אסטרולוניה ופרשנות המקדא בהנותו של אב אברהם אבו עזרא [Astrology and Biblical Exegesis in Abraham Ibn Ezra's Thought] (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 579-580 Shlomo Sela. NTiV pN orna« t>w mum ?t??? nuïnai rPiiSnotw [Astrology and Biblical Exegesis in Abraham Ibn Ezra's Thought]. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1999. Pp. 420. It is a sad fact that human suffering is all too often a cause of intellectual progress. As Shlomo Sela notes at the outset of his impressive monograph on Abraham Ibn Ezra's scientific thought, Ibn Ezra was induced into writing anything other than poetry only when, as an Andalusian scholar imbedded in Arabic culture and science, he came into contact with Jewish communities north of the Pyrenees who were almost entirely ignorant in these domains. Prior to his 50th birthday, Ibn Ezra apparently wrote next to nothing in science and biblical commentary and, Sela suggests (p. 12), were it not for his forced emigration (ca. 1140), he would have sunk into oblivion as a scholar (although of course remembered as a poet). In a similar fashion, the Tibbonides and the Kimhis were to immigrate to southern France a couple of years later, and thereby created the necessary conditions for the diffusion of Arabic science and philosophy among Jews ignorant of Arabic. Closer to our own time, the forced emigration of Jewish scholars and scientists from Nazi Germany had a beneficial influence on the evolution of science and humanities in a number of countries, especially Israel and the United States. Ibn Ezra expressed his scientific ideas in his scientific treatises and translations on the one hand, and in some sections of his biblical commentaries on the other, all of which were written for scholars in the communities in which Ibn Ezra sojourned. Sela chose to concentrate on scientific ideas related to time and geographical space. With respect to both, he examines how Ibn Ezra integrates scientific contents into his Bible commentaries, thereby transferring them from one "discourse" to another. Sela here introduces the hermeneutic notion of "surrounding" (sevivah). He seeks to find out whether and how a scientific concept "functions" differently, depending on whether it is used in a scientific or in an exegetic surrounding.1 1 The notion of "surrounding" is perhaps taken over from a further surrounding in which Sela is an expert, in addition to those of the history of science and of Jewish studies, namely that of computers. If this is the case, Sela's innovation is a perfect instance of what the late Joseph Ben-David has labeled and explained as a "hybridization ": a scholar who is socialized in one scientific culture and thereafter contributes to another, transferring concepts and methods of the former to the latter, thereby bringing about innovations that may not have occurred otherwise. See his Scientific Growth: Collected Essays on the Social Organization and Ethos ofScience (Berkeley , 1991) and my study "Joseph Ben-David's Sociology of Scientific Knowledge," Minerva 25 (1987) 135-149. 580THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW Studying Ibn Ezra's scientific ideas is particularly difficult since he regularly wrote two or even more different "editions" of his treatises. In addition , most of his scientific works are still in manuscript, and those that have been printed have generally not been edited scientifically. Further, Ibn Ezra's style is famously enigmatic. Sela thus had to draw up a list of Ibn Ezra's scientific works and try to identify their different versions. The results of this painstaking task are presented in Appendix IV (pp. 361 — 378), which for the first time gives a comprehensive overview of the works, their different versions, their dates and cross references they contain .2 This is extremely valuable and helpful, and will be the point of departure for all future research on Ibn Ezra. This appendix would have been even more useful if Sela had also included a list of all the extant manuscripts of each work, or at least of those he has identified (he occasionally refers to dozens of manuscripts he examined). Part one of the book, although ostensibly about time, in fact discusses much more: the place of man and of human history in the cosmos according to Ibn Ezra's astrological conceptions. It is nothing less than a pr...