New Study: “Averroes ex Averroe: Uncovering Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s Method of Commenting on the Commentator”
Harvey, Steven and Oded Horezky, “Averroes ex Averroe: Uncovering Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s Method of Commenting on the Commentator” In Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2021), pp. 7-78.
In January-March 2017 Prof. Steven Harvey was a visiting scholar in the “Averroes-Edition” Project. During his stay in Cologne, Prof. Harvey and Dr. Oded Horezky re-examined the medieval Hebrew literature which related to Averroes’s commentaries on the Physics, such as super-commentaries, philosophical encyclopedias and anthologies. This collaboration has led to several lectures and forthcoming studies of which “Averroes ex Averroe” is the first to be published.
“Averroes ex Averroe” studies one of the most interesting manuscripts of medieval Jewish philosophy, a unicum that is housed in the British Library, Heb MS Add 27559. This fascinating manuscript, in part a version of a work compiled by Ṭodros Ṭodrosi, in Trinquetaille in the 1330s, is a Hebrew anthology of logical and scientific texts, written by Greek and Arabic philosophers, some of which are translated into Hebrew for the first time by Ṭodros. The paper sheds new light on this manuscript through an examination of the section on natural science that Ṭodros devoted to the study and explanation of Aristotle’s Physics and which comprises more than a third of the entire manuscript. The article’s title “Averroes ex Averroe” implies on Ṭodros’s creative methodology to interpret Averroes’s Middle Commentary by employing Averroes’s Long Commentary. In other words, Ṭodros uses Averroes in order to explain Averroes. The paper contributes to our knowledge of the fundamental status of Averroes’s middle commentaries on the Corpus Aristotelicum among medieval Jewish scholars and examines the value of Ṭodros’s anthology for editing Averroes’s Middle and Long Commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics – both major goals of the “Averroes-Edition” project. It concludes with three appendices, two of which compare Ṭodros’s text with parallel passages in the Hebrew translations of Averroes’s commentaries, and a third which provides a detailed description of the British Library manuscript.