Averroes and Averroism in Medieval Jewish Thought

Racheli Haliva (PhD 2016, McGill) is associate professor of Jewish studies at Shandong University’s Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies and a former co-director of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at Universität Hamburg. She works on the history of medieval Jewish philosophy and the relationship between Jews and Jewish converts in the Middle Ages. Yoav Meyrav (PhD 2017, Tel Aviv) is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded HEPMASITE (Hebrew Philosophical Manuscripts as Sites of Engagement) project at Universität Hamburg and a former research associate at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. He has published on ancient, Arabic, and Jewish philosophy, Hebrew philology, and the history of metaphysics. Daniel Davies (PhD 2007, Cambridge) has worked for the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library and on the “PESHAT in Context” project at Universität Hamburg. He focuses on medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion. His publications include Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, which received an honourable mention from the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards. His second book on Maimonides will be published by Polity in 2023.

Contents


Foreword


 Racheli Haliva, Daniel Davies and Yoav Meyrav





Notes on Contributors





Part 1: What Is Jewish Averroism?


1 Was al-Ġazālī an Avicennist? Some Provocative Reflections on Jewish Averroism


 Steven Harvey





2 How a Rehabilitated Notion of Latin Averroism Could Help in Understanding Jewish Averroism


 Giovanni Licata





Part 2: The Maimonides/Averroes Complex


3 Is Maimonides’s Biblical Exegesis Averroistic?


 Mercedes Rubio





4 Averroes and Ğābir ibn Aflaḥ among the Jews: New Interpretations for Joseph ben Judah ibn Simon’s Allegorical Correspondence with Maimonides


 Reimund Leicht





5 The Garden of Eden and the Scope of Human Knowledge: Maimonides, Falaquera and Nissim of Marseille


 David Lemler





6 The Role of Averroes’s Tahāfut in Narboni’s Commentary on the Guide


 Yonatan Shemesh





Part 3: Averroes in Jewish Religious Discourse


7 Averroism, the Jewish-Christian Debate, and Mass Conversions in Iberia


 Daniel J. Lasker





8 Double Truth in the Writings of Medieval Jewish Averroists: An Esoteric Way of Appealing to Both Sceptics and Non-sceptics


 Shalom Sadik





9 Averroes’s Influence upon Theological Responses to Scepticism in Late Medieval Jewish Philosophy


 Shira Weiss





Part 4: Jewish Authors Doing Philosophy with (and about) Averroes


10 Love and Hate May Lead Astray: Moses Halevi’s Rejection of Averroes


 Yoav Meyrav





11 Averroism in Judah ha-Cohen’s Midraš ha-ḥokhmah?


 Resianne Fontaine





12 Falaquera the Averroist


 Yair Shiffman





13 The Necessary Existent, Simplicity, and Incorporeality: An Anti-Avicennian-Averroist Approach


 Bakinaz Abdalla





14 Gersonides and Kaspi on the Uncertainty of the Future and the Practical Intellect


 Alexander Green





15 Rabbi Moses ben Judah (Rambi) as an Averroist


 Esti Eisenmann





16 Crescas’s Attitude toward Averroes


 Warren Zev Harvey





17 Matter and Elements: Al-Ġazālī and Averroes as a Source of Isaac Abravanel’s “The Forms of the Elements”


 Elisa Coda





Part 5: Averroes in Hebrew and from Hebrew


18 Choking on Water, the Stratification of Society, and the Death of Socrates in the Hebrew Averroes


 Yehuda Halper





19 Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s accessus ad auctorem: A Hebrew “Aristotelian Prologue” to Averroes’s Middle Commentaries on Rhetoric and Poetics


 Francesca Gorgoni





20 Jacob Mantino and the Alleged Second Latin Translation of Averroes’s Long Commentary on On the Soul 3.5 and 3.36


 Michael Engel





Index