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Abstract

A true appreciation of the meaning of metaphor, and its role in imagination, can only be obtained by investigating the history of these ideas in Arabic Aristotelian, Andalusı̄ and Iberian thought. Issues of language and the transference of images and words from one idea or language to another are central to this book. This chapter outlines the themes of the book.

Once in my youth in the city of my birth, a scholar of Muslim law asked me – I was in his favour and certain of his fondness – to read before him the Ten Commandments in Arabic. I understood his intention : he wanted to reveal the dullness of [Scriptures’] figures of speech. I asked him to read the opening of the Qur’ā;n in the Latin language  – he knew how to speak and understand it. When he undertook to transfer [the Qur’ā;n ] to that language, his words were sullied and their beauty became abominable. He then understood my intentions and discharged me from his request.

—Moses ibn Ezra, Kitā;b al-muḥā;ḍara wal-mudhā;kara/Sefer ha-‘iyunim ve-ha-diyunim al ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit [Heb.], edited and translated by A.S. Halkin (Jerusalem: 1975) 45. My translation from Hebrew to English.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ross Brann , “The Arabized Jews,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, eds. Menocal, Scheindlin and Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 435. Scholars no longer use the language of “influence” when speaking of Andalusī-Jewish culture, writes Brann , but refer to its “ambiguity and conflict” (Scheindlin; Brann

    ), cultural closeness and distance (Wasserstein), symbiotic cultural duality of Jewish and Arabic elements (Scheindlin; Goitein) and literary contacts and cultural interference (Drory). Brann, “The Arabized Jews,” 440.

  2. 2.

    Jewish participation in ṭā’ifa courts should not be overstated; individuals were employed as long as they had a unique skill or ability to offer, and without widespread support in the courts, they could be deposed or attacked at any time. David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

  3. 3.

    As the Muslim world expanded and incorporated non-Arab Muslims, there was a need for Muslims to understand the original Arabic language of the Qur’ān and the culture of the Arabic peninsula. Arabic Muslims began to research pre-Islamic Arabic poetry as a source for understanding the Qur’ān . Yosef Tobi writes that Sa’adia Gaon (882/892–942) was aware of these trends in Arabic literature and wanted to preserve the status of the Hebrew language and Jewish culture. As Qur’ānic Arabic was elevated to the status of a divine, immutable and inimitable language, Sa’adia sought to promote the Hebrew Bible as divine revelation by undertaking a literal translation and interpretation into Arabic. At this point, Hebrew poetry was limited to piyyutim, liturgical poetry . Sa’adia was the author of the first poetics; he maintained that the purpose of poetics was to understand God’s message to the Jewish people through the rhetoric of the prophets . Sa’adia’s poetics sought to teach the purity of the Hebrew language to Jews who were primarily Arabic or Aramaic speakers. Later Jewish thinkers such as Moses ibn Ezra , Judah Halevi and Maimonides also championed the Hebrew language as the language of divine revelation. Tobi , Proximity and Distance: Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Poetry , trans . Murray Rosovsky (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 122–152. Sa’adia, writes Alfred Ivry , also preceded Maimonides in recommending that biblical anthropomorphism should not be read literally. Ivry , “The Guide and Maimonides’ Philosophical Sources,” in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, Kenneth Seeskin, ed. (Cambridge: 2005) 64. According to Ross Brann , Hebrew poetry reflects an overt and a covert intent: outwardly it is a competitive reaction to ‘arabiyya, inwardly it reflects the condition of their cultural inferiority vis-à-vis the dominant Arabic culture in which they lived. Brann , The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 24–25. However Esperanza Alfonso writes, “In these poems, Jewish poets did not represent themselves as on the periphery but in direct competition with Muslims for the command of a shared cultural system.” She points out that both Muslim and Jewish cultures value the acquisition of knowledge and its transmission and they share exegetical methodologies as well. Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the tenth to the twelfth century (London and NY: Routledge, 2008), 37.

  4. 4.

    Kemal Abu Deeb, “Literary Criticism,” in Julia Ashtany et al., Abbasid Belles-Lettres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 359.

  5. 5.

    See Alfārābī, Avicenna and Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics in Salim Kemal , The Philosophical Poetics of Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes: The Aristotelian Reception (London, New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003).

  6. 6.

    Julia S. Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 30.

  7. 7.

    Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1005–1134 AD (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2002), 156.

  8. 8.

    Robinson, In Praise of Song, 142ff.

  9. 9.

    Joseph Dana, Poetics of Medieval Hebrew Literature According to Moshe ibn Ezra [Heb.] (Tel Aviv: Dvir Company Ltd., 1990), 45.

  10. 10.

    Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes, 21.

  11. 11.

    Josef Stern’s work covers the process of intellectual acquisition of metaphysical knowledge, or how human beings can know God , rather than the role of imagination in the process by which humans acquire this knowledge. Stern, “Maimonides’ Epistemology,” in Kenneth Seeskin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 118–126; idem. The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). See also Lenn E. Goodman, “Maimonides on the Soul,” in Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 65–80; Alfred Ivry, “Maimonides’ Psychology,” in Maimonides and His Heritage, eds. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, James Allen Grady (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

  12. 12.

    See Mordechai Z. Cohen, “Moses ibn Ezra vs. Maimonides: Argument for a Poetic Definition of Metaphor (Istiāra),” Edebiyat (2000) Vol. 11: 1–28; Aaron W. Hughes, The Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004).

  13. 13.

    James Arthur Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in the Guide of the Perplexed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

  14. 14.

    Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006).

  15. 15.

    In this I differ with Warren Zev Harvey in his article “Three Theories of Imagination in Twelfth-Century Jewish Philosophy ,” in M.C. Pacheco, J.F. Meirinhos, eds., Intellect et imagination dans la Philosophie Médiéval/Intellect and Imagination in Médiéval Philosophy/Intelecto e imaginaçâo na Filosofia Médiéval: Actes du Xte Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M.), Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002, (Rencontres de philosophie médiévale, 11) Vol. I (Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2006), 299.

  16. 16.

    For discussions about the Aristotelian underpinnings of medieval Jewish thought, see: Daniel H. Frank, “Maimonides and medieval Jewish Aristotelianism,” in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 136–156; Ivry, “The Guide and Maimonides’ Philosophical Sources,” 58–81; Joel L. Kraemer, “The Islamic Context of Medieval Jewish Philosophy ,” in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38–68.

  17. 17.

    Nabil Matar, “Alfārābī on Imagination: With a Translation of His ‘Treatise on Poetry,’” College Literature, 104.

  18. 18.

    See Deborah L. Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990); Black, “Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations,” Topoi 19: 59–75; and Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  19. 19.

    Robinson, In Praise of Song.

  20. 20.

    Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

  21. 21.

    Hughes, The Texture of the Divine.

  22. 22.

    Hughes examines imagination’s function within cognition in his analysis of the initiatory tale, an allegorical text that uses images and metaphors to initiate the reader’s experience of the Neo-Platonic ascent of the soul towards transcendent truth. He advocates that medieval allegorical narratives be examined for their philosophical underpinnings. These tales “[challenge] the logocentric assumption that philosophical thinking is somehow image-free or that there even exists such a phenomena as imageless thinking.” Hughes , The Texture of the Divine, 49.

  23. 23.

    Stern, “Maimonides’ Epistemology,” 118–126, and idem., The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide.

  24. 24.

    For example, when analysing Halevi’s opinion on prophetic imagination .

  25. 25.

    Moses ibn Ezra, Sefer ha-‘iyunim ve-ha-diyunim al ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit , Avraham Shlomo Halkin, ed. and trans. (Jerusalem: Hotsa-at Mekitze Nirdamim, 1975), 121–133. For a philosophical treatment of dreams , see Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118–186; Amira Eran, “Intuition and Inspiration – The Causes of Jewish Thinkers’ Objection to Avicenna’s Intellectual Prophecy (ḥads)” in Jewish Studies Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007), 63–68; Collette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64–5.

  26. 26.

    See Howard Kreisel’s comprehensive work on prophecy in medieval Jewish philosophy : Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). In Sirat’s history of Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages, she enumerates three types of prophecy: the true, veridical dream ; the prophetic vision of the scriptural prophets ; and the vision of a person of high moral character (such as Moses ) while awake. The imaginative faculty can trick the rational soul by playing with images and using parables. Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 118–124; 152–153; 192–198. See also Yochanan Silman’s book on Judah Halevi: Silman, Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, and the Evolution of his Thought, trans. Lenn J. Schramm (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

  27. 27.

    See, for example, the articles on medieval philosophic allegory in Jon Whitman, ed., Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

  28. 28.

    On the use of allegory in Maimonides’ Guide, Diamond writes that Maimonides uses Midrashic allegory in the Guide creatively, as poetry that needs to be unpacked. Diamond , Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, 3. Ivry writes: “Maimonides’ allegorical treatment of Bible extends beyond treating depictions of God’s actions as metaphors; it extends towards understanding the entire text as an imaginative human construct, not to be taken literally as God’s spoken word.” Ivry , “The Guide and Maimonides’ Philosophical Sources,” 67. Ivry explains this in a subsequent article: According to Guide II:36, Moses is the only biblical prophet to have received his prophecy purely through his intellect, wholly bypassing his imagination . As a result, writes Ivry , “[t]he purely intellectual revelations that Moses received…have been translated into imaginative language, the language of normative prophetic discourse.” Thus, he continues, “the entire Pentateuch, Moses’ torah , must be seen as his allegoresis of what escapes language essentially.” Ivry, “Triangulating the Imagination – Avicenna, Maimonides and Averroes”, in M.C. Pacheco, J.F. Meirinhos, eds., Intellect et imagination dans la Philosophie Médiéval/Intellect and Imagination in Médiéval Philosophy/Intelecto e imaginaçâo na Filosofia Médiéval: Actes du Xte Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (S.I.E.P.M.), Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002, (Rencontres de philosophie médiévale, 11) Vol. I (Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, 2006), 676. Stern conflates the term “allegory ” with “parable,” preferring the latter because it connects Maimonides to the “rabbinic parable (mashal) in whose tradition he also situates himself.” Stern argues that, given the human being’s “epistemic limitations,” the parable is the “primary medium for the expression of incomplete knowledge of metaphysics.” Josef Stern , “The Maimonidean Parable, the Arabic Poetics, and the Garden of Eden,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXIII (2009), 212.

  29. 29.

    Notably Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment; and Stern, The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide.

  30. 30.

    See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 61–63.

  31. 31.

    Steven Harvey, “Falaquera’s Epistle of the Debate and the Maimonidean Controversy of the 1230s” in Torah and Wisdom: Studies in Jewish Philosophy, Kabbalah, and Halacha: essays in honor of Arthur Hyman, ed. R. Link-Salinger (New York: Shengold Publisher, Inc., 1992), 76.

  32. 32.

    Notably Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret, and Menahem Meiri. Henry Malter, “Shem Tob ben Joseph Palquera: Thinker and Poet of the Thirteenth Century,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 1 (1910–1911), 153.

  33. 33.

    With the notable exception of Raphael Jospe , Torah and Sophia: The Life and Thought of Shem Tov ibn Falaquera (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1998). Other works that have examined Falaquera’s contribution to medieval Jewish thought are: Steven Harvey, Falaquera’s Epistle of the Debate: An Introduction to Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, MA and London: Cambridge University Press, 1987); M. Herschel Levine, The Book of the Seeker (Sefer Ha-Mebaqqesh) by Shem Tob ben Joseph ibn Falaquera (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976); Henry Malter, “Shem Tob ben Joseph Palquera: Thinker and Poet of the Thirteenth Century” (JQR 1:1910–1911) 451–501; Aurora Salvatierra Ossorio, “Shem Tov ibn Falaquera: From Logic to Ethics,” Comparative Literature Studies 45:2 (2008) 165–181; and Yair Shiffman, “The Differences between the translations of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed by Falaquera, Ibn Tibbon and Al-Harizi, and their textual and philosophical implications,” Journal of Semitic Studies XLIV:1, Spring, 47–61.

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Roberts-Zauderer, D.L. (2019). Introduction. In: Metaphor and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29422-9_1

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