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  • Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean eds. by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison
  • Peter Phillip Jones
Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann and Robert G. Morrison (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2016) 270 pp.

This collection of eleven essays grew out of ongoing conversations between editors Y. Tzvi Langermann (Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel) and Robert G. Morrison (Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine), and finds its focus on the history of science and its intersections with religious thought in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean. Within this rough topical frame, the contributors attempt to tackle, through historical and philological approaches, the transit of various texts across the Mediterranean, and the implications of those transits for medieval languages and cultures, with the aim of bettering our understanding of how knowledge was exchanged from one culture to another. In other words, each contribution probes at least one "transit," and approaches this term as a multivalent concept from the physical movement of texts, to their translations and re-translations, while also considering the impacts they may have had on medieval intellectual history, each in their specific contexts. Rather than attempt to reproduce the multitude of provocative conclusions and interesting methodological characteristics of the entries in this collection, I merely offer an overview of the contributions, with a few closing thoughts.

The first essay, by Robert G. Morrison, examines the role of oral transmission in translating the Sefer Mezuqqaq ("The purified book"), an astronomical text first written in Arabic and then translated into Hebrew by a Moses ben Elijah (likely 15th c.), who had the text verbally read out to him in Turkish. Recognizing the text as a Hebrew version of a popular Islamic text on astronomy (the al-Mulakhkhaṣ), Morrison homes in on modifications made in the Hebrew translation, which may have been the result of the text's oral transmission. Morrison describes a back-and-forth communication process between a Hebrew writer and a Turkish speaker that led the translator to problematize the approaches to astronomy put forward in the text, in the course of translating.

The second essay, by Ofer Elior, is a case study of Jewish Byzantine reception of Spanish-Provençal Hebrew philosophical and scientific texts. Analyzing the letters of a fifteenth-century Byzantine Jewish scholar, Rabbi Yedidyah Rakh, Elior shows how Rakh confronts and complements Maimonidean rationalism in his attempts to reconcile seeming contradictions between the Torah and the scientific reasoning of his day. Elior's analysis also reinforces the notion, put forward by past scholarship, that the Byzantine Jewish intellectual community of this time was detached from other Jewish intellectual traditions. So while there is considerable evidence to show that philosophical and scientific works were crossing the Mediterranean for Byzantine consumption, somewhere a disconnection resulted in a separate, isolated, and often less precise tradition of scientific and philosophical interpretation. [End Page 279]

The third essay, by Y. Tzvi Langermann, is a study of Abraham Bar Ḥiyya's composite theory of light and opposition, drawn together from diverse sources (Greek, Jewish, Islamic). Langermann looks at Bar Ḥiyya's eschatological treatise, The Scroll of the Revealer, and considers the notion of gradations of light, and the idea that the universe is organized according to pairs of opposites. Tracing Bar Ḥiyya's theories back to their influences, such as Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and the Sefer Yeṣira, a medieval cosmological text, Langermann persuasively argues that Bar Ḥiyya carefully adapted from these influences in the shaping of his own original work of Jewish eschatology.

The fourth essay, by Leigh Chipman, considers secret writing, or cryptography, and its use in encrypting poetry and prose in the Middle East during the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods (thirteenth/fourteenth centuries). Chipman explores the possible functions served by cryptography in diplomatic affairs of the time, and how knowledge of cryptography may have travelled west, from Mosul to Venice, due to improved diplomatic relations based around increased trade.

The fifth essay, by Leonardo Capezzone, discusses the multiple re-conceptualizations of memory from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries in Islamic intellectual history, tracing its meaning as a moral virtue, and function...

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