It Is Known.

For all my complaining about the disconnect between the medieval and the medievalism of Game of Thrones, I think I have identified the medieval Hebrew origins of the Dothraki citation system, much appreciated for its brevity by wise men throughout the Seven Kingdoms and in the cities across the narrow sea: "It is known."



As he was translating Jonah ibn Janaḥ's two-part lexicon of the Hebrew Bible out of Arabic into Hebrew, Judah ibn Tibbon would often omit much of the discussion of terms when it relied too heavily on points of Arabic lexicography or language or grammar. He would remove Ibn Janaḥ's detailed discussions and prooftexts when they would lack cultural significance for his non-Arabophone readers, and would substitute Ibn Janaḥ's commentary with a single, knowing word: Yadu'a. It is known.

In truth it grates a bit. I'm sitting a stone's throw from the manuscript collections where I want to begin my next project and the only thing between them and me is the fact that I have to fix the footnotes in the manuscript for my first book. I've consistently gotten  advice that for a first book, to avoid making it sound dissertationy, one should strip out anything that looks like a lit review. I clearly took that advice a little too far, and ended up getting, quite rightly, slammed for not acknowledging my place in the scholarly universe. Better to be slammed for that pre-publication rather than in reviews or in a tenure file, but I'm in Madrid, fixing footnotes that I could just as easily fix in New York but for the timeline and the clock ticking in the background.* (At some point the tenure track starts to feel a bit like Captain Hook's nightmares...) And I'm writing footnotes about a guy who was creating resources for readers by, among other things, deliberately omitting everything that came before him, substituting the sum total of human knowledge about the meaning of words in the Hebrew Bible with a wink and a nod to only the most educated and most polyglot of his readers: Yadu'a. It is known.

It tells us, of course, that standards for scholarly discourse have changed in the last eight hundred years. I think some of that's for the best, but some of it is stifling and makes us sound weasely and indecisive. More interesting, and it's the point that I'm making in one of those footnotes (clearly I've not fully learned my lesson about not mentioning here work pre-publication — but what a dreary existence that would be, and how tedious!) is that it is in fact an affirmation of the validity of Arabic biblical lexicography and an affirmation of the comparative method.

The portrayal of the Dothraki is done through the worst, most simplistic Orientalist stereotypes, so egregious that even as someone who takes some issue with Edward Said's analysis, as is becoming increasingly acceptable, this is a case where I would wholeheartedly and simply fall back on his one word as a condemnation of it. It is a cartoon of a vaguely Bedouin tribe, no longer the guardians of God's language but backwards savages. Their vocabulary is small and lacks words to express gratitude or aspiration. When they say it is known, they are superstitious and silly, believing things that medieval Arabic astronomy could easily disprove.** But when Judah ibn Tibbon says that it is known, he is in effect venerating the Arabic linguistic tradition and making it the ultimate, authoritative source. He is telling his readers, both those who could recognize his rhetorical technique and those who were already so far removed from the Islamicate world that they could not, that there is knowledge out there and that it is so completely trustworthy as to not need repeating or verification. For Judah ibn Tibbon to say: yadu'a, it is known, is to affirm the language of the Bedouins and its scientific study by later intellectual Arab elites.

It is known.

*Yes, I am complaining about whether I have to fix my footnotes in New York or Madrid. Disappointed though I am in the missed opportunity, I do know that it's the first-tieriest of first tier academic problems.

**And yes, I know I'm conflating two different categories here — Bedouins and Abbasid astronomers. I'm trying to sound like a human being before sounding like an academic and that's not a sentence that could easily accommodate both voices. And if anybody gives me a hard time about it from a Chicago IP address, I will scream. And then revert this to being a password-protected blog for good.)

A Love Letter to Judah ibn Tibbon (Or, a Paragraph that Probably Won't Make the Final Cut)

The third chapter of my book project is about the poetics articulated across the oeuvre of Judah ibn Tibbon.

It ends with a final section that I am terming an excursus that examines the poetry written by an author so actively engaged with the literary-critical traditions of Arabic poetics. Even though the first three chapters are currently out for review, I had not yet written the excursus. It doesn't really interrupt the flow of the book one way or the other, and it is set up as something of a stand-alone section; so I didn't begin to write it until this morning.

I expect that the first paragraph that I've written won't survive in the final version. I'd like it to, but love isn't a response permitted to literary critics and cultural historians, especially the ones who are trying to prove themselves in their first books. Writing in one's own voice is not something that is supposed to happen in academic monographs. And so this is what I shan't say in my book about Judah, the terrible poet whom I've come to adore:

One of the pleasures of undertaking a project such as this one is really getting to know the subject and to begin — in a historiographically and literary-critically problematic process — to feel a real kinship with him. In this case, I have come to appreciate above all else Judah ibn Tibbon’s reserved, wicked sense of humor. Eight hundred years dead, he can still make me laugh. And so when I say that Judah ibn Tibbon was a terrible poet, I do so with a real love of the man, a genuine sympathy towards his intellectual program, and an ongoing appreciation of his style. He was a great and engaging and thoughtful prose writer and that is what has made it possible to live with him in my head, as I have, day in and day out, for almost the last five years. But a poet he was not (though I love him all the same). He falls into the category of historically — and even literarily — important but bad poets, where he is joined by the likes of Meir Halevi Abulafia, leaving behind a poetic legacy that must be contended with  if not enjoyed.

Footnotes

I often think that writing without a lot of clutter and footnotes is the ideal for readable academic prose, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I also derive a lot of pleasure from really top-notch championship-level footnoting. These are my notes from chapter three of my book, which I'm presenting at Cornell next week. It's not quite done — there's a little bit of chapter to be fleshed out and a few footnotes to be fixed before I submit three chapters to the publisher — but it was done enough to circulate before the colloquium; and the footnotes are deeply satisfying.

***

¹³⁰ Ḥasan ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī. Kitāb al ‘umda fī maḥāsin al-shi‘r, ed. M. al-Dīn. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1967.

¹³¹ For a setting of Ibn Ezra into an Arabic poetic context, see Raymond P. Scheindlin. “Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra on the Legitimacy of Poetry,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 101-15.

¹³² Judah al-Ḥarīzī, who will factor into the next two chapters, left a similar literary footprint in prose composition, using the full range of Arabic literary models to defend and elevate writing in Hebrew.

¹³³ This is not meant to suggest that Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra represent anything like the totality of Arabizing Hebrew poetry or poetics — or even the totality of the form’s responses to the condition of exile and the status of a minority culture. However, as poets who were also authors of some of the most significant works of poetic theory to have emerged from the Andalusi milieu, both in situ and as they contemplated religious and cultural exile, they are apt as reference points for contextualizing the Tibbonim as poetic thinkers within both Andalusi and exilic contexts.

¹³⁴ For notions of local knowledge and culture, see Clifford Geertz. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1985. For the foundational statement of polysystem theory (also referred to as Tel Aviv post-structuralism), see Itamar Even-Zohar. “Polysystem Theory,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 287-310. It was Rina Drory’s work Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2000 (originally published in Hebrew in 1988) that specifically applied polysystem theory to the Iberian context. In general, I find polysystem theory to be somewhat more productive than other current theories used for framing and contextualiziang and organizing our understanding of the cultural history of medieval Iberia. In particular, it demands particular attention to the elements that make up the polysystem, thereby yielding precise and detailed text-based readings that can account for broader cultural phenomena, moreso than theories of cultural hybridity that draw upon the work of Homi Bhaba in postcolonial studies. As a branch of post-structuralism, polysystem theory is particularly devoted to breaking down the binary oppositions of center-periphery and canonical-noncanonical, pairings that are particularly detrimental to the material within traditional study of both Semitic- and Romance-language literature in the Maghreb. Entanglement and itra-actional theory have also become increasingly popular as ways to account for cultural contact, borrowing, on the basis of the writing of Karen Barad, from particle physics for metaphyiscal purposes; however, the use of this theory for explicating cultural contacts outside the realm of the study of material and manuscript culture is, to my mind, unnecessarily elaborate and its utility and the benefit of its utility questionable.

¹³⁵ Qur’ān 12:2, trans. N. J. Dawood.

Book-Finishing Marathon, Day Twenty-Eight

125pp. 41k words and change. Most of the introduction, chapters 1-3 and a chapter 5 still in need of some serious cleaning up.

A Calvino-esque Anti-Classic

I'm getting ready to give a paper at what promises to be a fantastic conference at the University of Chicago. (In fact, the lack of recent posting is down to this feeling like the stakes are high for a couple of different reasons, on top of moving back to New York this week.)

I'm presenting a weird and obscure text — naturally, because that's pretty much my portfolio — that's definitely not a classic. It's also Not A Classic in the sense that it conforms to the opposite of Calvino's definition of classics as texts that you already know and feel like you are re-reading even when you read them the first time. This is a text whose weirdness has contributed to its obscurity.

An inversion of the description of the reading process of a classic is quite apt for me in this instance, as well. Through a probably completely irreplicable series of events, I happened to read it for the first time with no context, no secondary scholarship, and without even knowing really what it was — it was bound in with another manuscript I was looking at in the Bodleian collection. It was a completely interesting exercise to read an interpret a text totally uninfluenced by and unresponsive to earlier thinking. And as it happens, my reading of this text runs totally against the grain of what almost all of the (not really voluminous) earlier scholarship says about it. Some of the earlier scholarship will be in attendance, too.  I'm nervous. It could go quite badly, but it could also go really well; and it's sort of exciting to have read this way.

Forthcoming

Not a Broblem

On the one hand, this morning's offering on Mc Sweeney's Internet Tendency, an open letter to the labial phonemes in Arabic, is taking some flak for capitalizing on the foreign-accents-as-humor trope.

On the other hand, you sort of have to be such a geek (or at least have something of geekiness buried deep in your nature, coupled with at least a passing familiarity with basic linguistics) to try to pull something like this off that it was the fellowship with others who find the IPA to be a bottomless mine of comedy gold that grabbed me and won me over.

Not to make this about the thirteenth century or anything, but there's sort of a kinship among people who have worked tirelessly to learn Arabic, especially the grammar and the phonology. Learning Arabic is the sort of of challenge that, once you've taken it on, it's very heartening to read about other people in the same boat and to hear other people expressing the same things you are thinking or have thought. One of my favorite sentences in Samuel ibn Tibbon's prologue to the Moreh comes as he is talking about his advocacy for word-for-word rather than sense-for-sense translation but makes some small concessions for grammatical correctness in the target language of Hebrew. If you've made it through first year Arabic you can identify exactly the proportions of wonder, puzzlement, bemusement and frustration in his mental tone of voice when he wrote, of the grammatical rule that dictates that non-human plurals take singular feminine agreement: "Sometimes, when we would use a a masculine plural, they use a feminine singular!"

And I know it's not exactly the same thing because this is written from the perspective of someone teaching English to Arabic-speaking students, but this odd fellowship of students of Arabic a big enough tent to include a pretty broad swath of intersection between Arabic and language learning. I didn't read the piece as him making fun of his students or of foreigners with accents as much as engaging in that same head-shaking that we all do at the complexity of the Arabic language.

I think it's okay.

In This Land as in a Kingdom of Ishmael

A talk open to the general public,
Delivered at Congregation Rodeph Shalom, Philadelphia, 2/20/13

A few months ago, I had a conversation with a gentleman who is about my grandfather’s age. He was telling me about taking New York State Regents’ Exams as a yeshiva student in the 1940s and how, in spite of having had to learn geometry on his own because there was no teacher for that subject in his yeshiva, he earned a 96 out of 100 on the statewide exam. Proud, he raced home to tell his immigrant father. At this point, I interrupted his story because I knew exactly where it was going: “Your father asked you what happened to the other four points, right?” He answered me: “No, my father asked why I couldn’t get a 100.” Even though I graduated from a secular public high school in a different millennium from this man, and even though not only are my parents not immigrants but most of my great-grandparents were not even immigrants, he and I had a shared, very culturally American Jewish experience of bringing home not quite good enough really good exam scores and being interrogated about them. And even though I knew that my parents were mostly joking when they asked what happened to those last four points I had failed to earn, the persistence of that question also helped to instill two important values in me: the importance of succeeding in education, and the importance of a sort of filial piety — making my parents proud by that very same success.

It turns out that variations on that question — Why couldn’t you get a 100? — go back a lot farther than the Lower East Side in the 1940s. And these questions are not only asked by American Jews who speak English, like my parents, or Eastern European Jews speaking Yiddish, like my elderly friend’s father, but also by Jews whose parents spoke Arabic because they lived in places whose culture was informed by the Muslim leadership of their lands. As far back as antiquity, there are examples of sons bringing home the Hellenistic or Byzantine equivalent of a 96 on the Regents’ Exam and their fathers saying, “What happened to the other four points?” What I’m going to speak about tonight is an example of this question that occurs in the Middle Ages, at the end of the twelfth century. This questions is, in equal measures, an indication of the value that Jews living in and in exile from Islamic lands placed upon what today we might call religious and secular types of education, of the importance of family relationships, and also of an issue that is of special importance to us as Reform Jews in the twenty-first century: the question of assimilation into and within a wider non-Jewish culture.

Collation

This tableau will eventually yield the handout for my talk tomorrow.

Clockwise from bottom left: Handout draft, manuscript photos, chamomile tea, flawed edition.

Statement of Research Need

I had to write up a rough research plan as part of the application for a reader's card for the Bodleian Library; so since it was already all spelled out, I figured I'd share some of what I'll be up to for the next two weeks, Frankenstorm-pending, of course.

***

I propose to consult with three manuscripts that form part of the Bodleian collection.

The first is Neubauer Cat. No. 1402.1, a copy of the Hebrew translation of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s ethical-didactic treatise, The Improvement of Moral Qualities, as well as a letter written by the translator to a friend in which he describes his translation process. The subject of my current research is that translator, Judah ibn Tibbon, his son Samuel, and their joint intellectual program. I have, thus far, consulted with the two extant editions of the letter, published in Hamburg in 1848 and in Lyck in 1859. The Hamburg edition literally leaves question marks in the text, and the Lyck edition was based on the earlier print edition rather than on the manuscript. I therefore require access to the manuscript to ascertain what those question marks are standing in for, whether it is text or damage to the page.

The second is Bodleian MS 2130 (Cat. No. 730), a letter from a sixteenth-century bookseller, Pinhas of Narbonne, in which he describes his communications with a confederate, Isaac bar Menahem of Narbonne, whom I believe to have been involved in the creation of forged texts attributed to the translators who are the subject of my research. The letter is cited once, quoted only partially and only in French translation of the original Hebrew, in Henri Gross’ Gallia Judaica.

The third is Neubauer Cat. 2219.3, a Hebrew ethical will written by the father translator to the son translator. This is the only complete manuscript of one of the major texts that forms the basis of my research. I have been working from editions up until now but prior to publishing my work I wish to verify a few details of the text by consulting with the manuscript.

And finally, in the introduction to his catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library, Adolf Neubauer explains that he does not do more than give a cursory listing of each manuscript because “something must be left for those who may make a special study of these manuscripts” (vii). I hope, by working with the manuscripts themselves, that I may be able to discover things that I cannot yet identify as needing because they will have been overlooked, deliberately or unintentionally, by cataloguers and earlier scholars.

"I have honored you by giving you many books... but you have dashed my hopes and made yourself scarce from them!"*

As part of my fellowship this year, I'm meant to be involved in outreach to the greater Philadelphia Jewish community. I am actually pretty excited about that; I think it gives meaning to the work in a way that simply doing abstract research for the sheer pleasure and intellectual satisfaction doesn't often have. And so I proposed to give a talk in the spring called: "You Have Fallen Short of My Expectations!": How a Medieval Jewish Guilt Trip Brought Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed to Europe. And I was going to talk about a letter from the father of the first Hebrew translator of the Guide of the Perplexed, an important Jewish text, to the translator himself, in which the father berates the young man for not studying hard enough, for not caring about intellectual endeavors, and for having messier handwriting than a twelve-year-old. It's a very vivid letter and a very over-the-top berating. (*The title of this post quotes from that berating.) But the real kicker is that when it comes time to translate this very important work of Jewish law and philosophy, the son uses his father's methods rather than the methods preferred by Maimonides, who had been nothing but encouraging.

The theme of the series of public lectures of which this is one is "Why the Jewish Middle Ages Matters." Now, I'm not a big fan of making the Middle Ages relevant to modernity, but I figured that showing that values of family and hard work and education, and even the occasional guilt trip about not being perfect in school, were present amongst thirteenth century Jews in very similar ways as they are present amongst American Jewry would be a good and not-totally-cliched way of handing the question.

I thought the title was catchy.

Plus, I figured the talk itself would play really well to a synagogue audience.

I was seriously wrong.

I heard back today that no, actually, they'd prefer it if I could put the word Islam in the title.

And yeah, I could. But that's going to go one of two ways: It could take me into the much more technical side of my current project. I promise you: even the most educated lay audience is not going to care about Judah ibn Tibbon operating as a lexicographer rather than as a translator when he incorporates the work of Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali into his own writing. (Frankly, I've probably lost most of you, and I don't fault you for that. It's really cool to me and about six other people.) Or it could take me way general, your sort of basic Okay. 711. Muslims. Jews. Cordoba. Horseshoe arches. kind of thing. And maybe that would be interesting to them, but it's sure not really interesting for me, not to mention that it's not what I'm totally immersed in at the moment; and I have to figure that my own investment in the topic is probably worth something just in terms of the presentation.

I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out. I'm also sure that it's not going to be quite as good as what I had in mind. But what do I know? I'm just the expert.

Update 13 Oct. 9:45am: I've decided I can give the same talk under the revised title: "In This Land as in a Kingdom of Ishmael": Fathers, Sons and Jewish Learning in the Islamic World

The Real Reason for the Trip

(Click here if the image is still unreadable upon enlargement.)

The panel I presented on:

Revising a bit during the break in the middle of the session:

Giving my paper:

 And the whole group at the end of the workshop:

(All conference photos by Josephine Gehlhar.)

I've survived my first international presentation, and I think it went quite well. I learned a lot from the other speakers, and my paper was received quite well (*phew!*). One of the really wonderful things that the organizers did was to organize this to be a multigenerational conference, and it was great to meet a bunch of other scholars who are contemporaries and at the same stage in their career as I am, but then also to have feedback from people who are more established, both intellectually and professionally. We all stayed in the same hotel, so we had a chance to chat more informally over meals, as well as deliberate more formally during the workshop. All in all, a completely worthwhile, valuable and great experience.

Revising a Book Chapter as a Short(ish) Talk

I'm giving a talk on Thursday at the Kevorkian Center here at NYU that will hopefully (in the newly-approved sense of the word) lead to my becoming affiliated with the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. It's the first time that I'm giving a talk based on a longer work that I've had to cut down and re-edit as a talk rather than being purpose-written as a talk based on a smaller project, or even just a talk based on something written that was just about the right length. The talk's not short — 45 minutes! — but it's still less time than one would need to simply read aloud a whole chapter of a book aloud.

And that's what the longer work in question is: the first chapter of the book I am writing roughly based on my dissertation work. That chapter concerns a study of three texts in which the progenitor of a translation workshop writes about reading the Hebrew Bible in Arabic translation. The text that I discuss second in the chapter is the one that is most exciting to me; it's freshest in my mind and it's also the least studied of three very understudied texts. And so I thought I'd pull it out and present that text. But as I started to do that, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to present that text without doing more rewriting and reframing than I have time for between now and Thursday. My first, brief reaction was to see this as a failure — of my ability to explain my work to a more general audience succinctly, to edit my own work, what-have-you. But all of a sudden, I realized that, while this was a problem for the talk, it was actually really good news as far as the book is concerned. It means that each section of the chapter builds upon the previous one and that the whole chapter coheres: that you can't just pull out one chunk and have it stand on its own. The argument is complex and requires all the pieces to be in place.

The talk will be fine. And finally, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about the book, too.

When we last left our intrepid young assistant professor, she had just discovered that the two books she thought she needed to consult were indeed owned by her friendly, local world-class public library...

... In this installment we learn of the conclusion to her research emergency.

***

Today I spent the day up at the main branch of the New York Public Library. It houses its collection in a gorgeous beaux-arts building, which made it feel rather like I was on some fantastic European research trip rather than a mere two miles from my office:

Upon my arrival, I discovered that there is currently an exhibition on loan from the Bodleian about Percy Bysshe Shelley, an Oxford man who was sent down (which I knew) for promoting atheism (which I didn't know). Since I was there to track down the sole printed edition of a manuscript contained at the Bodley, I took this as a positive omen.

The marble lions guard the outside of the building, and the Lego lions guard the door from the other side.

I set up shop in the sun-drenched Judaica reading room.

It is so sun-drenched, in fact, around 11am, that I had to move away from the windows because I was starting to feel snow-blind because of all the glare from the pages.

But what could be bad about sitting next to this guy for the remainder of the day?

I was thrilled to discover that both the edition of the main text as well as the catalogue that accounts for the second manuscript to which the translator's note is appended contained the full text of that note. The books were both in really bad shape, though, so I wasn't allowed to photocopy the pages I needed. 

I copied out the translator's note by hand (it was less than two pages in a 12mo-sized book). And then I decided that, just in case and in the interest of fiddling with technology, I'd try to photograph the pages of the volume as well. I had managed to leave the battery for my fixed-lens digital camera with macro mode in the charger at home, but I decided I'd try it with my iPhone camera to see how it would work. All the photos in this entry were taken with my iPhone camera, which, photographically speaking isn't very good at all. But it was definitely sufficient for taking very legible photos of pages. They're not publication quality, but without a tripod (prohibited) and studio lighting (impractical) I wouldn't have gotten publication quality images with my camera, either. All things considered, I was really impressed with the results and now have a photographic copy of the whole volume. The edition is a little problematic, so I'm definitely going to have to look at the two manuscripts before my book appears in print, but this is definitely enough to get me through the workshop respectably.

Once I finished my work, I took some time to look at the special exhibitions. Photography wasn't allowed in the Shelley exhibition, but there is an online version. The best thing by far was the first edition of Frankenstein signed by the author to Lord Byron. Well, actually, maybe that was second-best to the autograph draft pages of same. The exhibition also features also the only surviving copy of an 1811 pamphlet that PBS had published anonymously in support of an Irish dissident who had run afoul of the libel laws. It's only been recently re-disovered; it had previously been thought to have been completely lost to posterity. There were also some fragments of Shelley's skull (apparently Shelley-relic keeping was common in the wake of his death). I was also really interested to learn that there is actually a reason why Mary Shelley's middle name is Wollstonecraft. I'd always assumed that it was an homage, but in fact it was a family name; her mother was the Mary Wollstonecraft.

The library had letter-press printed cards with quotations from PBS's poetry. They were placed in old-fashioned file drawers around the exhibition, with encouragements to take them.

I also went to see the Rose Family Haggadah, which was on display for passover. The mix of iconography is quite interesting.

And I finished off the day by stopping in on Christopher Robin Milne's friends.

All in all, a total success and a very enjoyable day: the best of all worlds! To celebrate, I think I shall watch the marvelous Shelley episode of Lewis tonight before getting back to work first thing tomorrow.

Research Emergency!

At a cocktail party at the end of last semester, the husband of a colleague was telling me about a new emergency fund that NYU has made available for faculty to dip into for totally unforeseen research expenses. I joked with him for a few minutes about what, exactly, would constitute a "research emergency," since particularly as a medievalist, the concept seems a little foreign to me. As I tell my students when they fall behind and need some reassurance: These guys have been dead for the better part of a millennium, a few more days isn't going to make a difference one way or the other. Of course, research emergencies are things like Egyptian sociologists suddenly needing to go to Tahrir Square, etc. or meteorologists needing proximity to unexpected weather conditions.

But I think I'm now having a genuine medieval research emergency. It hinges on there being a clear difference in the early 20th-century sense of the word "published" and the contemporaneous sense of same. And I think it's worth laying out here:

The book chapter that I'm working on right now explores the relationship between devotional and professional reading in the thought of the head of the translation workshop that is the subject of my book. This is one of the places where I'm needed to beef up what I did as part of my dissertation work, when I thought I'd only write about the son of this particular translator, himself also a translator. Late-ish in the game, I realized that the question that I wanted to answer  with my project required a study of the father as much as of the son. So that's a long way of saying that even though this will be my so-called dissertation book, there's a lot of totally new work going into it.

To write this chapter, I wanted to consult with all of of the prologues that the patertranslator appended to his translations, and thus began pulling every relevant edition that is held in the Bobst collection and requesting the missing ones from inter-library loan, especially if we were missing what is considered to be the authoritative edition of a given text.

One particular text, called The Improvement of Moral Qualities, has proven to be a bit of a rattlesnake. There are historical reasons for this boondoggle. The problem that I'm having is that, as I am coming to realize, most modern editions don't contain the translator's preface; the reason for this is that it is appended to only two of the extant manuscripts and so it was not included in most of the early modern printed editions. The printed Hebrew version  that Bobst owns (Jerusalem, 1966) doesn't contain the translator's letter. The English translation (New York, 1902) does, and contains the following footnote:

"Appended to the manuscripts (Neubauer 1402.2, Michael 401) of the Hebrew translation of the 'Ethics.' Steinschneider published it for the first time (pp. 366, 367 of the 'Katalog der Michael'schen Bibliothek,' Hamburg, 1848); it was reprinted in the Lyck edition, 1859; cf. St. (H.U. p. 381) and H. Gross, Gallia Judaica (Paris, 1897 p. 280)."

Much to my dismay, it turns out that to say in 1902 that something was "published" means that its existence was publicized in in some kind of catalogue.  It does not mean, as I assumed that it did, that the text is transcribed and edited out from one or many manuscripts in such a way that one can study the text. (In other words, it is more likely conform to definition 1 found in the OED rather than the definition 2.) The references mentioned in the Hebraeischen Uebersetzungen and Gallia Judaica are, similarly, references to the existence of the text and not the text itself.

Since Wise distinguished between "reprinting" and "publishing," I'm optimistic that I'll actually be able to read the original text once I get my hands on the 1859 edition. The 1807 edition, as I discovered, much to my dismay, is not just a reprint of the 1859 edition. Yale seems to own a copy of the 1859 edition, and I'm also hopeful that either the Jewish Theological Seminary (shorter train ride) or the Hebrew Union College (no train ride (literally around the corner)) may also have a copy. (Edited a bit later to add: Victory! Both JTSA and NYPL (longish walk, shortish train ride) have the book in their holdings! Now all that remains to be seen is whether the prologue is actually in the book.) I'll also spend some quality time with the Bodleian Library web site to see if the relevant MS in their collection has been or could be digitized (or, I should say, digitised).  (The Michael'schen Bibliotek is a rattlesnake eating another rattlesnake, so for the moment I'm going to focus on the Bodley MS, although of course I'll look at both before doing a proper edition or even publishing the book.)

I'm still a little panicked, though.

This whole research emergency has really driven home the point that a lot of the texts that were edited in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really, really need to be re-edited now, according to modern scientific standards. In a way, it's kind of reassuring that there's still loads of manuscript work to be done even where there are, ostensibly, editions of things. They're not typically very good and they're definitely not easily available. I do love a good puzzle. I'd just rather not have to solve it under a time crunch.

I'll get it eventually. But the truly pressing, emergency part comes from having to present this work in Tel Aviv at the end of May, and having to circulate a written paper a month beforehand. And it was my own naiveté that really provoked the emergency, assuming as I did that "published" meant "published" and not getting started earlier on getting a photograph of the manuscript from the library. So depending on the success of my edition-hunting and whether I can take the time out from working on other aspects of the project to get to the Bodleain before then, not to mention convincing some university committee that this is a Genuine Research Emergency (tm), I may have to circumlocute and leave things a little more speculative than I'd be happy with. Fortunately, it's a workshop, so everyone will know that this is work in progress and not necessarily hugely close to being publishable. But still.

At least the Bodley isn't being looted. Even if I don't get there before the workshop, it's not like I'll never have the chance to see the manuscript. Count me grateful for small favors.