For decades, the Kitāb al-Talḫīṣ , a pharmacological dictionary composed by the Jewish biblical lexicographer and exegete Abū l-Walīd Marwān Ibn Ǧanāḥ (ca. 980–1040), was thought to be lost. Even its discovery in 1979 by Fuat Sezgin, who gave a brief outline of the text preserved in an Istanbul manuscript, went entirely unnoticed by the scholarly community until 2010, when Fabian Kas gave a preliminary account of the work in his masterful concordance of the minerals in Arabic pharmacognosy. During a recent study trip to the Suleymaniye Library in Istanbul, the present writer was able to examine at first hand the work preserved in MS Aya Sofia 3603. A physical description of the work and its purpose, as set out in Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s introduction, are presented, followed by a characterization of the author’s methodology. More than just a glossary, Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s Talḫīṣ, written in the adab style, draws on multiple medical, botanical and even literary and philosophical sources. Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s concept of an independent medical dictionary may have been inspired by his earlier composition of the Kitāb al-uṣūl , the Book of Roots , a bilingual biblical dictionary. Significant details of the classical Greek and Arab sources upon which Ibn Ǧanāḥ drew are discussed, along with his relation to the Qayrawān school and his exchanges with his contemporaries in al-Andalus. Of particular interest is an Arabic quote from Isaac Israeli’s Book of Elements . A list of quotations in the works of later authorities is included in an attempt to gauge the work’s influence. In conclusion, the originality of this composition is highlighted, as well as the possibility of a specifically Jewish contribution to the discipline of pharmacognosy.

This English version of an essay published in Hebrew in 1988 offers a well-informed and insightful typology of the various positions on the cardinal issue of the relationship between Torah, in the sense of the totality of traditional Jewish learning and commitment, and scientific knowledge. It distinguishes and analyzes six fundamental positions: the delimiting approach; rigorous separation; the theory of separate domains; the interpretive approach; the dialectic approach; and the transcendental approach. It dwells especially on the positions of Yeshayahu Leibowitz and R. Abraham Isaac Kook.

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One of the most influential Christian lapidaries in medieval Europe was a composite text that combined fragments of several traditions concerning the powers of engraved stones. Here designated the “Techel/Azareus Complex,” this lapidary appears in different configurations in each manuscript, with varying combinations of both individual stones and of larger groupings of stones (“clusters”). Each of these clusters, which are intertwined in the manuscript tradition, has its own stylistic features and theoretical notions, suggesting that they may once have circulated as independent lapidaries. With an understanding of the Latin tradition and its particular fluidity, it becomes possible to recognize three Jewish texts, introduced and discussed here for the first time, that also form part of the textual history of the Complex . The first is a Hebrew translation that derives from an intermediate Anglo-Norman version. The second Hebrew text contains Castilian and Catalan terms; its complicated relationship to the Latin tradition suggests that it may have originated from similar sources, but independently. The third text, written in Italian in Hebrew characters, is remarkably similar to some of the Latin versions. Appendices provide a list of medieval Christian authors who cite the Complex , a bibliography of modern printed editions of this lapidary, a list of Anglo-Norman terms found in the manuscripts of the first Hebrew version, and a preliminary list of manuscripts.

From My NotebooksOn Tajriba/Nissayon (“Experience”): Texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic Y. Tzvi Langermann (bio) Preface A research project that I undertook some time ago, and which came to fruition in a paper entitled “Maimonides’ Repudiation of Astrology,” led me to investigate the concept of tajriba or “repeated experience.”1 In the medieval debate over astrology, tajriba is a key concept. Astrologers claim that the experience accumulated over the ages, in which certain stellar configurations are repeatedly synchronous with fairly specific terrestrial events (both natural and historical), establishes a sound connection between the two. This is the epistemological basis of the art of astrology, which makes predictions for the future on the basis of (what are claimed to be) repeated experiences of the past. The opponents of astrology, Maimonides among them, reject this claim. Maimonides, as a good Aristotelian, demands of a true science that it identify causes and prove formally that they are causes. Tajriba cannot do this; hence an art such as astrology that relies solely upon tajriba is not a true science. [End Page 147] Not that Maimonides and those who agree with him on this point totally deny tajriba as a possible source of knowledge: medical practice, in particular, must employ remedies whose efficacy has been ascertained repeatedly, even if one cannot explain why they work. Indeed, in his Guide, Maimonides ratifies the rabbinic permission for some obviously pagan practices—the Talmud calls them “the ways of the Amorites” — because their reputed therapeutic effect has been validated by experience: You must not consider as a difficulty certain things that they have permitted, as for instance the nail of one who is crucified and a fox’s tooth.2 For in those times these things were considered to derive from experience (tajriba) and accordingly pertained to medicine and entered into the same class as the hanging of a peony upon an epileptic3 and the giving of a dog’s excrements in cases of the swelling of the throat and fumigation with vinegar and marcasite in cases of hard swellings of the tendons. For it is allowed to use all remedies similar to these that experience has shown to be valid even if reasoning (qiyās) does not require them. For they pertain to medicine and their efficacy may be ranged together with the purgative action of aperient medicines.4 Three points may be drawn from Maimonides in connection with tajriba and its place in medieval scientific discourse. (1) Tajriba is an epistemological foundation of applied arts or sciences.5 (2) In the exact sciences, tajriba plays no role at all. (3) Medicine straddles the middle ground: it aims to be a science like the other sciences, but it cannot avoid including in its pharmacopoeia remedies that have no rational justification but whose efficacy has been demonstrated by tajriba.6 The claim that tajriba is irrelevant to the exact sciences can be justified from the writings of Maimonides only by an argument ex silentio: [End Page 148] nowhere in his discussions of astronomy—for example, in the chapter of the Guide devoted to astronomy (II, 24)—does the term occur. More generally, I note that tajriba has no role at all in the interplay of astronomical theory and observation, an important theme in some of the best medieval science, and studied by eminent scholars such as Bernard R. Goldstein and George Saliba.7 This key observation was made in fact in a paper published some time ago by my late mentor, A. I. Sabra, who noted with some surprise [End Page 149] that Ibn al-Haytham does not use tajriba to describe his optical experiments, even though he does use istiqrāʾ, the standard Aristotelian term for induction.8 Instead, the optical and astronomical literature speaks of iʿtibār. Another term that we shall encounter in some of the Judeo-Arabic texts displayed in the second section of this paper, imtiḥān, meaning “test,” is also found in the astronomical texts cited by Sabra.9 In fact, Sabra found that the earlier translator of Ptolemy’s Almagest, al-Ḥajjāj, did use tajriba to render the Greek peira, but that Isḥāq bin Ḥunayn...

The writings of two twentieth-century New York-based religious thinkers, Mordecai Kaplan and Hans Jonas, shared a common concern to find an alternative approach to the problem of evil in general and to the religious challenge of the Shoah in particular. For Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, it was possible to draw upon his already well-developed, scientifically augmented (or inspired) revisions of the Jewish religion and the Jewish God. For the philosopher of technology, Jonas, the revisions to the traditional categories of Jewish theology arguably followed from his struggle to make some kind of moral sense of the Holocaust in the light of his interest in the biological emergence of selfhood. At the heart of the revisions of each, however, was a kind of cosmic evolutionism that necessitated an understanding of the origins of human ethics from an evolutionary perspective. While neither could be said to have demonstrated an intimate understanding of Darwinian theory (this is especially true of Kaplan), both viewed themselves as critically engaged with it and sought to utilize Darwin in offering accounts of a genocidal world that were neither entirely naturalistic nor entirely supernatural.