Download PDF | (Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship) Joseph ibn Nahmias_ Robert G. Morrison (ed.,trans.,comm.) - The Light of the World_ Astronomy in al-Andalus-University of California Press (2016).
448 Pages
Preface
In a brief, though classic, article from 1951, entitled “The Study of Wretched Subjects,” the master historian of science Otto Neugebauer argued for “the recovery and study of the texts as they are, regardless of our own tastes and prejudices.”1 Although Neugebauer’s immediate concern was the eminent historian of science George Sarton’s review of a study of a Mandaean treatise on astrology, Neugebauer’s argument that historians will gain the most when they study early science on its own terms pertains directly to the present study of The Light of the World. Even to specialists, astrology’s technical terms, calculations, and intertextual references are complex and demand unceasing attention. Because astrological forecasting had been criticized even in the ancient world, Sarton had described the Mandaean treatise as “‘part of the superstitious flotsam of the Near East.’”2 Similarly, The Light of the World’s intricacies, such as the author’s tendency to revise continuously his own explanations, combined with initial assessments that The Light of the World exerted no real influence on the history of astronomy, have deterred a comprehensive assessment of the text. But just as Neugebauer argued with respect to Mandaean astrology, it turns out that The Light of the World is an important episode in Islamic intellectual history, Jewish civilization, and the history of astronomy.
The Light of the World grapples with two general ways of thinking about the heavens, each of which The Light of the World’s author, Joseph Ibn Naḥmias (fl. ca. 1400 in the Iberian Peninsula), found equally compelling. Illustrations and descriptions of the medieval cosmos, whether in Europe or in Islamic societies, frequently depicted the heavens as a series of nine nesting orbs, all of which shared the same center. It was a tidy picture, one that meshed easily with cosmological references in literature and one that provided explanations for phenomena on Earth. But one might wonder how or if everyone could have thought things were that simple. In fact, by the medieval period, scholars had been studying the heavens for centuries and recognized the complexities of celestial motions. The Babylonians were capable of predicting positions of celestial bodies with precision. In the Hellenistic age, two- and three-dimensional models of celestial motions with excellent predictive accuracy emerged. These Hellenistic and Babylonian astronomies, though different from each other, yielded a more intricate but more mathematically precise description of the cosmos than that provided by a cosmos of perfectly nesting orbs.
In the cultural context of The Light of the World, both explanations were valuable. The reason why there was not a single agreed-upon goal for the study of the heavens was because, in The Light of the World’s milieu, more than one discipline could investigate the heavens. Physics addressed the structure and material composition of the heavens. Astronomy tended to be more concerned with accurate predictions and descriptions of celestial motions. Metaphysics addressed the underlying reasons for celestial motions. The distinctions between disciplinary approaches were neither fixed nor absolute. For one, astronomy generally did not dismiss the concerns of physics and metaphysics. As well, the conclusions of physics and metaphysics were based in a general sense upon observations. Most important for The Light of the World, scholars of astronomy who did pay attention to physics disagreed about how to understand the physics of celestial motions. The Light of the World is particularly fascinating because it comes from a context in which scholars took all of the disciplines’ approaches to explaining the heavens seriously.
Ibn Naḥmias took on the complex question of reconciling the elegance of a cosmos modeled on nesting homocentric orbs with doing a better job of making accurate predictions. There was a tension embedded in Ibn Naḥmias’s project because, on the one hand, a cosmos of nesting homocentric orbs best fit the dominant philosophic outlook, but on the other hand, accurate predictions of positions were important for any application of astronomy. As The Light of the World incorporated more than one approach to explaining the heavens, it is not surprising that it is a text that challenges facile categorizations. It is a text that valued the truths of metaphysics, and thus religion, but that also aimed for mathematical precision. It is a text written for Jews that was also fully in conversation with the philosophy and science of Islamic societies. It is a text that originated in the Iberian Peninsula but which exhibited some similari-ties with the theoretical innovations of astronomers in Iran. And whatever the text’s impact was on science in Islamic societies and in Jewish civilization, The Light of the World’s most lasting influence may have been exerted via its passage to Renaissance Italy. Clearly, The Light of the World is important in many ways, none of which I grasped when I first encountered the text in 1992.
A full understanding of the text’s contents is connected to a recognition of the distinction between the two versions of the text, namely the Judeo-Arabic original and the Hebrew recension. The Hebrew recension contains significant theoretical innovations and evinces an even greater concern for the physics of celestial motions. For that reason, this book is organized so as to treat the two versions of the text separately, allowing each version to speak for itself and all the while acknowledging the strong relationship between the two versions. The book contains eight chapters, preceded by an introduction. The introduction presents what we know about the author of The Light of the World, Joseph Ibn Naḥmias, and then examines the connection of The Light of the World to certain currents in Jewish and Islamic thought, pointing out the places where Islamic texts played a significant role in certain Jewish texts. The introduction situates The Light of the World in the history of texts that presumed that the cosmos was composed of nesting orbs with a common center, that is, homocentric orbs. Delving into the contents of The Light of the World, the introduction outlines the distinctive components of The Light of the World’s astronomical models, followed by an overview of the models themselves. This overview provides a more systematic outline of the contents of The Light of the World than is possible in the lineby-line commentary.
Finally, the introduction describes the available MSS of The Light of the World, editorial procedures, and the history of the text’s reception. Chapter 1 is devoted to the Judeo-Arabic original of The Light of the World. It includes a transcription of the unique Judeo-Arabic MS with emendations and variant readings from the portions of the text where the Hebrew recension tracks the Judeo-Arabic original. Chapter 2 has a translation of the Judeo-Arabic text, followed by a technical commentary in chapter 5. The purpose of the technical commentary is to explore the full extent of The Light of the World’s detailed attempts to reconcile the philosophic elegance, truth, and simplicity of a cosmos of homocentric nesting orbs with the competing truth of mathematical precision. The book has two sets of figures for the Judeo-Arabic original; one set is a translation of the figures found in the MS, and the other set serves to explain points that the technical commentary makes. Chapter 3 is devoted to the Hebrew recension of The Light of the World, a recension made during Ibn Naḥmias’s lifetime, either by Ibn Naḥmias himself or by a scholar working in the spirit of the Judeo-Arabic original.
The chapter provides a transcription of the unique Hebrew MS, with emendations and variant readings from the portions of the text where the Hebrew recension tracks the Judeo-Arabic original. Where the Hebrew recension departs from the JudeoArabic original, chapter 4 supplies a separate translation. The technical commentary on the Hebrew recension follows in chapter 6. Like the Judeo-Arabic original, the Hebrew recension tried to reconcile nesting, homocentric orbs with mathematical precision. But the Hebrew recension was also more concerned than the Judeo-Arabic original with specifying the physical movers for each motion. This concern led to the novel technical complexities that are explored in the separate commentary on the Judeo-Arabic recension. As was the case with the Judeo-Arabic original, the book has two sets of figures; one set is a translation of the figures found in the MS, and the other set serves to explain points that the commentary makes.
As an addendum to the technical commentary on the Hebrew recension, in chapters 7 and 8 I transcribe and translate a critical response to The Light of the World, written by the scholar Profiat Duran (d. ca. 1415), appended to the end of the MS of the Hebrew recension. Finally, the book concludes with a Judeo-Arabic/Hebrew/English glossary of technical terms. This glossary is intended to explain my choices in translation and also the choices that the author of the recension made in translating the Judeo-Arabic into Hebrew. This book will show that while The Light of the World has been seen as an idiosyncratic curiosity, the text’s interest in meshing mathematical precision with a cosmos of homocentric orbs was an agenda shared by and relevant to other scholars.
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