Guide for the Perplexed

Maimonides (Heb. מושה בן מימון, Moses ben Maimon, "Moses, son of Maimon") was born in Córdoba in Spain in 1135 or 1138. He was the son of a Jewish judge, Maimon ben Joseph, who gave his son a solid religious and secular education. In 1148 the family was forced to flee Spain. The Almohads, a Berber-dominated Muslim reform movement, invaded the country, and for the remaining non-Muslim inhabitants, this meant they had to choose between conversion or death.

After a while, the family ended up in Fez in 1160, but five years later, when there were new religious persecutions, they travelled via visits to Akko and Jerusalem to Fustat (old Cairo), where they settled. After the death of the father and the older brother, it was Maimondes who had to provide for the family. He was included in the list of doctors with service at the court and from 1177 became the leader of the Jewish congregation in Fustat.

Maimonides became a very well-known name among both Jews and Muslims. When he died in the year 1204, an official day of mourning was held in both Fustat and Jerusalem. He is buried in Tiberias.

Two of Maimonides' works are considered classics in their respective fields. The Mishneh Torah ("Repetition of the Torah") is a halakhic (legal) work. As a systematisation of material from the Talmud, its purpose was to be an aid to those who wished to live their lives in accordance with traditional Jewish practice. It was not written for the intellectual, inquiring reader, but for the one who feels overwhelmed by the extensive discussion of the individual mitzvot (commandments) and their implementation in daily life.

Moreh nevukhim has a different goal. Because of the philosophical questioning of religious dogmas that was alive in the intellectual debate among (and between) Jews, Christians and Muslims, on the basis of the rediscovered Greek philosophers, the work is an attempt to reconcile traditional Jewish theology with that of this time highly influential Aristotelian philosophy. Written in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew letters; its original title is - in transcription - Dalalat al-Ha'irin), it is considered the finest work of medieval Jewish philosophy, and the work has also influenced Christian scholasticism. It discusses central Jewish dogmas as presented in the biblical text from a philosophical standpoint, emphasising the spiritual significance of the sometimes corporeal descriptions of the divine realm.

Maimonides' way of treating the classical Jewish sources did not escape criticism. For more than a century the "Maimoidean Controversy" raged among Jewish scholars. The debate centered on whether the traditional sources lost their status when they became the subject of summaries such as the Mishneh Torah. Although no agreement was ever reached on the matter, the opponents caved in; criticising Maimonides became increasingly unacceptable.

The translation of the "Guide" from Arabic into Hebrew began almost immediately after Maimonides finished writing it. It was translated by Samuel (Shmuel) ben Judah (Yehudah) ibn Tibbon (c. 1150 - c. 1230) in collaboration with the author. Ibn Tibbon was a member of the well-known ibn Tibbon family of translators and (sometimes) writers, active in southern France and Spain in the 13th and 14th centuries.

That Maimonides was satisfied with the result appears from a passage in a letter: "You are well equipped for the task, because the Creator has given you a mind gifted to 'understand parables and their meaning, [as well as] the obscure sayings of the wise.' I sense from your statements that you completely master the subject and that its innermost meaning is clear to you."

"Guide for the Perplexed" was originally created in Fustat (present-day Cairo) in the 12th century. The Royal Danish Library's manuscript was written down in Barcelona approx. 150 years later.

What we know about the scribe "Levi, son of Isaac, son of Caro, from the city of Salamanca" is the information he himself gives in the book's colophon (fol. 316a), which in a translation can read:

"I, Levi, son of Isaac, son of Caro, may he be blessed, from the region of Salamanca, wrote [=copied] this book which is called the Guide for the Perplexed, 'as Moses did before the eyes of all Israel' [5. Moss. 34,12] for the enlightened and honoured doctor Menachem Betsalel. And I wrote it here in Barcelona, ​​and completed it in the year 108 according to the minor calendar [1347/48 CE], despite the fact that I am not from this region. May the Almighty bless him in the study of it, him and his children and his grandchildren and all his descendants. May He bless him. And may He spread out His tabernacle of peace and he shall remain in the shadow of God.* And may He uphold the Scripture in him, as it is written: 'This book of the law shall always be on your lips; you shall meditate on it day and night and carefully do all that is written in it; then it will go well with you, then you will have luck with you.' [Jos. 1,8] And may He remember and save us until the time of the Messiah and the coming of the Saviour." (*Here Levi alludes to the name of his mentor, Betsalel means "in the shadow of God".)

The quote from Deut. 34.12 is interesting in itself. In its entirety, the verse reads "or on all that his mighty hand did, all the great and awesome things that Moses did in the sight of all Israel". In Hebrew, the wording "strong hand" is ha-yad ha-chazaqah - a term used by critics from the beginning as a paraphrase of Maimonides' Mishnah Torah, because "yad" (hand) can also be read as the number 14 - an allusion to this work's fourteen parts; later it came to be fully accepted as a designation.

The origin of the illuminations in this codex has been the subject of discussion, but there is currently consensus that the book's main illuminator was Ferrer Bassa, active in Barcelona as the head of a workshop that also employed his son Arnau. Ferrer Bassa is better known as an executor of murals (e.g. San Miguel de Pedralbes Monastery in Barcelona), but is also believed to have executed several manuscripts.

One theory is that Ferrer Bassa was responsible for the larger panels in the volume, while other employees of the workshop took care of the marginal decorations. Several of these allude to details in the text, but this does not necessarily point to a Jewish artist, but may be the result of close collaboration between scribe and illuminator.

Possibly "Guide for the Perplexed" was Ferrer Bassa's last work. He died around the time of its end, possibly in the Black Death; after 1348 nothing is known of him or his son.

The manuscript was executed for Menachem Betsalel, a doctor in Barcelona in the service of the Catalan King Pedro 4th (“el Ceremonioso”, also known as Duke Pedro 3rd of Barcelona and King Pedro 2nd of Valencia). The king was also Ferrer Bassa's patron, which may explain the choice of the latter as illuminator, but there are also traces in the archives of other interactions between Bassa and the Jewish congregation in Barcelona. Menachem seems to share a fate with Bassa; his widow received support from the king in 1349, so her husband was probably one of the victims of the plague.

The fate of the manuscript during its first two centuries is unknown. Papal censors signed it in the years 1587 and 1619 (fol. 352b), and in the late 17th century it was acquired by the theologian Hans (Johannes) Bartholin (1665-1738), presumably in Holland during his student days there. He presented it to Frederik Rostgaard (1671-1745; for Bartholin's dedication, and Rostgaard's signature, see fol. 2b and 3b). Christian Danneskjold-Samsøe (1702-1728) bought the manuscript in 1726; after his death, it was acquired, together with several other titles in his large book collection, in 1732 by the Royal Danish Library.

Number of pages: ii 352 ii
Dimensions: 194 x 133 x 65 mm
Font: Sephardic [Hispanic-Jewish] Hebrew script

fol. 4a: Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon's introduction to the translation
fol. 9a: Guide for the Perplexed, Book I
fol. 114a: Guide for the Perplexed, Book II
fol. 202a: Guide for the Perplexed, Book III
fol. 317b: Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon's glossary of foreign words