The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition

Sarah J. Pearce

Description

Beginning in 1172, Judah ibn Tibbon, who was called the father of Hebrew translators, wrote a letter to his son that was full of personal and professional guidance. The detailed letter, described as an ethical will, was revised through the years and offered a vivid picture of intellectual life among Andalusi elites exiled in the south of France after 1148. S. J. Pearce sets this letter into broader context and reads it as a document of literary practice and intellectual values. She reveals how ibn Tibbon, as a translator of philosophical and religious texts, explains how his son should make his way in the family business and how to operate, textually, within Arabic literary models even when writing for a non-Arabic audience. While the letter is also full of personal criticism and admonitions, Pearce shows ibn Tibbon making a powerful argument in favor of the continuation of Arabic as a prestige language for Andalusi Jewish readers and writers, even in exile outside of the Islamic world.

Acknowledgements
A Note on Translations and Transliterations
Introduction: 'The Preface of Every Book Is Its First Part': A Brief Overview of Materials and Methodology
1. 'Pen, I Recount Your Favor': Reading, Writing and Translating in Memory of al-Andalus
2. 'Examine your Hebrew Books Monthly and Arabic Books Bimonthly': Autobiography and Bibliography in the Islamic West
3. 'On Every Sabbath, Read from the Bible in Arabic': Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature
4. 'The Words of the Ancient Poets': Poetics Between Jewish and Islamic Scripture
5. 'The Arab Sage Said': Transmitting Arabic Wisdom in Translation
6. 'From Vessel to Vessel': The Reception and Reimagining of the Tibbonid Corpus
Conclusion: "This Book Has Been Completed:" Looking Back and Ahead at al-Andalus in Translation
Appendix: Judah ibn Tibbon's Ethical Will: A New Translation
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• European
• Jews
• Jewish
• Jewish Studies
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253026019
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Andalusi Literary INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
INDIANA SERIES IN SEPHARDI AND MIZRAHI STUDIES
Harvey E. Goldberg and Matthias Lehmann, editors
The
Andalusi Literary

INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
THE ROLE OF ARABIC IN
JUDAH IBN TIBBON S ETHICAL WILL
S. J. PEARCE
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Sarah J. Pearce
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pearce, Sarah Jean, author.
Title: The Andalusi literary and intellectual tradition : the role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon s ethical will / S.J. Pearce.
Description: First edition. | Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2017] | Series: Indiana series in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046942 (print) | LCCN 2016049050 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253025968 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253026019 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH : Hebrew literature, Medieval-Spain-Andalusia-Arabic influences. | Tibon, Yehudah ibn, approximately 1120-approximately 1190. Igeret ha-musar. | Wills, Ethical.
Classification: LCC PJ 5016 . P 38 2017 (print) | LCC PJ5016 (ebook) | DDC 892.4/09002-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046942
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations and Transliterations
Introduction: The Preface of Every Book Is Its First Part : An Overview of Materials and Methodologies
1 Pen, I Recount Your Favor! : Reading, Writing, and Translating in Memory of al-Andalus
2 Examine Your Hebrew Books Monthly and Arabic Books Bimonthly : Autobiography and Bibliography in the Islamic West
3 On Every Sabbath, Read . . . the Bible in Arabic : Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature
4 The Words of the Ancient Poets : Poetics between Jewish and Islamic Scripture
5 The Arab Sage Said : Transmitting Arabic Philosophy in Translation
6 From Vessel to Vessel : The Reception and Reimagining of the Tibbonid Project
Conclusion: This Book Has Been Completed : Looking Back and Ahead at al-Andalus in Translation
Appendix: Judah ibn Tibbon s Ethical Will: A New Translation
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A LTHOUGH IT IS ultimately a very different project, the germ of this book can be found somewhere in my doctoral dissertation, and so I should like to begin by thanking the members of my graduate and doctoral committees in and around the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University: Simone Pinet, David Powers, and Cynthia Robinson. Kim Haines-Eitzen was not formally a member of the committee but was present at all the key junctures; it was she who encouraged me to apply for the job I currently hold and has encouraged me in nearly everything since. And for having been student and not-student of Lauren Monroe and Shawkat Toorawa, respectively, I learned a tremendous amount about how to read text.
My deepest gratitude, though, is to my Doktorvater, Ross Brann, my intellectual debts to whom will be obvious to the reader. Particularly in the last year of work on this book, it became more and more clear to me the ways in which his thinking has come to shape my own. More than that, though, he shows by example that there is another way within an academy that is so often given to careerism and to demonstrations of ego and cleverness at the expense of a more patient brand of scholarship: that the very best intellectual work and an absolute, decent humanity are not mutually exclusive in one person. I wrote in the acknowledgments section of my dissertation that I suspected that I would find myself forever striving to live up to his example. That is still true.
Much of this book was conceptualized during the academic year 2012-13, which I spent at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, then under the direction of the legendary David Ruderman. I am grateful to him and to the center s staff-Sam Cardillo, Natalie Dohrmann, Etty Lassman, Carrie Love, and Yechiel Schur-who made life very easy for the coterie of absent-minded professors in their charge; to the library staff-Joe Gulka, Arthur Kiron, and Bruce Nielsen; and to the inimitable Sol Cohen. I would particularly like to acknowledge the generosity of Ione Apfelbaum Strauss, who endowed the Louis Apfelbaum and Hortense Braustein Apfelbaum Fellowship that funded my year at the Center; and the cohort of fellows who created such an enriching intellectual environment there. New York University, as my intellectual and professional home, has been an unusual and wondrous place to write this book. I am beyond grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures who were willing to take a chance on hiring an extremely green and untested young scholar and who, like Judah ibn Tibbon, are firmly convinced of the fact that Arabic, too, is a Spanish language. To begin to list names risks inadvertently omitting important ones, so instead I shall thank them here as a group; they know who they are. I would, however, like to acknowledge specifically Jo Labanyi, Robert Lubar, and Jordana Mendelson, who, in their administrative capacities, have been fiercely protective of my time and supportive through the process of writing the book. The writing, as I am told so often happens, came together rather at the end, and I am extremely grateful to NYU s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the Paulette Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship that allowed me the time, free of classroom responsibilities, to pull the project together. I am also grateful to the Center for the Humanities at NYU for a generous publication subvention that covered the costs of obtaining image reproductions and of indexing the volume.
I have been fortunate to be able to present sections of this book in a great variety of forums over the past few years; the feedback I received has been instrumental in revising and refining my arguments. I was able to present chapter 2 variously in the spring and fall of 2015: at the Histories of the Book in the Islamicate World symposium organized in Madrid by Sabine Schmidtke, at the Columbia Seminar on Religion and Writing convened by Dagmar Reidel, and more informally in a graduate seminar at Yeshiva University at the invitation of Ronnie Perelis, an exercise that was tremendously helpful in refining the argument. I presented a very early version of chapter 6 at Brian Catlos s and Sharon Kinoshita s Mediterranean Seminar held at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2012; and at the symposium The Cultural World of the Medieval Translator, convened in the spring of 2013 at the University of Chicago by James T. Robinson, whose subsequent critique of a draft of the manuscript was instrumental in pushing me to give the book the shape that it now takes. Extracts and versions of other chapters have benefitted tremendously from feedback received after presentations at various meetings of the American Oriental Society and the Society of Biblical Literature. Meira Polliack, who has been a supreme mentor and friend to me, facilitated both formal and informal opportunities to talk about my research and so generously and thoughtfully critiqued an early draft of the manuscript, all of which has pushed me to further develop the arguments, particularly those in chapter 3 ; most recently, she, Camilla Adang, and Benjamin Hary hosted me in Tel Aviv, where I presented that material to the Biblia Arabica Working Group. I am also extremely grateful to colleagues at NYU and at Penn-Gabriela Basterra, Paul Cobb, Sibylle Fischer, and David Larsen-for their comments on various sections of the manuscript and the book proposal and for their advice on navigating the often-treacherous waters of academic publishing. Phil Lieberman was, in a meta-historical twist, my publishing dragoman.
The editorial staff at Indiana University Press has been spectacular throughout. I am grateful to Rebecca Tolen, Dee Mortensen, Paige Rasmussen, and Rachel Rosolina for their guidance and support and to Matthias Lehman, the series editor whose enthusiastic support for the project was key to bringing it to fruition with the press. As copy editor, Eric Schramm made me take a much-needed second look at all the details. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Decter and David Wacks, both of whom unmasked themselves as having been the once-anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for the press. Their comments drew attention to places where I could tighten, refine, and further develop my argument; this is a better book than it would have been without their assessments.
I consider myself very lucky to have colleagues who are also friends, with whom I can talk shop (and not-shop) free of the hazards that can freight many of the interpersonal relationships that we have in this profession, who have patiently listened to and helped me puzzle through both the intellectual and professional difficulties that this project posed: Esperanza Alfonso, Rebecca Goetz, Tara Mendola, Eilis Monahan, and Holman Tse. Quite a lot of this book was written across a table from Abby Balbale at a Manhattan outpost of Le Pain Quotidien; in a field that can be so fractious i