Imagining a Lost Maimonidean Autograph: The Judeo-Arabic Manuscripts of the BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS

• In Event: Methods in Jewish Studies

Abstract

Moses Maimonides’s BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS is arguably the most popular Judeo-Arabic halakhic text. This work survives in more than seventy manuscripts and, in 1969, the Maimonidean bibliographer Jacob Dienstag listed almost the same number of works written under its influence. Despite—or perhaps because of—its popularity, the text of the BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS has not been subject to critical evaluation: standard editions rely on only a small handful of the Judeo-Arabic manuscripts. Only a comprehensive evaluation of the manuscript evidence of this work, alongside the tradition of two medieval Hebrew translations, can present a true critical edition of this text. However, no simple stemmatic relationship can be established. This is because, as is the case with all other Maimonidean writings, the BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS was subject to ongoing revision and modification by the author. Review of the Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, in fact, reveals an unstable text, as some copies clearly reflect “early” Maimonidean positions and others “late” ones. This can be shown by comparing these manuscripts with the autograph copy of the COMMENTARY ON THE MISHNAH and Maimonides’s own testimonies to having changed his mind. Review of the manuscript tradition of this text underscores that Maimonides did not treat the BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS as of secondary importance. It also begins the process of recovering the dynamism of Maimonides as a thinker—one who ceaselessly tinkered with his writings. Finally, because no autograph of this work survives, the methodology used here for salvaging authorial interventions can serve as an exemplar for the reconstruction of other premodern texts. This work relies on new technologies of transcription and data management; it also takes advantage of online publishing to present variable texts in a dynamic form. It is hoped that advances in digital humanities will spur newfound scholarly interest in critical editions and all that they can show about premodern knowledge production.

Author

• Marc Herman, York University