Table Of ContentAmsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy 16
Charles H. Manekin
Y. Tzvi Langermann
Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt Editors
Moritz Steinschneider.
The Hebrew Translations
of the Middle Ages and
the Jews as Transmitters
Vol I. Preface. General Remarks.
Jewish Philosophers
Moritz Steinschneider. The Hebrew Translations
of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Transmitters
Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy
Editor:
Reinier Munk, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Editorial Board:
Resianne Fontaine, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Robert Gibbs, University of Toronto, Canada
Steven Harvey, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Warren Zev Harvey, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Albert van der Heide, VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Arthur Hyman, Yeshiva University, New York, U.S.A.
David Novak, University of Toronto, Canada
Kenneth Seeskin, North Western University, Illinois, U.S.A.
Colette Sirat, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi que (CNRS), France
VOLUME 16
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/5662
Charles H. Manekin (cid:129) Y. Tzvi Langermann
Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt
Editors
Moritz Steinschneider.
The Hebrew Translations
of the Middle Ages
and the Jews as Transmitters
Vol I. Preface. General Remarks.
Jewish Philosophers
Editors
Charles H. Manekin Y. Tzvi Langermann
Department of Philosophy Department of Arabic
University of Maryland Bar Ilan University
College Park , MD , USA Ramat Gan , Israel
Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt
Seminar für Orientalistik und
Islamwissenschaften
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Bochum , Germany
Revised, updated, and translated by Charles H. Manekin, Y. Tzvi Langermann, and Hinrich
Biesterfeldt
Translated from Die hebraeischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als
Dolmetscher, by Moritz Steinschneider, Berlin, Kommissionsverlag des Bibliographischen
Bureaus (1893)
ISBN 978-94-007-7313-4 ISBN 978-94-007-7314-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7314-1
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958239
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
T his work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection
with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and
executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this
publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s
location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer.
Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations
are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law.
T he use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of
publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for
any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein.
Printed on acid-free paper
Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Contents
Editors’ Preface ............................................................................................... 1
References ................................................................................................... 4
Editors’ Introduction: The Genesis of Die hebraeischen
Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters ...................................................................... 7
The Early Conception of HUe: 1845–1860 ................................................ 8
Collecting the Data for HUe: 1845–1880 .............................................. 14
Attempts to Secure Funding, the Schleiden Pamphlet,
and the French Mémoire (1877–84) ....................................................... 19
From Les Traductions hébraïques to Die Hebraeischen Uebersetzungen .... 30
References ................................................................................................... 34
The French Mémoire of The Hebrew Translations
of the Middle Ages. Foreword ......................................................................... 37
The Theme and Its Importance ................................................................... 37
The Present Mémoire .................................................................................. 39
References ................................................................................................... 42
The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages. Preface .................................. 43
References ................................................................................................... 49
General Remarks ............................................................................................ 51
Jews and Languages .................................................................................... 51
The Prefaces of the Translators ................................................................... 52
The Causes and Motives for the Translations ............................................. 53
Requirements and Apologies ...................................................................... 54
Quality of the Translations .......................................................................... 55
Deviation from the Original ........................................................................ 56
Hebraisms ................................................................................................... 56
Historical Implications ................................................................................ 57
Historical Matters ........................................................................................ 60
v
vi Contents
Statistics ...................................................................................................... 62
The Author’s Position ................................................................................. 64
References ................................................................................................... 65
Part One. Philosophy. Chapter Three. Jews ................................................. 69
References ................................................................................................... 202
Appendix .......................................................................................................... 231
Manuscript Index ............................................................................................ 243
General Index .................................................................................................. 247
Editors’ Preface
The bibliographer and literary historian Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907)
produced several works that became instant classics in their respective fi elds.1 But
his D ie hebraeischen Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher
(T he Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Interpreters ; hereafter,
HUe ), published in 1893, was, and remains to this day, his m aximum opus . It is a work
of gargantuan proportions, accurately described by one reviewer as ‘colossal’ and
‘gigantesque,’2 spanning over a thousand pages of closely-set type, and including
approximately seven thousand footnotes. Even the long title fails to describe
adequately the work’s contents. For Steinschneider expanded the story of the
medieval Hebrew translations and their authors to include information about all types
of Hebrew adaptations, versions, commentaries, supercommentaries, etc., that pertain
to philosophy, science, medicine, and belles-lettres, as well as bio-bibliographical
information about their authors. For this reason H Ue has been for over a century the
authoritative account of the transmission and development of Arabic and Latin,
and by way of those languages, Greek culture, especially science, to the Jews of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. To paraphrase its author, it is a book not to be
read continuously but rather to be consulted repeatedly .3
For decades after its completion there was relatively little progress in the fi eld of
medieval Hebrew science and the Hebrew translation literature. Almost everything
written in these areas was based on H Ue , or on Steinschneider’s studies preceding
it. George Sarton referred to Steinschneider’s studies so many times in his
Introduction to the History of Science that he considered it pointless to list his name
1 A biography of Steinschneider has been a scholarly desideratum for close to a century.
Bibliographical details are summed up in the Encyclopedia Judaica and the Jewish Encyclopedia,
both s.v. Steinschneider, Moritz. The longest biographical treatment is still Marx 1947 . Marx has
a very useful bibliography on pp. 294–95. For a list of Steinschneider’s writings, see Kohut 1896 ,
Steinschneider’s secretary, Adeline Goldberg, published additions to the bibliography in Goldberg
1901 , 1905 , 1909 .
2 See I. Lévi’s review in Lévi 1 894 .
3 Steinschneider 1 893 , xiv.
C.H. Manekin et al. (eds.), Moritz Steinschneider. The Hebrew Translations of the Middle 1
Ages and the Jews as Transmitters, Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy 16,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7314-1_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
2 Editors’ Preface
in the index. 4 Two lengthy articles in English on medieval Hebrew translations, one
published as late as the 1973, were essentially abridgements of Steinschneider.5 Had
Steinschneider decided not to include the fruits of 50 years of manuscript research
in the book, or had he not been able, during those 50 years, to learn about so many
Hebrew manuscripts––in short, had H Ue been less the comprehensive masterpiece
than it was, then, perhaps, subsequent generations may have taken up the task where
Steinschneider left off. As it was, the task seemed to them pretty much completed.
T he situation has changed markedly in the last three decades. While there is still
no scholar who embraces the entire fi eld as did Steinschneider, there may be no
longer any need for one: technological advances in manuscript research and data
retrieval, progress made in cognate Arabic and Latin areas of research, and a spirit
of collaboration among a small but growing group of scholars, has yielded, and
hopefully will continue to yield, important results in this much-neglected area of
inquiry. Scholars in Europe, Israel, and the U.S. are studying texts which in many
cases have not been touched since Steinschneider made his notes over a century
ago. The single most important advance has been made in the accessibility of the
data, i.e., the manuscripts themselves. Where once scholars had to travel throughout
Europe to inspect Hebrew manuscripts, they can now read microfi lms of those man-
uscripts in one central location, the Institute for Microfi lmed Hebrew Manuscripts
(hereafter, IMHM), at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. In recent years,
more and more Hebrew manuscripts have been digitized and placed online, so that
scholars can access them free of charge from wherever they happen to be, as long as
they are equipped with a computer and an internet connection.
A great amount of texts and studies has been published in the last century that
bear upon the medieval transmission of knowledge, both from the Greek to the
Arabic, and from the Arabic to the Latin. In the area of the transmission of Greek
thought into Arabic, not only have articles and monographs appeared regularly over
the years, but also extensive bibliographies of Arabic medicine and sciences by
Manfred Ullmann and Fuat Sezgin, respectively, a book-length article on the Arabic
translations, translators, and the disciplines by Gerhard Endress, and a history of the
Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad, with an extensive bibliographic
guide, by Dimitri Gutas.6 As for the European translations from the Arabic (either
directly or via the Hebrew), there has been considerable activity by two overlapping
groups of scholars: those working within the Latin tradition who are interested in
the reception of classical learning among the scholastics, and those working within
the Arabic tradition who are interested in its transmission to the Christian West.
Because the pool of Hebrew manuscripts is considerably smaller than its Arabic
and Latin counterparts, HUe is more comprehensive than Steinschneider’s other
4 See Sarton 1 927 . Sarton treated Tannery, Cantor, and Duhem in the same category.
5 S ee Bevan and Singer 1 927, and the 1973 Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Translators and Translations”.
6 See Ullmann 1 970; Sezgin 1 967; Endress 1 987 , 1 992; Gutas 1 998. According to Gutas, 195,
“there is as yet no modern bibliographical survey of the Arabic translations of all the Greek phi-
losophers; Steinschneider’s Die arabischen Übersetzungen aus dem Griechischen remains the
only single treatment.”
Editors’ Preface 3
two works on medieval translations. Nonetheless, there has been a spate of activity
in recent decades, with scholars taking advantage in particular of the centralization
of resources at the IMHM. 7 HUe’ s comprehensiveness, and the slow but steady
progress in the fi eld, suggests that the best way to deal with ongoing research is not
by replacing Steinschneider’s masterpiece, but by reworking and updating it. H Ue
has held up for a century; it needs now to be revised and transformed to meet the
needs of researchers in the twenty-fi rst century.
T he present work is itself a “ Bearbeitung, ” a version or adaptation, of the section
of H Ue devoted to the Hebrew translations of Judaeo-Arabic philosophy (§§211–217).
We offer it as the fi rst part of our larger project to translate, update, and revise, in
short, to transform, H Ue for the modern reader. Our decision to begin not at the
beginning of the work, but rather in medias res calls for some explanation.
Steinschneider, it will be recalled, had already prepared a work in 1845 on the
Arabic literature of the Jews, which he published in 1902 as D ie arabische Literatur
der Juden. As a result, he informs the reader in the V orrede that he treats this section
less extensively than others. Of all of H Ue this section was in the most need of revi-
sion, fi rst in light of Steinschneider’s later work, and then in light of the enormous
amount of work done on Judaeo-Arabic sources and their Hebrew translations in the
last century, which saw, i nter alia , the discovery of the Cairo Geniza. The section
also contains some of the most important works of medieval Jewish culture, such as
Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed and Judah ha-Levi’s K uzari .
O ur version is based primarily on the German text, but also takes into account
the French Mémoire, the additions (Z usätze ) and corrections that Steinschneider
printed in H Ue and some of Steinschneider’s marginal glosses to his own copy,
which is in the Steinschneider Collection at the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America. It is important to emphasize that the present text is a revision of H Ue ,
and so deviates from the original when new scholarship has come to light that
challenges Steinschneider’s pronouncements. We have not attempted to distinguish
the various strands of HUe , or to translate slavishly Steinschneider’s original text;
the version is based on Steinschneider to a large extent, but not entirely so. On
the other hand, overtly supplementary material, composed mostly of additional
bibliographical material and commentary, appears within square brackets and in a
different typeface [like this]; when we have been unable to identify a reference,
we have placed a q uestion mark in square brackets, e.g., [?]. Diagonal brackets
enclose Steinschneider’s own additions and revisions from the section “Zusätze und
Berichtigungen” of H Ue .
A s noted above, Steinschneider was unable to examine personally many of the
manuscripts on which he based H Ue. Today, virtually all Hebrew manuscripts
extant have been fi lmed by the Institute of Microfi lmed Hebrew Manuscrits (IMHM)
at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Most of the mss. to which we refer have
been inspected by the editors at the IMHM; otherwise information was acquired
from the IMHM catalogue, available online at aleph.nli.org.il.
7 See, for example, Zonta 1 996 and Freudenthal 1993 ; Langermann 1 999 ; Harvey 2 000 ; Zonta 2006 .
