Recently Published Books

Editor’s note: Aleph does not publish book reviews in the usual sense, but in most cases only notices that are merely informative and non-evaluative. For books published in Hebrew, the English title is given in parentheses as found in the book itself, or (if none is given) in our translation. Authors’ names are given according to their common English spelling, usually as indicated by the publisher. All notes are by the Editor, unless otherwise indicated. For technical reasons, in the present issue this section is shorter than usual; we ask for readers’ indulgence.

We will be pleased to announce the appearance of new books in areas of interest to our readers. Authors and publishers are invited to send copies of their books to the Editorial Office.

Middle Ages

Moses Maimonides, Wegweiser fur die Verirrten. Eine Textauswahl zur Schöpfungsfrage. Arabic/Hebrew, German, trans. Wolfgang von Abel, Ilya Levkovich, and Frederek Musall, introd. Frederek Musall and Yossef Schwartz. Herders Bibliothek der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Band 19. Freiburg: Herder, 2009. 318 pp. Index.

The first complete German translation of Maimonides’ Guide was executed by Adolf Weiss in 1923–1924. He drew mainly on Judah Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew version, but also used Munk’s edition of the Arabic text and especially Munk’s French translation. Alexander Altmann published a translation of a few chapters in 1935. The present volume, too, offers only selected chapters, with the Arabic text and translation on facing pages. The editors took a bold—and in my view felicitous—decision and print the text in Arabic script (except for the Hebrew quotations, reproduced in the Hebrew alphabet). The aim is to make the Guide more accessible to students of Arabic philosophy who frequently are not comfortable with Arabic in Hebrew script.

As the subtitle indicates, the selected texts are concerned with creation. This, too, is a judicious choice: it presents Maimonides to a large philosophical audience via his treatment of a universal philosophical, rather than exclusively Jewish, problem. This translation should increase Maimonides’ presence in courses on medieval philosophy in Germany. The text and translation have been divided into small units for easy reference. There are also explanatory notes, though these strike me as too few and too short for a book intended for students (five pages of notes for some 125 pages of German text). The index of names is welcome, but not exhaustive: e.g., Themistius, mentioned in the text (Guide 1:71; here §58), is not listed. A detailed glossary of philosophical terms would have been a welcome addition to this volume.

Random checks of the translation were generally encouraging. The German is idiomatic and the translation precise. Hence the book offers German readers a generally reliable rendering of Maimonides’ thought.

Some quibbles are inevitable, however. Here and there the translators were a bit too liberal to my taste. For example, where Maimonides refers to “Greeks” (Guide 1:71; here §50), they write “christlichen Griechen”: this correctly captures Maimonides’ intention, as the context shows, but christlichen is not in the text (and should have been bracketed in the translation). Similarly, they added “dialektische” as a qualification of “Argumente” without textual justification (Guide 2:19; here §253). The translators render khalāʾ as “leerer Raum” (1:72), but introducing the loaded term “Raum” (= space) can be misleading. Altmann’s translations (Hohlraum, Leerraum) attenuate the connotation of “Raum.”

At some spots there are surprising, although not serious, errors. In Guide 1:72 (§78) Maimonides lists the parts of the human body: flesh, bones, humors and arwāḥ. The last term is translated here as “geistige Krafte” (= spiritual powers); but, as Munk, Pines, and Michael Schwartz all observe, it refers to the material, bodily “spirits” or pneumata (Altmann: Lebensgeister). The term maʿādin (Guide 1:72; here §86) often means “metals” (as here translated), but also signifies everything that can be quarried, i.e., “minerals,” and (following Munk, Pines, and Schwartz) should have been rendered as such. Some passages seem to have been the object of less attention than others (such as the beginning of chapter 2:25). One note (n. 4, p. 305) attributes a Hebrew version...