"Moses Our Messenger": Arabic and Islamic Traces in Maimonides' INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENTARY ON THE MISHNA

• In Event: Medieval Philosophical Discourses in Historical Context

Abstract

Maimonides opens his INTRODUCTION TO THE COMMENTARY ON THE MISHNA by outlining the chain of transmission of the Mishna, from the top of Sinai to the assembled Israelites. Initially, Maimonides refers to Moses as RABBENU, a standard Hebrew loan-word and honorific in Judeo-Arabic texts. Then, only a few pages in, Maimonides shifts tone; he refers to RASSULNA MOSHE, or OUR MESSENGER MOSES. This shift, this use of the standard Islamic honorific for the Prophet Mohammad, marks not an equivalency but a contrast that Maimonides is at pains to draw out in his text. Writing in Judeo-Arabic for a Jewish community whose language of literacy was Hebrew but whose mother tongue was Arabic, Maimonides uses the cadences of Arabic literature and philosophy - and particularly of Al-Farabi and al-Ghazzali - both to ensconce the Jewish tradition in the Islamic world, and to distinguish Jewish law, Jewish history, and the Jewish people from the majority by which they are surrounded. Through linguistic analysis and textual comparison, this paper will highlight the ways that Maimonides' language is inflected by the Islamic context of the community for which he wrote, and by the Arabic philosophical and intellectual world in which he lived. Because this text has never been translated from the original Judeo-Arabic into English, these valences, which enrich our understanding of Maimonides and his world, have long gone unremarked. Maimonides' INTRODUCTION speaks, albeit in Arabic, to what it meant to study Jewish law as a minority in the Muslim world.

Author

• Jessica Radin