possible lists of human psychic faculties to match the ten rulers, perhaps to discourage an overly-literal enumeration of powers.Footnote ⁴⁴ He even links these verses to Lot, and although there is no extended reading of Genesis 19 in his extant work, Samuel identifies Sodom with the body and the city of Zoar with the higher, rational soul that survives the death of the body, as the LiberPM does, unlike Maimonides, who identifies the “small city” with the human body and its faculties.Footnote ⁴⁵

Both the nature of the Sun that connects us to something that is beyond the mere matter of our bodies, and the role of the two angels who come to help Lot rise above his worst impulses and move towards intellectual contemplation, called “illuminated reason” (ratio illuminata) and “purified imagination” (ymaginatio defecata), deserve further attention. Reason and imagination are faculties of the human person, but as “angels” they show that something of these higher powers of the soul come from beyond the sublunar world of generation and corruption, and ideally the human will be led by them. These two powers are discussed again in the final chapter of this introductory material before the Guide translation proper begins. This chapter, entitled “On the Commandments,” links the introduction on parables of the “Liber de parabolis” to the Guide translation in the “Liber de mandatis,” explaining why it was essential to prefix a disquisition on the interpretation of parables to an explanation of the reasons for the commandments, and specifically one that talks about the psychic challenges humans face to a life of contemplation and theoretical speculation, which is their ultimate and highest end.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this chapter the reader encounters two powers called “speculative contemplation” and “active operation,” which I associate with Lot's two angels, “illuminated reason” and “purified imagination” and link to the work of the “sun,” for reasons I will make clear in what follows.

In this chapter, “speculative contemplation” seeks truth, and this is the path of studying wisdom which leads to perfection and knowledge of God. “Active operation,” on the other hand, seeks peace, and this peace is the internal governance of the rational soul over the “rulers of the small city” — the human faculties of the non-rational parts of the soul — and also justice in the civic community as a whole. And the pathway to both internal truth and external peace is the commandments, which provide rules that smooth the path of human relations and temper the imbalances of the human body. The well-being of the body and the good order of human community are the basis and prerequisite for the practice of speculative contemplation.Footnote ⁴⁷

The source for much of this discussion is Guide III.27, which talks about how the commandments serve both the ordered functioning of human society and the perfection of the individual human body, as well as the health of the soul. This consists of the soul's acquisition of correct opinions, all with the ultimate goal of the perfection of the soul, which consists in not merely accepting these opinions, but understanding them to be true because they have been arrived at through speculation and found necessary by investigation.Footnote ⁴⁸ The last paragraph of this section of the LiberPM is a translated paraphrase of the conclusion of III.27, removing the Talmudic citations of the original and adding clarifying comments on the difference between the Hebrew Bible and Vulgate versions of Deuteronomy 6:24, which it reads as speaking of these two perfections, body and soul.Footnote ⁴⁹

But why should these two powers — speculative contemplation and active operation — be associated with the two angels of Genesis 19? Maimonides gives us some help on how to interpret these angels in Guide II.6, in which he discusses the different terms used to describe the separated intellects, one of which is “angels,” and also describes different things signified by the equivocal word “angel.” Angel means messenger and thus the separated intellects, which are intermediaries between God and the existents, can be called “angels.” But because “angel” means messenger, every individual or thing that carries out an order is an angel, including the four elements and the prophets, and also the powers of the soul: “Every force belonging to the bodily forces is an angel.” Maimonides quotes Midrash Qohelet, “When a man sleeps, his soul speaks to the angel and the angel to the cherub,” and explains from it that, “The imaginative faculty is likewise called an angel and the intellect is called a cherub.”Footnote ⁵⁰

We have here a reference to imagination and intellect that can be named as angelic beings, close to our two angels from Genesis 19 in the LiberPM, who are called imagination and reason. But Maimonides does not connect these powers which we can call angels to the two types of human perfection that he discusses in Guide III.27, as the LiberPM will do, and his imaginative and intellective faculties are not quite the purified imagination and illuminated reason of that work. Most importantly, imagination and intellect are simply human psychological faculties for Maimonides. They share the name “angel” with the separated intellects only because of the equivocal nature of that term.

The ultimate origin of these powers in the LiberPM is rather Avicenna's division of the powers of the rational soul into two parts. The first is the theoretical part, that is, the contemplative or motive power, which turns its attention upwards towards universals and away from matter. The second is the practical part, that is, the active or comprehensive power, whose job it is to attend to life in the material world, the “sensible things,” and to manage and channel the actions of the parts of the vegetative and animal souls, the latter with its perceptive faculty divided into the five exterior and five interior senses, which would be another way of reading the “ten rulers” of Ecclesiastes 7:19 (Vulgate 7:20) as interpreted in the LiberPM.Footnote ⁵¹

Avicenna's theoretical-motive-contemplative power and his practical-active-comprehensive power get linked, respectively, to reason and to imagination, and also to angels in terms very close to those used in the LiberPM in a July 1227 letter from Gregory IX to Frederick II, identified by Beryl Smalley, that urged the emperor to at last keep his repeated promise to set out on crusade.Footnote ⁵² In it, Gregory compares these two powers to the cherubim and the ever-turning sword that shows one face then the other, which guard the path back to Eden in Genesis 3:24:

Smalley suggested that Gregory's source for this early discussion in Latin of the two faces, or powers of the rational soul, was the Avicennan De immortalitate anime attributed to Dominicus Gundissalinus and reworked in a version attributed to William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (d. 1249), and she supposes the bishop was Gregory's source.Footnote ⁵⁴ But William explicitly rejects Avicenna's view of the two-fold rational soul as false, believed only by “imbeciles” in his day.Footnote ⁵⁵ There is another possible candidate for bringing this language about the soul into wider Latin use. Michael Scot knew and used Avicenna's De anima in the translation of Dominicus Gundissalinus and Abraham ibn Daud, and drew on it, and on Gundissalinus's own writings on the soul, in his Liber introductorius.Footnote ⁵⁶ There he describes the soul in Avicennan terms, drawing from its classification of the faculties, and identifying within the rational soul an active part that attends inwards to the things of the senses, and a speculative or contemplative part that looks upwards to universals.Footnote ⁵⁷ And shortly before July 1227, when Gregory sent the letter, Michael Scot was cooling his heels in Rome, hoping for a papal benefice, and soon after, entered the service of the emperor himself.Footnote ⁵⁸

The image of the Tree of Life guarded by the cherubim with the turning sword found in Gregory's letter is also a key, though puzzling, motif for Samuel ibn Tibbon in his Commentary on Ecclesiastes. The flaming sword illuminates with its light, but not for everyone. He draws on Maimonides's discussion of Midrash Qohelet to explain it: “He [Maimonides] said that the imaginative faculty is called “angel” and the intellect “cherub.” But it is more likely in my view that “angel” and “cherub” are synonyms.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Samuel ibn Tibbon enumerated the powers of the soul represented by the “ten rulers” of Ecclesiastes 7:19 (Vulgate 7:20) in several ways, and provided Romance terms for the retentive faculty (assentire); recollection (remembre); and memory (“which they call memoria in Romance and which others call rememrar”). He named Aristotle's De sensu et sensato (Sense and Sensibilia), book one of the Parva naturalia, as his source. In reality, his source is Averroes's Epitome of Parva Naturalia, specifically book two, De memoria et reminiscentia (On Memory and Recollection).Footnote ⁶⁰ The Latin translator of Averroes's Epitome was Michael Scot.Footnote ⁶¹ Perhaps these Romance words in the Hebrew commentary hint at “traduction a quatre mains,” and that Samuel cooperated with Michael on his translation, rendering Arabic into Romance, which Michael then translated into Latin. Their common interest in this text does demonstrate a shared interest in the internal senses of the soul.

This interest is also reflected in Samuel's Maʾamar Yikkawu ha-Mayim (Treatise on the Gathering of the Waters), completed after his commentary, possibly in 1221 or 1232.Footnote ⁶² Here, Samuel cites Isaiah 6:6 and 6:7, in which the seraph touches Isaiah's lips with a coal as an instance of the kind of purificatory act we saw in the discussion of Lot and the angels in the LiberPM. The text reads:

Ibn Tibbon's seraph who purifies in his Maʾamar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim and the cherub who illuminates in his commentary parallel the illuminated reason and purified imagination of the LiberPM.

Ibn Tibbon's seraph is not simply a name for a power of the human soul, as with Maimonides, but rather is clearly identified with the separated active intellect, which actualizes the human intellect, as in Avicenna.Footnote ⁶⁴ Likewise, in the LiberPM, the “angels” seem to be more than names for powers of the soul. The text is circumspect, but seems to identify them with the active intellect in this interpretation of Genesis 19 on Lot: “Unless the sun, that is divine illumination, rises over the earth of this one, that is, over him who has the earth as his foundation, he is the inhabitor of a house of clay, not at all entering Zoar. And see that when the rational and contemplative man is brought outside the city, two things are said to be still with it, namely the purified imagination and illuminated reason.” The identification is concealed somewhat from the casual reader by the reference to divine illumination, but the attention here to the movement of the sun, believed by Avicenna and others to be, like the circular motion of all the heavenly spheres, a consequence of the separated intellects, suggests the LiberPM likewise has this picture in mind.

Michael Scot

Michael Scot's identity as the Latinate half of the duo is harder to prove decisively, since the Latin author made no effort to disclose his identity and perhaps even wished to conceal it from the casual reader, but it rests on substantial circumstantial evidence.Footnote ⁶⁵ James Robinson has already observed a curious parallel between texts used by ibn Tibbon and those used by Michael Scot and others associated with the cathedral of Toledo.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1217, Michael Scot translated al-Biṭrūjī's Kitāb fī al-hayʾa (On the Movements of the Heavens) from Arabic into Latin with the help of “Abuteo leuita.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Al-Biṭrūjī's goal was to understand the movement of the stars and planets in a way that meshed with Aristotle's theories of motion in Physics and De caelo, avoiding the epicycles and eccentrics of Ptolemean astronomy.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even before Michael translated it in 1217, Samuel, who most likely came to know it when he visited Toledo sometime between 1204 and 1210, had already cited it in his own work, and his son, Moses, would translate the whole thing into Hebrew in 1259.Footnote ⁶⁹ Michael drew on the same sections ibn Tibbon cited in his own later Liber introductorius.Footnote ⁷⁰

Michael Scot cites Maimonides once by name in his Liber introductorius:

Michael's accolade for Maimonides, “the great philosopher,” is one he accords to few others. Note also that Michael recognizes the teaching that he quotes exists in a book. Elsewhere Michael reflects Maimonides's views without citation, as when he says that women are more inclined than men to perform acts of magic intended to summon demons since they are greatly lacking in reason, an opinion Maimonides expresses in Guide III.37, transmitted in the LiberPM and, as we shall see, an aspect of the concerns with idolatry that drive that work.Footnote ⁷² Michael compares the concentric spheres that make up the cosmos to the layers of an onion, which Maimonides does likewise, in Yesodei haTorah, suggesting access to Maimonides's thought beyond what can be found in the Guide.Footnote ⁷³

Michael's biography puts him in Rome at the right time to have dedicated the LiberPM to Cardinal Romanus.Footnote ⁷⁴ He first appears on the historical stage in 1215 in Rome for the Fourth Lateran Council, accompanying the entourage of Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo.Footnote ⁷⁵ He was a resident canon of the see of Toledo, and may have been the cathedral's magister scholarum identified as “M.” in a document of 1208.Footnote ⁷⁶ He returned with the archbishop to Toledo, where he finished his translation of al-Biṭrūjī in August 1217. He also translated Aristotle's works On Animals while still in Toledo. In 1220, he was in Bologna, and seems to have left Spain for good. Between 1224 and 1227, Popes Honorius III and Gregory IX wrote letters praising Michael and seeking benefices for him. Gregory's letter describes him as knowledgeable in both Arabic and Hebrew.Footnote ⁷⁷ The dedication of the LiberPM to Cardinal Romanus, the pope's trusted servant, could have been done to capture the attention of the pope to intervene on his behalf. No desirable benefice could be found for Michael, however, so he entered the service of the papal archenemy, Emperor Frederick II. Samuel ibn Tibbon consulted manuscripts of Aristotle's Meteorology in Toledo sometime between 1204 and 1210.Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, Michael could plausibly have met and worked with Samuel in Toledo, and been in Rome at the date the Liber was dedicated, 1223–24, and in 1227 when Pope Gregory IX sent his Avicennan letter to Frederick II.

The LiberPM shares stylistic commonalities with Michael's translations from Arabic, and with his original works. Since Michael's translations were highly literal, they were significantly influenced by the syntax of his source material and by his linguistic assistants, thus a translation from Hebrew looks different from those from Arabic.Footnote ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, the LiberPM is written in the same simple and clear Latin of his original writing and follows his style of translation, most often literal and word-for-word, and occasionally paraphrastic.Footnote ⁸⁰ Dag Hasse has developed a method identifying the use of characteristic Latin particles by thirteenth-century translators that allowed him to name Michael Scot securely as the translator of seven and possibly eight of Averroes's works.Footnote ⁸¹ Applying his method to the LiberPM supports my identification of Michael as its Latin author.Footnote ⁸²

Another stylistic clue is the way that the LiberPM consistently and unusually signals biblical quotations by citing chapter number, biblical book, and then rough location within the chapter (beginning, middle, or end).Footnote ⁸³ The division of the books of the Latin Vulgate into the chapters that are still current was only a couple of decades old, and was disseminated through the University of Paris.Footnote ⁸⁴ This system, once attributed to Stephan Langton, probably originated in England, possibly at the monastery of St. Albans and maybe under the influence of Jewish bibles.Footnote ⁸⁵ I have found no other author who further subdivides these chapters by beginning, middle, or end.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, the only other case I know of is in Michael Scot's prologue to his Liber introductorius, in which he cites from chapter three of Ecclesiasticus “near the beginning.”Footnote ⁸⁷ It is a very useful structuring technique for a work like the LiberPM, which involved the comparison of Hebrew and Latin biblical verses.

Jacob Anatoli

I conclude the first half of this paper by discussing evidence from a text completed after Samuel ibn Tibbon and Michael Scot were both dead by the Jewish scholar, Jacob Anatoli (c. 1194–1256), because it reinforces the association of Michael with the LiberPM. While in Naples at Frederick's court, Michael became a close associate of Anatoli, who, after 1211 and before he himself joined Frederick's court, had been ibn Tibbon's student in Marseille, and was also his son-in-law.Footnote ⁸⁸ Anatoli was in Naples while Michael was translating many of Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle from Arabic into Latin, likely with Anatoli's help, Anatoli himself translated to Hebrew Averroes's Middle Commentaries on Porphyry's Isagogue and on Aristotle's logical texts, as well as Ptolemy's Almagest, and Averroes's abridgement of that work. Anatoli also translated into Hebrew a compendium of the Almagest, called the Kitāb fī jawāmiʿ ʿilm al-nujūm (Elements of Astronomy) by al-Farghānī (d. after 861) from the Latin version of Gerard of Cremona, done in Toledo before 1175.Footnote ⁸⁹ Anatoli declares in the translation, “I translated it from the mouth of a certain Christian and rectified it [against a book] in the Arabic language.” This Christian was most likely Michael Scot, rendering the Latin orally into a vernacular which Anatoli then translated into Hebrew. Chapter 22 of Anatoli's version contains material on the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations absent from both the Latin exemplar and the Arabic version that has come down to us.Footnote ⁹⁰

In his Malmad ha-Talmidim (Goad for Students), a series of Maimonidean philosophical sermons keyed to the weekly Torah readings, we see the expansion of one branch of the textual community of readers of Maimonides that began in Toledo. Anatoli recounts with admiration, in some twenty-odd places, things he has learned from Michael Scot. These include elements of natural history, biblical exegesis, and also conversations about aspects of Maimonides's Guide, in which he quotes Michael as an expert.Footnote ⁹¹ In his sermon on Parashat Nitzavim in Malmad ha-Talmidim, Anatoli appears to respond to the argument of the introduction to the LiberPM in a way that suggests he knows the text. Moreover, he associates this discussion with Michael, as I shall demonstrate in what follows.

In the course of this sermon, Anatoli bemoans the fact that “some of our sages” do not attend to finding reasons for the commandments.Footnote ⁹² Some commandments have obvious reasons. Others, the statutes or ḥuqqim, which address ritual matters including sacrifices, are difficult to discern. The project of the section of the Guide translated by the LiberPM is precisely to explain the reasons for this type of commandment and, for Maimonides, the fundamental reason behind them is to end idolatry. Anatoli justifies the effort to discern the reasons behind the commandments because, in the absence of reasons, other peoples ridicule and mock the Jews because they do not know why they are doing the things they do. Deplorably, this mockery falsifies Deuteronomy 4:6, which promised that if Jews obey the commandments which are “your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples,” when these peoples hear the statutes they will say “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”Footnote ⁹³ The argument Anatoli makes here is essentially that found in Guide III.31, but put in more forceful terms. “Inquiry and questioning about the reasons of the commandments is appropriate,” Anatoli writes. “There is a reason, and if the reason is recalled in Torah, we will support it and if not, we will conduct research into it . . . For performance of a commandment in the absence of the recognition of its reason and intention is very offensive.”Footnote ⁹⁴ His argument effectively explains and justifies not only Maimonides's disclosure of the reasons for the commandments in the Guide, including his use of sources outside the Torah, but also suggests why the translation into Latin of this section of the Guide in the LiberPM may have been a project ibn Tibbon could support.

Anatoli states that one must find reasons for the generalities of a commandment, but not for every single detail within it, and names Part III of the Guide as his source.Footnote ⁹⁵ Then he quotes Michael Scot who, Anatoli says, compares the two approaches to understanding the reasons for a commandment that Anatoli has discussed here — that is to say, finding a single reason for the whole commandment versus finding a reason for every detail in it — to two modes of performing allegorical interpretation.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the introduction to the Guide, Maimonides described two approaches to the interpretation for a parabolic biblical passage: taking the entire passage as a whole with a single meaning, or interpreting it word by word. He cautioned against over-interpreting parables by excessive attention to detail.Footnote ⁹⁷

A comparison between uncovering the reasons for the commandments and disclosing the inner interpretation of biblical allegory is the core of the introductory chapters of the LiberPM, as we saw above in the section on Samuel ibn Tibbon. At the outset, the author of the LiberPM claims that he is responding to a question about why Leviticus 2:11 commands that honey not be burnt in sacrifices, while at the same time Solomon elsewhere invites the eating of honey in Proverbs (for example, Prov. 24:13–14 and 25:16). The answer given is that, “The proverbs of Solomon proceed one way in the form of a parable when he spoke about honey and other things, as I will explain later in a chapter concerning the parable, and the orders and utterances proceed in another way concerning the commandments of God.”Footnote ⁹⁸ That is, the LiberPM begins by contrasting the interpretation of a commandment to the interpretation of an allegory or parable. It discusses the number of commandments, 613, of which there are 248 that are positive and 365 that are negative. Then it draws on Guide III.31, paraphrased and reordered to discuss the purpose of the commandments as a whole, and, like Anatoli's sermon, excoriates those with no interest in knowing the reasons for the commandments. It quotes Deuteronomy 4:6, the same verse cited by Anatoli, to argue that, on the contrary, the precepts must have some reason and do some good, because that is why the verse says that the peoples of the world will know the Jews are wise because they follow them. And immediately after that, the Liber begins the long discussion of how to interpret parables, and why their interpretation is relevant to the commandments discussed above in the section on Samuel ibn Tibbon.Footnote ⁹⁹

The parallel between the order and content of Anatoli's sermon and the first folio of the LiberPM is clear in the way they both link the interpretation of parables to that of commandments, their dependence on Maimonidean strategies of interpretation, including Guide III.31, and their use of Deuteronomy 4:6. Anatoli does not directly quote from the Liber; rather, he reflects and reproduces in a very different format the argument constructed by “the sage to whom I was attached,” Michael Scot, with the help of his own father-in-law.

Encounter in Toledo

The second half of this study discusses the impact of the Guide on the broader textual community I introduced at the outset. It traces the earliest impact of Maimonides on his first Latin audience, beginning with Maimonidean conversations that took place among Christians in Toledo even before the Liber was presented to Cardinal Romanus in 1223–24. These conversations reflect both the section of the Guide conveyed in the LiberPM and parts that are not. There is no way to tell from them whether a now-lost Latin translation of ibn Tibbon's Hebrew Guide existed in Toledo, as we have in the LiberPM for Guide III.29–49, or whether knowledge of other ideas in the Guide that are evident before its partial dissemination in 1223–24 came from written notes or oral conversations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Samuel ibn Tibbon's work remained part of these conversations, especially as they touched upon Aristotelian natural philosophy. The Guide presented scholars in Toledo with a God who worked through the principles of Aristotelian physics, and Maimonides's Guide offered an incentive to translate and study those works of Aristotle and his interpreters that illuminated these questions. But it also gave them a way of thinking about their own Christian tradition as it related to Jewish Law and that is where this section begins. I will return to this theme at the end, by exploring the polemical purposes to which some of this was put and the dire consequences this had for Jews as the textual community of readers of the Guide expanded from Toledo to Paris.

The long section of the Guide in the LiberPM focuses on the reasons for the commandments. Maimonides argues here that the positive and negative commandments he identifies have reasons, and are each designed to inculcate true belief, good morals, or civic well-being. Some, called judgments (mishpatim), are clearly and obviously designed for one of these ends, but the reasoning behind others, the precepts or statues (ḥuqqim), is not obvious.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Guide III.29, Maimonides locates the reasons for these laws in the first intention of the Law as a whole, which is to eradicate idolatry.Footnote ¹⁰² He traces the problem of idolatry historically to Abraham's recognition of the unity of God and subsequent confrontation with the idolatrous practices of the “Sabians” among whom he lived.Footnote ¹⁰³ The oral and written Law that Moses handed down at Sinai was designed to wean the Jews from paganism. Maimonides has studied the texts of the Sabians, whose practices still pose a threat and a temptation, and concludes from their books that the sacrifices of the Hebrews enjoined by the Torah, both as a general principle and in the forms they took, were given to them as a remedy for idolatry.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Jacob Anatoli reported that Michael Scot made the same argument in conversation with him, that the Law was given to Israel to distance it from the beliefs and practices of the Sabians.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, adopts both Maimonides's historical account of the emergence of the Law and his understanding that Mosaic sacrifice was meant as a remedy for idolatry in his anti-Jewish Dialogus libri uite and in his world history, the Breuiarium, without naming his Maimonidean source. The prologue to the Dialogus libri uite, written a few years before the LiberPM, describes how after the exile from Eden, the people, “disturbed by various teaching and wandering from their innate conscience, wavered from the truth of the Parents, and fell into a labyrinth of errors so much so that, having set aside the Creator, they constructed idols, ascribed various deities to them, and made sacrifice to a damnable priesthood.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ All was not lost, however: “But the mercy of God preserved knowledge of Himself in the progeny of Terah. Then, according to the letter of the promise, after Abraham's seed had been propagated, He gave the fiery law to the sons of Israel.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the prologue to the Breuiarium, he writes that after the Fall in Eden, “[a] madness of idols is raised up, until the sagacious devotion of the patriarchal prophet adored the One intelligence.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The patriarch here is Abraham and the language Rodrigo uses to describe the one God (unum intelligens) evokes Maimonides's Guide.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Rodrigo paraphrases here, albeit elliptically, the central arguments of Guide III.29, and reflects its contention that the first intention of the Law was to end idolatry. His account of the idol worship of the people who came after the exile from Eden — the rejection of the Creator, the construction of idols, and the connection to them of different deities — evokes Maimonides. He speaks of a “madness of idolatry,” perhaps echoing Maimonides's on the “ravings” of the idolators.Footnote ¹¹⁰ He follows Maimonides's Guide III.29 in his understanding of the central role played by Abraham, identified here, as in the Guide, by his father, Terah.Footnote ¹¹¹ Above all, he underscores Maimonides's contention that the Law was given to the Hebrews by Moses as a direct response to their idolatry.Footnote ¹¹² Rodrigo names it a “fiery law” because it still required sacrifice, but these sacrifices — described by Rodrigo as a “remedy for idolatry” — are, after Moses, intended to wean the people away from pagan practices and are directed only towards the one God.Footnote ¹¹³ The Mosaic law here, again following Maimonides, is an accommodation to human weakness. For Maimonides in Guide III.32, the Law accommodates the inability of humans to shift immediately from sacrificing to idols to eliminating all sacrifice completely.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Weaning the Israelites away from idolatry is a tool in the step-by-step process of human perfection, which was, as we saw above in the section on Samuel ibn Tibbon, the underlying message of the introductory chapters the LiberPM.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Maimonides draws an analogy between how God led the Israelites not the easy and direct way, but rather the long way through the desert, to how God did not eliminate all sacrifice, but rather redirected it away from idols and towards Him alone, and moreover hedged these new sacrifices with burdensome restrictions and rules.Footnote ¹¹⁶

A member of Rodrigo's circle, Mark of Toledo, also pursued this idea of the Law as both a remedy for idolatry that accommodates human weakness and a tool in the development of human perfection.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Mark was a canon of the cathedral of Toledo. By 1210, he had completed a translation of the Quran at the request of Archbishop Rodrigo and Mauricio, then archdeacon of Toledo, and later bishop of Burgos. In 1213, again at the request of Mauricio, Mark translated the treatise on divine unity of ibn Tūmart, the spiritual leader of the Almohads who ruled Muslim Spain.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Mark opens the preface of his translation of the Quran with a discussion of how Muhammad moved his followers away from idolatry towards monotheism: “Iron strikes stone producing fire, which has multiple positive, practical uses.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ But when the two were brought together to make idols of stone and iron, the fire produced was scorching and sulfurous; it did not illuminate men, but rather led them astray.Footnote ¹²⁰ Mark tells us that Muhammad was raised by idol-worshipping parents in an Arabia, which, like Abraham's Sabia in the telling of Maimonides, was defiled by the worship of demons.Footnote ¹²¹ When he left it for study, Muhammad encountered Christians and Jews and their beliefs and Scriptures. Returning to Arabia, he wanted to turn his people away from idolatry and towards the worship of the One God, but he recognized that the Law of the Christians would be too hard, and the Law of the Jews, apart from the decalogue, contained provisions that were extraneous or strange (extraneas), so he confected a Law that drew on both.Footnote ¹²²

The concern with idols, Muhammad's perplexity (in tanta fuit perplexitate constitutus), and the characterization of the Jewish Law as containing extraneous Laws alongside the essential have as their source Maimonides's Guide as transmitted in the LiberPM. Mark creates here a Muhammad who is a distorted image of the Abraham of Guide III.29: born in an idol-worshipping world in which even his parents, like Abraham's, worshipped idols and wanting to bring his people to worship of one God. Unlike the Moses of Guide III.32, Mark's Muhammad is not prepared to lead his people by the difficult yet, to Mark, correct way of the Christian Law, but instead takes them down the easier but doomed path.

In Guide III.32, Maimonides makes a triple analogy between the accommodationist and gradual path of the laws of sacrifice, the arduous and slow journey on which Moses led Israelites, and God's own canny construction of the human body, where nerves from the brain move eyelids and jaw, while the spinal cord, muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments are all necessary for motion of those parts further from the brain.Footnote ¹²³ The common thread between them is God's felicitous intention for human well-being, operated through nature and at a distance. Maimonides cites Galen's De usu partium (On the Use of the Parts of the Human Body) as his source for this description, but notes that this is plainly visible to anyone who looks; Maimonides's God educates humans by acting through the laws of nature which are evident to those who study them.Footnote ¹²⁴

This medical analogy seems to have made an impression on Mark. At some point, Mark studied medicine, possibly at Montpellier. While there, his fellow students and teachers learned that he knew of medical texts by Galen, unknown to them but preserved in Toledo in Arabic, and they urged him to return thither and translate these into Latin.Footnote ¹²⁵ We learn this story in his preface to three such translations.Footnote ¹²⁶ One of these, Galen's De motibus liquidis (On Problematical Movements), reads strikingly like an elaboration of Maimonides's discussion of the construction of the human body in Guide III.32.Footnote ¹²⁷ It even presents itself as a follow-up to Galen's earlier De usu partium, precisely on the question which most interested Maimonides in Guide III.32, namely the wiliness of the Creator in forming the body such that it is able to move its limbs.Footnote ¹²⁸ De motibus liquidis itself is a short treatise on movements of the parts of the body whose causes seem difficult to discern, including the movements of the jaws and eyelids, both of whose motions are described in Guide III.32 as being caused by slight movements of the nerves directly from the brain.Footnote ¹²⁹ Maimonides himself quoted from De motibus liquidis in his own Medical Aphorisms.Footnote ¹³⁰ It seems unlikely that Mark's interest in this text was a coincidence. In his translation, Mark uses the Arabic word nucha for the spinal cord, a term that will be later more commonly replaced in Latin translations by medulla spine.Footnote ¹³¹ Nuca/nucha is also used in the LiberPM and by Toledan translator Alfred of Shareshill in his De motu cordis.Footnote ¹³² Mark's translation of this Galenic text seems to reflect a desire to illuminate further the analogy that Maimonides draws in Guide III.32 between God's design for the human body and the intention of the Law and, extrapolating from that, to the ultimate perfection of humankind.

Natural Philosophy

Mark was one of several scholars in Toledo interested in natural philosophy in this period, who belong to a generation subsequent to the translation work done in Toledo in the twelfth century by Dominicus Gundissalinus and Gerard of Cremona, among others. The work of Mark and Alfred of Shareshill helps to show how the early thirteenth-century version of this translating movement seems to have been inspired by Maimonides. Mark mixes interest in the Law with concern for natural philosophy. These were two sides of the same coin; God's intention could be in some manner studied and known through both. Others in Toledo shared a sustained interest in Aristotelian natural philosophy, a concern to explore and understand the world beneath the lunar sphere guided by the writings of the Greek philosopher. This, according to Maimonides was the only sphere whose workings humans are able to understand with security, but, as he showed with his discussion of human movement in Guide III.32, studying it can also teach us something of the intention of God.Footnote ¹³³ The Christian translators of Toledo of this generation stemmed from an intellectual tradition that took its cues from Alan of Lille (d. ca 1202/1203), a rationalist and mystic who blended Aristotelian logic and Neoplatonic metaphysics and taught in Montpellier, and from the Neoplatonism of twelfth-century Chartres and the divine angelic hierarchies of pseudo-Dionysius (fl. late fifth-early sixth centuries) via John Scotus Eriugena (d. ca. 877). The Toledan scholars were optimistic about using the study of the workings of their own bodies, of animals and plants and minerals, and of the weather to draw their minds upwards to an understanding of the workings of the celestial spheres of the angels and even the divine supra-celestial realm.Footnote ¹³⁴ And they shared this interest in the created world of matter with the Hebrew translators.

As was observed above, James Robinson has already noted that the Latin Toledans and the Tibbonids were engaged in a parallel set of translations and/or commentaries of scientific texts.Footnote ¹³⁵ Their mutual interest in the revisionist astrological theories of al-Biṭrūjī, and Michael and Jacob's interest in al-Farghānī have already been discussed, but this was only the beginning. Samuel made the first translation of one of Aristotle's works into Hebrew, his Meteorology, and included a commentary drawing on the earlier commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, and Averroes.Footnote ¹³⁶ On the face of it, the Meteorology seems to be an incongruous choice for the first Hebrew Aristotle, but Aviezer Ravitzky has argued that Samuel was inspired by Maimonides's call to study that work in Guide II.30: “Understand all that has been demonstrated in the ‘Meteorologica,’ and examine everything that people have said about every point mentioned in that work.”Footnote ¹³⁷ This is a difficult chapter in which Maimonides explicates the “account of the beginning” by interpreting the language of the account of Creation in Genesis using the principle of biblical equivocation. This is the notion that certain scriptural words have multiple meanings such that the deeper significance of a term may lie under its more obvious definition, the same principle that undergirds the reading of parables in Ecclesiastes and Genesis in the first part of the LiberPM.Footnote ¹³⁸ The result is a highly materialist and naturalistic account of the unfolding of creation under the influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The influence of this chapter on ibn Tibbon is not surprising; it is more surprising, however, that the Latin scholars in Toledo were also inspired by Guide II.30. This chapter is not in the LiberPM, and thus their attention to its arguments reveals a wider diffusion in Toledo of the Guide than that work alone would indicate.

Maimonides opens the chapter by distinguishing “the first” (teḥillah) referring to position in time, from the “principle” (reshit) of Genesis 1:1: “Bereshit bara elohim/In principium creauit Deus.” A principle, he explains, is the ground for the thing whose principle it is, even if it does not precede it in time, in the same way that the heart is the principle of living beings.Footnote ¹³⁹ Thus, bereshit/in principium should not be translated as “in the beginning,” but rather “in/through the principle,” since reshit does not refer here to time, but rather to the foundational ground of the cosmos. He then explains that Genesis 1:2 (“And the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.”) mentions each of the four elements by name: “earth” can be taken equivocally for the element and for everything that is not the heavens; “darkness” refers to elemental fire; “spirit” is air in motion as wind; and “water” is differentiated into the water that fills the seas on the one hand and the firmament and “what is above firmament” on the other.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Maimonides describes the physical and environmental processes that were set in motion to create the sublunar world of matter and of generation and corruption. The initial cause of these processes is the motion of the sphere of the cosmos itself and the second is light and darkness, which causes the elements to mix. Then, “the first combination that is produced by them is constituted by the two exhalations,” namely, the two exhalations of Aristotle's Meteorology. One is a moist vapor, and the other is hot, dry, and smoky, both produced when heat from the sun touches the Earth.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These are, Maimonides says, “The first causes of all the meteorological phenomena among which rain figures,” without which there can be no grass or trees. “They are also the causes of minerals and, after them, the composition of the plants and, after those, of that of the living beings; the final composition being that of man.”Footnote ¹⁴² This is a highly materialist reading of the Genesis narrative which describes the coming into being of the sub-lunar world of generation and corruption as a natural process.

The plants, animals, and minerals described in Guide II.30, along with the atmospheric conditions that brought them into existence, are essential objects of study and attention for Maimonides. He returns frequently to the message that through our study of the sublunar world, we can learn something of the divine mind.Footnote ¹⁴³ What is so striking is that these orders of creation seem to be the model for the program of translation and scholarship of the Latin Toledans in this period. For instance, Michael Scot himself used Aristotle's Meteorology extensively in his Liber quattuor distinctionum, which pays close attention to the atmospheric conditions of the sublunar world, including chapters on wind, hail, dew, rain, and snow.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ His translation of al-Biṭrūjī's De motibus celorum is relevant for that author's understanding of the transmission of rotational motion from the furthest sphere down to the sublunary sphere and for his discussion of the natural motion of the four elements, processes that undergird a naturalistic explanation for the creation of the sublunar world.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While still in Toledo, before 1220, Michael completed a translation of Aristotle's extensive De animalibus (On Animals) and while at the court of Frederick II, he would translate Avicenna's treatise on the same subject.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Alfred of Shareshill, a contemporary translator and scholar working in Toledo, is credited with uniting Gerard of Cremona's translation, done in Toledo, of books I–III of Aristotle's Meteorology with Henry Aristippus's rendering from Greek of book IV, and then adding three more chapters, De mineralibus (On Minerals), and commenting on the whole.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ One of his sources for the commentary is Alexander of Aphrodisias, who was a key source for Samuel's own glosses on Aristotle's text. This is all the more striking since Alexander's commentary on the Meteorology would not be translated into Latin until 1260, when William of Moerbeke translated it from the Greek at the same time as he translated the Meteorology itself from Greek.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Did Alfred work from an Arabic manuscript of Alexander on his own?Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Or did he get assistance and inspiration from Samuel ibn Tibbon?Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The De mineralibus, appended to most manuscripts of the Meteorology, was actually a translation of Avicenna's writings on the formation of mountains and rocks.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Years later, Samuel paraphrased the same section of Avicenna in his Ma'amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim as a solution for the problem of why the earth is not completely surrounded by water.Footnote ¹⁵² Alfred also wrote a translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis (On Plants) that became a classic school text and composed a commentary on the same work, fulfilling Maimonides's command in Guide II.30 to include plants among the things to be studied.Footnote ¹⁵³

Finally, Alfred's original treatise De motu cordis (On the Motion of the Heart) argues that the heart is the central organ of the body, the means by which the soul conjoins to the body, and the source of life for the whole. He compares the role of the heart in the body, with its veins, nerves, and arteries, to that of the Sun in the heavens, whose rays send forth light and heat and animate what is below. As we saw above, in Guide II.30 Maimonides used the relationship of the heart to the body as an analogy of how to understand the meaning of “principle” (reshit) of Gen. 1:1. In Guide I.72, after describing how the motion of the heavens cause meteorological phenomena that create minerals, plants, and living beings, as he will do again in more detail in Guide II.30, Maimonides draws a parallel between the motion of the heart that rules the body and the motion of heaven that causes all change and governs the world, similar to that made by Alfred.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Although the central role of the heart in the body conforms to Aristotelian physiology, Thomas Ricklin, who has studied the emergence of the analogy of the heart to the Sun in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries among Alfred and others, traces its origins through another path. What he called the “revolution” of the heart can be found, he says, in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia and in the Plaint of Nature of Alan of Lille, who influenced the same textual community of scholars in Toledo that I discuss here.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Ricklin suggests that linking the role of the heart to that of the Sun emerged from new currents in astrology and the study of stars in the twelfth century which gave the Sun a dominant role in the cosmic system and which were transmitted by an earlier generation of Latin translators working in Spain, including John of Seville, Hugh of Santalla, Plato of Tivoli, Hermann of Corinthia, and Robert of Ketton, and in the writings of Abraham ibn Ezra.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Samuel ibn Tibbon himself ascribes a central role to the Sun, describing it as the proximate cause of all generation and corruption in the sublunar world, though he does not draw an analogy with the heart.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Michael Scot makes a parallel between not only the Sun, but also the whole movement of the heavens, and the heart. When the heart fails, we die; likewise, if the movement of the heavens stopped, the lower world would come to an end.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ These parallels all further testify to the common interests and approach to understanding the world and what was beyond it shared by this textual community.

Polemic

Thus far we have explored cultural and intellectual exchange across religious borders as instances of sharing and communication across religious lines, examples of Stroumsa's whirlpool and Burman's “sea of swirling movement” introduced at the outset.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But what presents as cooperation also always connects to Burman's fourth “sea,” that of difference-making and boundary-maintaining. Maimonides viewed Christians as idolators, people who associated attributes with God.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The promise of Guide III.31 about Deuteronomy 4:6 is that those nations who understand the reasons for the statutes — the ḥuqqim —will know that the Jews are correct about the nature of God. Jacob Anatoli may understand this verse in the same way when he discusses it in his sermon on Parashat Nitzavim, that is to say, Deuteronomy 4:6 promises not only that the Jews will to be respected when the nations see their statutes, but also that their view of the deity is correct, others are wrong, and the commandments are designed to inculcate this correct belief.

Sectarian attention to these questions was by no means only on the part of the Jews, but was fully implicated in the Latin Christian adoption of texts and ideas from the Greek, Islamic, and Jewish worlds. Whatever Samuel and Michael may have intended by their translation of the Guide, the LiberPM made a telling contribution to the steadily deteriorating relations between Christians and Jews in Latin Europe over the course of the thirteenth century. This deterioration went hand in hand with the dissemination of new texts of natural philosophy, as both these texts and the LiberPM travelled north to Paris. Although only the outline of this movement and its consequences can be traced here, their ramifications should compel a reconsideration of how we understand both of these events.

Already in Christian Toledo, there were hints that the Guide in Latin created an opportunity for religious polemic. Archbishop Rodrigo drew directly but silently on Guide II.30, turning Maimonides's principle of equivocation as a tool of philosophical biblical interpretation into a polemical tool to argue for the Trinity. As we saw above, Maimonides treats the terms “principle” (reshit/principium) and “spirit” (ruaḥ/spiritus) as equivocal terms. Rodrigo does the same, but in a way that reads a Christian allegorization of the Trinity into the Genesis narrative. The principium of Gen. 1:1, he says, should be understood equivocally, meaning both the Son, as “in the Son” and a temporal beginning as “in the beginning of the world and time.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ This is because for Christians, the Son is the principle, that is to say, the ground for all things, silently borrowing Maimonides's idea of reshit as principle or ground. Of the spirit that moved above the waters in Genesis 1:2, Rodrigo says “spirit” is used equivocally for the Holy Spirit that in Christian thought proceeds from the Father and Son and also for a created spirit, the wind, as Maimonides uses it.Footnote ¹⁶²

Rodrigo's use of the Guide points to a darker future for Maimonides's arguments about the intention of the Law. If the Law of sacrifice is intended only as an intermediate stage meant to draw the Hebrews from pagan practices as part of an evolving process of perfection, as Maimonides argued and Rodrigo accepted, what comes next? For a Christian the answer will always be Christianity and the section of the Guide transmitted by the LiberPM, explaining both the general and particular reasons for the commandments, offers a case for the religious evolution of the Jews that could support arguments about Christian supersession promising their eventual conversion to Christianity.

This plays out in the early history of the LiberPM in Paris, where it draws in a group of figures who share close intellectual and social ties. The work was dedicated, as we saw, to Cardinal Romanus in 1223–1224. Romanus was sent to France by Pope Honorius in 1225 to promote the Albigensian Crusade with Louis VIII. After Louis died in 1226, Romanus became a stalwart supporter of Blanche of Castile in her efforts to hold the kingdom for her son Louis IX. The two were so close that scurrilous songs present them as lovers.Footnote ¹⁶³ With Blanche, Romanus also became connected to William of Auvergne, canon of Notre Dame in Paris, and from 1228 that city's bishop.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ William was the first of the scholastics to draw on the Guide. We know he encountered it through the LiberPM because in his own Commentary on Ecclesiastes, he, like the introductory section on parables in the Liber, reads the “ten rulers” of Eccles. 7:19 (Vulgate 7:20) as powers of the soul, specifically here the Avicennan five external and five internal senses.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ William's De legibus (On the Laws) is a direct reaction and response to the challenge posed by the LiberPM, which Cardinal Romanus must have shared with him. We find in the De legibus many of the themes that attracted its Toledan readers to the LiberPM, like Maimonides's contention that the Law was intended to wean Jews from idolatry, his assertion that the laws have reasons, and the notion of the Law as a gradual step for beginners.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ But William dissents from its arguments too and provides new reasons where Maimonides was silent in a way that, as Beryl Smalley has said, implicitly suggests a Christian bishop is better at determining the literal reasons for the precepts than a Jew.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Critical textual attention to the reasons for the Old Law burgeoned after William wrote the De legibus. We see it with Roland of Cremona, appointed by William as the first Dominican chair of theology in Paris, and Alexander of Hales, the first Franciscan doctor, as well as among later figures like John de la Rochelle, Robert Grosseteste, Petrus Olivi, and Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Scholars tend to take this attention to reasons for those commandments no longer performed in practice by Jews since the destruction of the Temple as instances of interest in the “hermeneutical Jew,” that is, the Jew as a “figure of thought,” a collection of stereotypes designed to serve Christian ends which scholars view as somehow separable either intellectually or in reality from “real” Jews.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ But these Temple-bound precepts were relevant and real to Christians, not least because they were to Maimonides. He wrote about their requirements at length in his code of Jewish Law, the Mishneh Torah, which explains laws no longer followed by Jews after the loss of the Temple with as much attention as it gives to laws essential for contemporary Jewish life. The fourteen chapters on reasons for particular precepts in the Guide III.36–49, transmitted in fourteen chapters of the LiberPM, are organized according to the fourteen parts of the Mishneh Torah. Alexander of Hales transmits their headings in a form derived from the LiberPM in his Commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Christians could think through the meaning of the commandments and thus reimagine their own supersessory narratives, in part because the LiberPM set apart these chapters of the Guide as a distinct problem for Jews. Because of this, these laws were just as present and relevant and attached to actual Jewish bodies to the Christians who used the LiberPM as they were to Maimonides. The fall of the Temple was something Christian theologians daily strove to make real, not merely an old fact of history.

William was also an early adopter in Paris of many of the scientific and philosophical texts that emerged from the Toledan translators, including translations of Avicenna and ibn Gabirol as well as original works by Dominicus Gundissalinus and the Aristotelian natural philosophy of the translators of Michael's generation.Footnote ¹⁷¹ He was also the earliest in Paris to cite al-Biṭrūjī from Michael's translation and shared with Michael a knowledge and use of many of the same astrological and magical texts.Footnote ¹⁷² Part of William's role as bishop was governing the city's university. In 1229, after Blanche of Castile violently quashed a student riot following a Carnival dispute at a local tavern, Cardinal Romanus was assaulted and fled to the tower of the bishop's palace. William was then faced with a strike that caused masters and students to decamp from the city.Footnote ¹⁷³ His solution was to appoint a Dominican, Roland of Cremona, to the chair in theology, the first university chair held by a friar.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Roland, like William — and no doubt via William and/or Romanus — was the next to learn of and use Maimonides's Guide through the LiberPM.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ He shared with Michael Scot and William an awareness and use of the same group of magical and astrological texts.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Roland's contention in his commentary on Job that one may read such texts, but not use them, is reminiscent of Maimonides in Guide III.29, where, after evoking the prohibitions against idolatry in his Mishneh Torah, which explicitly excludes the reading of idolatrous books (Avodah zarah, 2), he proceeds to name and describe the content of those books, which in turn help explain many of the reasons for the commandments in the subsequent chapters of the Guide and the LiberPM.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The prologue of Roland's Summa cites Lev. 2:11, the verse that launched the LiberPM, and builds off a comparison between gold and silver. Here, however, it does not represent inner and outer wisdom of the apple of gold in a setting of silver, but rather the wisdom of the Church and that gleaned from philosophy.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

In 1239, Pope Gregory IX wrote to William of Auvergne in his capacity as bishop of Paris, initiating the project to put the Talmud on trial for, as the Christians saw it, blasphemy and heresy. The pope entrusted William with a series of letters to be distributed to the archbishops and kings of France, England, and the Iberian kingdoms.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Only France responded and Louis IX put the Talmud on trial under the supervision of his mother, Blanche, in 1240, with William serving as one of the judges.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The verdict was guilty and copies of the Talmud were burned in 1241 or 1242.Footnote ¹⁸¹ There are many things that remain unknown about the forces that set the trial in motion, one not least being the reason for William's pivotal role in the proceedings. But it takes on a new cast when we know that William considered himself an expert in the laws of the Jews and that he knew about the existence of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. Perhaps he thought that with it, the Jews no longer needed the Talmud, with what he viewed as its fables.Footnote ¹⁸² Odo of Chataeuroux would later define the problem of the Talmud as one of law: “The Jews, not content with the old Law, which the Lord gave in writing through Moses, indeed utterly neglecting the same, maintain that the Lord also proclaimed another law, which is called the Talmud.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Albert the Great, another early reader of the Guide, though through the short Liber de uno Deo benedicto and the Dux neutrorum rather than the LiberPM, was among the Paris scholars who signed Odo's condemnation of the Talmud of 15 May 1248.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Christian repression of Jewish books in the trial of the Talmud was presaged a decade earlier by what is called the First Maimonidean Controversy, when Maimonides's Guide and the philosophical first part of his Mishneh Torah, the Sefer ha-Maddah, were reputedly brought to the attention of Christian authorities in Montpellier by Jews who were wary of their philosophical content. In the words of one opponent of the Guide, Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, some, on Maimonides's authority, are following a path “to destroy the tradition, and to create parables out of the words of the laws; to overturn, to allegorize, and to make as nothing the account of Creation and the generations of Cain and Abel and the rest of the Torah.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ David Kimḥi blamed Solomon, accusing him of informing the Franciscans that the followers of Maimonides were heretics and unbelievers and for telling them: “You are burning your heretics; burn ours.” Kimḥi relates that even after the Franciscans had burned the Guide and Sefer ha-Maddah, still unsatisfied, Solomon approached the Dominicans and priests until word came to “the Cardinal” himself, putting the Jews of Montpellier in great danger and subjecting them to ridicule and abuse by the Christians who said: “See how the Law of the Jews is lost, for they have become two factions with respect to it, and there is no Law but our own.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

This unnamed cardinal must be Romanus.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ He was in Languedoc in late 1229, creating a process to try heretics in what would become a prototype for the papal inquisition. The results of its initial inquest were turned over to Romanus, who took them back with him to Rome in early 1230, not to return. At the same time, Romanus appointed Roland of Cremona to the chair of theology at his new university in Toulouse, founded to combat heresy.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Given Roland's position and friendship with Romanus, it is likely that he too was involved with this phase of the Maimonidean controversy. But we know that David Kimḥi's account is at least partially incorrect. The Jews did not reveal a controversial new text to their Christian oppressors. Romanus and Roland may have walked into a Provence where communities of Jews were already hotly debating the Guide amongst themselves, but they had a translation of at least part of it themselves before they arrived.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

This compels us to read with new eyes the Hebrew correspondence that is our main source for the events of the controversy. For example, Solomon's self-exculpatory letter, written after David Kimḥi's accusations against him were flying through Castile, seems to reveal an awareness of the LiberPM and especially its section on the interpretation of parables, which I have suggested is largely the work of Samuel ibn Tibbon. In the passage quoted above, from the same letter, Solomon expressed concern about efforts to minimize or allegorize the biblical narratives of the patriarchs, evident in the treatment of Lot in introductory chapters of the LiberPM. Solomon accused ibn Tibbon of revealing what should remain hidden: “We heard from the mouth of the translator who revealed all that the Teacher (may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing) had written, which he was saying before many about our Torah [that] all the stories are allegories, and all the commandments that are [merely] customary are more than can be told.”Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Likewise, Judah al-Fakhar of Toledo, who responded sharply to David Kimḥi's efforts to draw him into the quarrel on the side of the Maimonideans and who mentioned ibn Tibbon once by name in his first letter, seemed to allude to him in another place as part of a group of adherents “members of the covenant of the Guide,” a term that evokes the kind of textual community around the Guide that I have argued for here, and the source for the quotation in my title.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Did al-Fakhar have in mind the same readers that I have described here? “Woe to those, who go down to Egypt for help,” al-Fakhar writes, perhaps evoking ibn Tibbon's physical journey and intellectual recourse to Moses the Egyptian, as Maimonides was known in Iberia, and in the LiberPM.Footnote ¹⁹² “Woe to those” he continues, “who go after vanity and are become vain.” With its echoes of Ecclesiastes 1:2, this seems like a reference to ibn Tibbon's Commentary on Ecclesiastes. Al-Fakhar compares his target to Abraham who, in a reference to Genesis 14:13, “sits by the terebinths of Mamre, the brother of the cluster of heretics, that is, the Greeks . . . for their vine is the vine of Sodom.” In Genesis 14:13–16, Abraham is in Mamre with his allies when he learns that Lot has been captured, then successfully rescues him. One possible interpretation for this obscure set of allusions and references is that Judah knows the introduction to the LiberPM and is accusing Samuel of using Greek thought to “rescue,” that is to say, reinterpret Lot as an allegory using the tools of Greek thought. Judah then implies that the Maimonideans have handed over the Law to the Christians, “making the Guide into a new Torah,” although, “Moses commanded us Torah as a heritage. But she [Torah] is become like a stranger.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Could he be referring to the translation of the Guide on the commandments in the LiberPM? Judah, as a member of the Toledan Jewish elite and doctor to Fernando III, would certainly have been in a position to know of and be concerned about local Christian interest in Maimonides and the Guide and that could be enough to explain his deep hostility to this work.

These questions cannot be fully resolved here, but the entire correspondence deserves new attention, as do many of the other topics raised in this paper. For instance, the debt of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada to Maimonides is greater than could be discussed in these pages, as is the impact that Samuel ibn Tibbon and the questions he raised about the working of cosmology had on Michael Scot's Liber introductorius. But some conclusions are possible now. We are reminded that the movement of Greek and Arabic texts to the scholastic Latin west was frequently a process that had Jews at the centre. What is often, understandably, described as a movement of texts has become in these pages, I hope, a story about encounters, cooperative and adversarial, between people. We are forced to reckon with the fact that the transfer of knowledge and the privileging of reason was integrally bound up with the rising persecution of Jews and others. And finally, it is worth highlighting that in his collaboration with Samuel, Michael was working, not with a hired technician nor a convert, but with a scholar in his own right, who was seeking answers to shared questions. In this, the pair followed their predecessors in Toledo, Dominicus Gundissalinus and Abraham ibn Daud, and presaged the translations of the Castilian court of Alfonso X. Based on Anatoli's reports of his conversations with Michael, it is not an exaggeration, I believe, to call Michael himself a Maimonidean. And if we read Maimonides's Guide as requiring the philosopher to lend his talents to the perfection of the community, however much his own heart should be set on solitude and the perfection of his intellect, we can see Michael's acquisition of a post at court where he could advise the emperor, playing Maimonides to the sultan, or Aristotle to Frederick's Alexander, as the fulfillment of that charge.Footnote ¹⁹⁴