Abstract
Ahavah ba-Ta’anugim (Love in Delights) is one of those little-known valuable works that have never been printed, although extant in manuscripts. Scholars who have mentioned the work generally call it an encyclopedia, and this term seems to fit. For example, Colette Sirat has recently listed it as an example of a fourteenth-century encyclopedia of science and philosophy.1 In what follows, I will describe this work and some of its main characteristics. I will also raise some questions concerning the work, and suggest possible tentative answers.2
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References
Johannes Buxtorf, “Bibliotheca rabbinica,” in De abbreviaturis hebraicis, liber novus et copiosus (Basel, 1613), 168;
Giulio Bartolocci, Kiryat Sefer (Rome, 1675–1693), Vol. 4, 225;
Isaac ben Jacob, Osar Ha-Sefarim (Vilnius, 1880), 17–8;
Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus librorum hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, (Berlin, 1852–1860), 1977–8; idem, “La Bibliothèque de Leon Mosconi,” Revue des études juives 10 (1900): 70; Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985), 343; and Avi Harel, “Mishnato ha-Filosofit shel R. Moshe Nogah” (unpublished essay, Bar Ilan University, 1996).
I am presently beginning a doctoral thesis on this work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The manuscripts are: (1) Oxford, Bodleian MS Opp. 141 (Neubauer, 1291), (2) Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodl. Or. 45 (Neubauer, 1292), (3) St. Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy MS C 9, and (4) Moscow, Russian State Library, MS Guenzburg 1185. References below to Ahavạh ba-Ta’anugim, unless otherwise noted, are to MS Bodl. Or 45.
Virtually all of the Hebrew bibliographical works give the name of the author as Moses Nathan ben Judạh Nogah. A number of factors may be responsible for this error. (1) The first Hebrew bibliographer, Johannes Buxtorf, based himself on information obtained from various sources, but not from the manuscripts themselves. His sources did not themselves necessarily see the manuscripts, but instead provided information based on hearsay (see: S. Abramson, “Le-Rabbi Elimelekh Barukh,” Tarbiz 19 (1948): 40, n. 2). The existence during the same period of a known individual named Rabbi Moses Nathan (see below) may explain this erroneous hearsay.
Cf. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963), III,27, 510: “The law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body. As for the welfare of the soul, it consists in the multitude’s acquiring correct opinions corresponding to their respective capacity.… As for the welfare of the body, it comes about by the improvement of their ways of living one with another.... Know that as between these two aims, one is indubitably greater in nobility, namely the welfare of the soul—I mean the procuring of correct opinions—while the second aim—I mean the welfare of the body—is prior in nature and time. The latter aim consists in the governance of the city and the well-being of the states of all its people according to their capacity. See further, Schwartz, Yashan be-Qanqan Hadash, 212–6.
Cf. Maimonides, Guide II,33.
This distinction is interesting, since Maimonides considered ma’aseh bereshit and ma’aseh merkavah to be among the sitrei Torah. See, e.g., Guide III, introduction, 415.
See Uriel Simon, “Interpreting the Interpreter: Supercommentaries on Ibn Ezra’s Commentaries,” in Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra: Studies in the Writings of a Twelfth-Century fewish Polymath, ed. Isadore Twersky and Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 86–128.
On various contemporary interpretations of Maimonides’ Guide, see Aviezer Ravitzky, “The Secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed: The Commentary in Its Time and in Ours” (Hebrew), in ‘Al Da’at ha-Maqom (Jerusalem, 1991), 142–81, and Eliezer Schweid, Ha-Rambam ve-Hug Hashpa’ato (Jerusalem, 1968), 175–80.
Schwartz, Yashan be-Qangan Hadash, 35–38.
Ibid., 28–45.
Dov Schwartz claims that the philosophers of this circle belong to the same school, namely, a specific school of Jewish Neoplatonic thought. According to Schwartz, these Neoplatonic philosophers shared basic concerns: They held the opinion that the world was not created ex nihilo, but is derived from God by a process of emanation. God is presented in their works as having no positive attributes. Philosophers from this school also believed that the soul emanates from a higher source and thus is not merely the form of the body; that the lingering of the soul after death is mainly an intellectual lingering; and that the human being as an entity must seclude itself from this world in order to achieve perfection. The attitude of the philosophers of this school towards kabbalạh varied from one to the other, but none of them made use of it, and this fact distinguishes these philosophers from other philosophers, such as Ibn Waqâr and Ibn Motot, who made a synthesis of philosophy and kabbalạh while also drawing on Ibn Ezra. See ibid., 41–45. 28 Ibid., 20–28.
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Eisenmann, E. (2000). Ahavah ba-Ta’anugim: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Science and Theology. In: Harvey, S. (eds) The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy. Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9389-2_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9389-2_20
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