Religion & Literature

R&L 51.3-52.1 (Autumn 2019-Spring 2020) 251 BOOK REVIEWS The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will Sarah J. Pearce Indiana University Press, 2017. xiv + 276 pp. $60.00 hardcover. $59.99 ebook. In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, Sarah J. Pearce positions herself as a foremost scholar of medieval Iberian literary culture. This first monograph continues some of her earlier publications on the connections between the two major written languages of medieval Andalusi thinkers, Hebrew and Arabic, especially in the form of Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters). In The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition, she emphasizes the concept of the cultural prestige of Arabic as expressed through a twelfth-century Hebrew letter—in the genre of an ethical will—produced by Judah Ibn Tibbon, an Andalusi Jewish émigré to southern France. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s will, however, is just the entryway into this monograph ’s focus, acting as a microcosm for understanding the status of Arabic in the minds of Judah Ibn Tibbon and other Judeo-Arabic authors more generally. Pearce’s analysis of this ethical will, along with a new translation of the primary source, reveal to modern readers the inner depths of this text and the Judeo-Arabic context of southern Europe. This book deservedly won the La corónica International Book Award in 2019, reflecting its contribution to medieval Iberian scholarship. Judah Ibn Tibbon’s biography is necessary to understand Pearce’s detailed inquiry into his letter. Born in Granada around c. 1120, Judah Ibn Tibbon fled the Almohad invasion and settled in Lunel in the middle of the twelfth century. Between 1172 and his death in 1190, he wrote this lengthy letter to his son Samuel, who was born and raised in Provence. Having left behind the Arabophone world for a southern French community with limited access to Arabic, Judah ibn Tibbon subtly weaves salient aspects of his former cultural sphere into the will, especially a preference for the written language Religion & Literature 252 of Arabic. In the ethical will, this ideal perception of Arabic emerges mainly in Ibn Tibbon’s use of biblical and philosophical sources, references to his own book habits, and poetics. Pearce presents these literary themes as collectively reflecting an agenda of Arabophone culture. Judah ibn Tibbon “uses his ethical will to transmit both Jewish and Islamic thought, assert the primacy of Arabic, and preserve Andalusi culture” (8). Judah Ibn Tibbon is known primarily as a translator, and it was his son Samuel who famously translated Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed from Arabic (Judeo-Arabic) to Hebrew. Rather than treat Ibn Tibbon the writer of an ethical will as a separate entity from Ibn Tibbon the translator, however, Pearce understands the ethical will as part of an ongoing conversation with its author’s translation program. The family of Ibn Tibbonid translators tend toward literal, word-for-word translation. However, Pearce argues that Judah Ibn Tibbon performs cultural translation in unexpected ways in his work. His translation is “not one that adapts metaphors and toponyms and idiomatic expressions but is rather one that conveys the sociocultural prestige of the source language through literal translation” (37). In other words, Pearce argues that Ibn Tibbon’s use of word-for-word translations is in itself a form of cultural translation. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition is divided into six chapters. Since the ethical will holds primacy among the monograph’s sources, the chapters appropriately center themselves around a particular aspect of the will and proceed into a discussion of its literary and cultural context. Each chapter title begins with a verse or line from the ethical will as a starting point for a discussion of Andalusi literary culture more generally. For example, the title of the third chapter reads: “‘On Every Sabbath, Read… the Bible in Arabic’: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Arabic Literature.” By using the ethical will as a conduit into literary culture, Pearce challenges the stark divides of artifacts into historical, cultural or literary categories . The ethical will, she argues, works in all three ways...