Exactly one millennium ago, after having left Cordoba in 1013, Ibn ǦanÄḥ was working on his KitÄb al-mustalḥaq, the book that would become his calling card as a Hebrew-language specialist in the new al-Andalus that had emerged from the fall of the caliphate, and that he coddled, cared for and worked on unceasingly, updating it until the end. In 1880, the work was printed for the first time, thanks to the efforts of Joseph Derenbourg and his son Hartwig, using the only complete manuscript extant today and the same one used for this edition. Their Arabic edition and French translation were preceded by an invaluable study of the author, his contemporaries and his times that, together with the 1850 monograph by Salomon Munk, has served as the cornerstone supporting the work of generations of Hebraists devoted to this period of Andalusi history.
Today, our perception of that time has changed significantly, and those initial observations made by specialists working in circumstances that are unimaginable today have become somewhat obsolete. By way of example, we now know that it is inconceivable that a person born, raised and educated in the Cordoba of Caliph HiÅ¡Äm II would have moved to a provincial town like Lucena during the 10th century to study with renowned local teachers. Rather, it was the other way round: the local teachers went to the capital to provide instruction during a given period. With this perspective in mind, I have tried to start from scratch, taking account of the major contributions from the twentieth century to the present day on Ibn ǦanÄḥ and his work, but leaving behind the most romantic Orientalist theories that are repeated ad nauseum in each and every one of the works on this important Andalusi philologist and druggist. In any event, I would be remiss if I did not recognize my deepest admiration and gratitude to the classic teachers of the late nineteenth century, for my discourse is built upon theirs and my knowledge comes from them.
This new edition gathers all of the Judeo-Arabic fragments of this work known today that I have been able to unearth on my own and with the assistance of colleagues who alerted me to the existence of fragments in different collections. Unfortunately, it is not the final version that Ibn ǦanÄḥ wroteâthat last recension was surely lost with the Jews of al-Andalus and much of their legacyâbut, I believe, it is the most complete and up-to-date that can be. I have accompanied it with an English translation and I have studied its form and contents to the fullest extent possible.
I am well aware that this work never had the impact of the treatises of Ḥayyūǧ, but it is undoubtedly one of the most significant contributions to the theory of the famed Andalusi teacher. Designed as an addendum (mustalḥaq) to the treatises studied in all of the Arab-speaking Jewish schools of the time, its use was reserved for a specific elite capable of going further than the official contents required to obtain the iǧÄza or licence.
Around four years ago, I received state funding for my research project âRecovering the Judeo-Arabic Linguistic Legacy of al-Andalus: A Studyâ, under reference FFI2014-51818-P. The aim was to discover, retrieve and update linguistic texts written in Judeo-Arabic by the Jews of al-Andalus between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Using contemporary trends and perspectives, the work continued different lines previously explored by leading experts in the field, and contributed to the recovery and study of the Andalusi heritage in all its facets. All of the materials came from the Cairo Genizah and are currently held at the University of Cambridge, National Library of Russia (St. Petersburg) and the JTSA Library (New York), among others.
Today the recovery of the medieval Judeo-Arabic linguistic legacy is being carried out in major international academic centres, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge. In the case of al-Andalus, there is an alarming need to recover the great Andalusi classic works that gave rise to a linguistic school of thought and still provide the foundation for teaching Hebrew today. The objective of this project was to recover some of these pioneering works from the late tenth and early eleventh century written in a non-classical Arabic that formed the basis of the study of the Hebrew language throughout the entire Arabic-speaking Mediterranean basin in the Middle Ages. But more than merely recovering the texts, the intention was to translate and study them, establishing how many copies have survived and how many textual families they transmit, and collecting all the variants in a critical apparatus. The main focus was the language in which these texts were writtenâMiddle Arabicâand all the available resources and new information and communication technologies (ICT) were employed in this undertaking.
Looking back now, one becomes aware of the speed with which technology advances. When I decided to undertake the study of Ibn ǦanÄḥâs first works five years ago, it was necessary to relocate to the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for long periods of time to consult the holdings, scrolling through the collections, especially the Firkovitch, to discover which texts catalogued as ḥibbur bÄ-diqduq or attributed to Ḥayyūǧ or to Ibn ǦanÄḥ were really the text I was looking for, going page by page, because the fragments were sometimes hidden within copies of other works. This is an experience with which any colleague who has laboured in the temple that is the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts has experienced firsthand. Those who know me personally know that my family and job circumstances are not always the most propitious for taking the time required by this precious labour and, at first, I occupied myself with works of different lengths related to Ḥayyūǧ and the history of the lexicography of biblical Hebrew and Andalusi Hebrew metrics, thanks to research stays funded by the Erasmus Mundus Programme and the HUM-138 HebraÃstas Andaluces Research Group led by MarÃa José Cano at the University of Granada.
It was then that my friend and mentor, Aharon Maman at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, kindly lent me photographs of the large copies of the KitÄb al-mustalḥaq taken years earlier by David Téné (â®×׳׳×â¬â) on the sole condition that I return them once my work was done, which I hereby put on record that I will do as soon as I next visit Jerusalem. Nobody knows the philological texts in the Firkovitch Collection better than his assistant, Ephraim ben-Porat, who told me about the existence of some of the micro-fragments from the KitÄb al-mustalḥaq that are included at the end of this volume. I most sincerely thank both of them and the entire staff at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, without whose selfless generosity this work would not have been possible.
More than two years ago, when Ktiv: The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts appeared, my personal Iron Curtain fell. Suddenly, the hardships and sacrifices disappeared. I could consult all of the Judeo-Arabic manuscripts in the Firkovitch Collection sitting on my sofa with my tablet in hand and taking note of what materials interested me and which ones did not in a notebook. It took me less than a season of long English afternoons to sift through almost 9,000 manuscripts, thanks to a research stay at the University of Cambridge financed by the Spanish governmentâs Salvador de Madariaga Programme. I would therefore like to express my deepest gratitude to all those people, at times anonymous, who dedicated so much of their time to make initiativesâI call them miraclesâlike the Friedberg Genizah Project and Ktiv: The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts a reality.
It was, in fact, in the United Kingdom that Benjamin Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit at the Cambridge University Library, became interested in my edition of Ibn ǦanÄḥâs KitÄb al-mustalḥaq and the almost pharaonic edition of the primary treatises of Ḥayyūǧ, of which the Taylor-Schechter Collection holds almost 60 fragments and which I expect to conclude shortly. It is here, in Cambridge, where, once again thanks to funding from the Salvador de Madariaga Programme, I have been able to work side by side on a daily basis with friends and colleagues who have enriched the work contained in these pages in a variety of ways. I wish to thank Geoffrey Khan, Nadia Vidro and Amir Ashur most profoundly. It would be wrong to conclude these lines without expressing my deepest thanks to MarÃa Ãngeles Gallego, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Federico Corriente (I finally faced the facts and buckled), Ahmad Alhamad Alkhalaf and, of course, Pamela Lalonde.
Finally, I would like to dedicate these pages and the time it has taken me to write them to my family and friends, especially my daughter and son, my wife, my father, my sister and brothers and, especially, to those who are no longer with us. I would be most remiss if I concluded without dedicating this volume to my dear teacher Judit Targarona Borrás, who set me on the path of medieval biblical Hebrew grammar more than 20 years ago and left me to the care of my friend and teacher, Ãngel Sáenz-Badillos, may he rest in peace.