The first volume of the Officina Philosophica Hebraica subseries contains articles based on papers delivered at the first international conference of the DFG-funded long-term PESHAT in Context project, entitled “Themes, Terminology, and Translation Procedures in Twelfth-Century Jewish Philosophy” (4–6 April 2016). The central figure of both the conference and this book is Judah Ibn Tibbon of Granada, the “most conventional and least original starting point for this translation movement.” Judah Ibn Tibbon was a physician who left his Andalusian home, probably due to the Almohad persecutions, and settled in Provence. He was known as the “father of the translators,” not only in a figurative sense, but also literally, as he sired the influential Ibn Tibbon family of translators which influenced philosophical and scientific Hebrew writing for centuries. On the other hand, the study of the early phase of the Hebrew translation movement and the beginning of philosophical and scientific writing in the Hebrew language also reveals that the formation of a more or less standardized Hebrew terminology was a long process that was never fully completed. Even within the Tibbonide family, terminological shifts are frequent, to say nothing of the terminologies of other authors and translators who were historically less influential, but who should not be disqualified for that reason – and from a purely modern point of view – as idiosyncratic or obscure.

The present volume reflects the debates that took place at the conference and also successive discussions held at the Institute of Jewish Philosophy in Hamburg and elsewhere. All the papers have been thoroughly revised and peer-reviewed. They illustrate different aspects of the translation work that took place during the twelfth century and the historical environment in which that labor was carried out. Some of the studies refer to periods preceding the twelfth century, while many look forward to later centuries.¹

The introductory chapter by the volume’s editors provides an outline of the status quaestionis of the study of the formation and development of Hebrew terminology in the Middle Ages and sketches the history of the dictionaries from medieval times until the modern studies stemming from the nineteenth century. The article by Reimund Leicht presents an insight into the personality and intellectual and cultural profile of Judah Ibn Tibbon, considering him as both a continuator of Andalusian Jewish adab culture and a kind of turning point in the intellectual and cultural history of Judaism. Other contributions to the volume address problems pertaining to the period before and after the Tibbonide translation movement and add new perspectives. Daniel Davies addresses the topic of the secrets of the Torah and the secrets of faith in Samuel Ibn Tibbon. Gadi Charles Weber’s paper addresses the topic of the ambiguity of geometric terminology in Saadia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions. Terminological ambiguity is also the focus of Yehuda Halper’s contribution, which deals with the connection between knowledge and action in Maimonides’s Commentary on the Mishnah and Mishneh Torah. David Lemler traces the development of the term מופת from miracle to scientific proof, from the Bible to the Tibbonides and beyond. Giovanni Licata looks into the history of the term מתפלסף in Jewish philosophy and its particular use in Jewish Averroism. Michael Engel analyzes the roots שמר and שגח in the works of Samuel Ibn Tibbon. Resianne Fontaine concentrates her research on “Tibbonide” terminologies in Hebrew meteorological texts and stresses the terminological discontinuity between the different generations of Tibbonide translators. Yoav Meyrav discusses the Arabic-into-Hebrew translation strategies and procedures in the Hebrew manuscript tradition of Themistius’s paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII. Finally, Joost van der Lijn confronts the question of the transfer of some Sufi terms into a Jewish environment, dealing with Baḥya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Hearts and its translation by Judah Ibn Tibbon.

The publication of this volume was a long process, which is not rare in philological work. The philological and semantic creation of the structure, composition, and construction of the PESHAT in Context database is a challenge of philology, philosophy, and technique. It requires time, self-denial, capability, and commitment to work that is not easy, but is absolutely necessary. These words are not captatio benevolentiae for our reader, but a summary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s evaluation of and commitment to philology:

I have not been a philologist in vain – perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste – a perverted taste, maybe – to write nothing but what will drive to despair everyone who is “in a hurry.” For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all – to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow – the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. For this very reason philology is now more desirable than ever before; for this very reason it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of “work”: that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is intent upon “getting things done” at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not “get things done” so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e., slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes….

The Dawn of Day, trans. John McFarland Kennedy (New York: MacMillan Company, 1911), 9

The PESHAT project was initiated in 2010 by Gad Freudenthal, Resianne Fontaine, and the editors of this volume as a joint project between the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche. Since 2013, it has continued as a long-term research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the title PESHAT in Context. We would like to thank the DFG for the generous financial support that made the creation of this research on Hebrew philosophy possible. The co-editors of this volume would like to express their gratitude to Resianne Fontaine for her constant help in co-directing this project. We owe many thanks to our present team of researchers (consisting of Daniel Davies, Florian Dunklau, and Michael Engel) for their dedicated work on the project and for their help in preparing this volume. They were supported by Nora Jael Gutdeutsch and Katharina Hillmann. The final language and copy editing was carried out by Katharine Handel. Many thanks to all of them.

Reimund Leicht and Giuseppe Veltri

Hamburg, Jerusalem

May 2019