© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700674-12342127
Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 137-166 brill.com/me
Medieval
Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture
Encounters
in Confluence and Dialogue
“The Types of Wisdom Are Two in Number”:
Judah ibn Tibbon’s Quotation from the
Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-Dīn
S.J. Pearce*
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University, 13-19 University Place,
Room 425, New York, NY 10003, USA
*E-mail: sjpearce@nyu.edu
Abstract
The present study bears out an early twentieth-century suggestion that the twelfth-century
Andalusi physician, translator, merchant and lexicographer Judah ibn Tibbon quoted
directly from the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, the theological magnum opus of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī,
in the ethical will he wrote to his son Samuel. In addition to demonstrating, through a con-
sideration of lexicographical evidence, that a sentence from that summa was indeed quoted,
in Hebrew translation, in the text of the ethical will, the present article will set that quota-
tion into its context as a part of the Tibbonid drive toward literal, word-for-word translation
from Arabic into Hebrew. It will further consider the signiijicance of the authorial decision
by Judah ibn Tibbon, who fled Granada for Provence following the advent of Almohad rule
in Iberia to include, alongside Andalusi sources, direct quotation from al-Ghazālī, a text that
formed part of the intellectual underpinning of the Almohad movement.
Keywords
Judah ibn Tibbon, Samuel ibn Tibbon, al-Ghazālī, translation, lexicography
A lone, one-word footnote in the standard modern edition1 of a twelfth-
century letter that survives in a single complete manuscript witness
1 Judah ibn Tibbon, “A Father’s Admonition,” in Hebrew Ethical Wills, ed. Israel Abra-
hams (New York, NY: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1926), 51-92. Two other editions
of this text were published, both in 1852: H. Edelmann. Derech Tovim. (London); and Moritz
Steinschneider. Ermahungsschreiben des Jehuda ibn Tibbon und Sprüche der Weisen. (Ber-
lin). Abrahams considered Steinschneider’s edition to be flawed; and Edelmann’s edition
follows Steinschneider rather than the one complete manuscript. Sections of the letter also
appear in the revised and expanded 2002 version of Simha Assaf ’s Sources for the History of