Judah ibn Tibbon's ethical will serves as a structural, historical, and intellectual base of Pearce's comprehensive analysis of the influence and meaning of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic to Andalusi Jewish intellectuals. Though the ethical will is itself a literary and metaliterary text, Pearce carefully focuses her “literarily guided study” (9) on historical circumstances and precedents to ground “medieval literature within its own cultural and temporal contexts” (11). The first chapter situates Judah ibn Tibbon's nostalgia for Andalusi intellectualism in the context of his politically necessitated relocation to Lunel from Granada. Judah's nostalgia for Jewish learning that flourished in its emulation of Arabic, Pearce explains, fueled his adamant “word-for-word” (9) translation system: in stark contrast to the idea-centric theory of translation that Maimonides advocated, Judah sought to conserve Arabic “as a manifestation of culture” (37) for his readership in Provence, where Jewish thinking operated outside of the Arabic sphere.
Chapter 2 turns towards bibliography, autobiography, and genealogy. Via the catalogue of books that Judah delineated in his ethical will, Pearce examines “Judah's particular predilections and the ways in which he clings to the memory of an intellectual culture of al-Andalus” (54). Here, Pearce also draws attention to Judah's apparent disappointment in—yet reliance on—his son Samuel, the recipient of both the ethical will and the library. Pearce explores contemporaneous ethical wills that likewise dealt with the bibliographic and familial to suggest that Judah's berating of Samuel for shirking his Arabic studies was perhaps more of a general warning against youthful folly than a display of heartfelt dismay. Samuel, as she explains, accepted his responsibility for “the windfall of books available to him” (59) in the Tibbon library and disproved “the loser son” theory (58–59) by ultimately eclipsing his father's fame with his Hebrew translation of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed.
The third chapter returns to the idea of Arabic's prestige as the language of the Qurʾān with respect to “Islamicate aspects of [Jewish] Andalusi culture” (89). While the first chapter focuses on Judah's translating as an act of remembrance, here Pearce shifts to Judah as a professional translator who “pushes the boundary between sacred reading and profane profession” (86) by encouraging his son to read the weekly Torah portion in Arabic. She parses Judah's approach to translation as one that is “culturally and literarily Arabizing” (84), even if it conveniently “conceals the Arabic” (84) exegetical foundations.
Pearce moves from the exegetical to the poetic in the fourth chapter, elaborating on the indebtedness of Jewish intellectuals’ grammatical and poetic innovations to Arabic. In addition to contextualizing the secular literary culture of Andalusi Jews, this explication adds nuance to Pearce's reading of Judah as a “shrewd cultural translator in spite of himself and in spite of his strong preference for the literal translation of texts” (106). Pearce offers an epigram from the ethical will as evidence of Judah's shrewdness, and it is quite effective; the point is not the mediocrity of Judah's own poetic skills on display in the ethical will, but rather his “literary knowing nod” to those who understand the Arabic subtext of Hebrew poetry “without alienating the one who does not have a familiar point of reference within the world of Arabic books” (111).
Following of the library, Hebrew Bible, and poetry, the fifth chapter examines key prose works that informed Judah's ethical will. Pearce focuses on the philosophical, gauging Judah's approach to al-Ghazālī with respect to other Andalusi Jews’ interpretations of “the Arab sage.” In Judah's lexicographic choices for theological concepts, Pearce identifies his use of “loan translation” rather than literal translation, which signals his willingness to break “from the tradition out of which he grew” (159) to suit his new circumstances. As Pearce's methodical analyses of intellectual currents related to the ethical will progress, the reader begins to see Judah's scholarly and professional agendas as more complex than adherence to literal translation presupposes; his life's project is itself akin to what Pearce terms “the cross-cultural, genre-bending characteristics” (8) of the ethical will.
The final chapter turns to the reception history of Tibbonid translations. Calling on modern translation theory, Pearce ponders the implications of Samuel's Hebrew translation of Maimonides's Guide through which “the original has been made to take the role of commentary on or cipher for the translation” (171). Pearce questions the meaning of this inversion by placing it in the context of the Tibbonid word-for-word translation method: “How, then, could that intended audience have made use of such a translation-turned text?” (171). By drawing on fictional and fantasy texts that likewise confronted “Arabizing features” (180), such as the Hebrew Alexander romance, Pearce identifies a kindred tendency “of readers to use fiction, imagination, fantasy, and paratext as a way of grappling with a whole host of narrative, historical, cultural, and linguistic complexities” (191). Thus, Pearce fittingly closes with a turn to the reader as the targeted, responsible beneficiary of text. In spurring the “Tibbonid cultural project” (191), the Ibn Tibbons both edified and liberated their readers to pursue “broader historical and spiritual truth” (191).
Finally, the appendix features Pearce's new translation into English of Judah ibn Tibbon's ethical will, which serves as more than a mere gift of convenience to the reader: the translator's note and the translation itself pay tribute to Judah's own legacy as a meticulous translator, while thoughtfully acknowledging modern translation theory and the translator's onus as interpreter. The “head-spinning meta-literary exercise” (205) of Pearce's own translation is both metaliterary and literal. As the reader of Judah's ethical will transforms into its translator, she substantiates the book's treatment of the literary-historical framework of the ethical will. In doing so, Pearce reminds readers of the pressing relevance of this study to the fields of Jewish studies, medieval studies, Iberian literature, Mediterranean studies, translation studies, and beyond. Without any “romanticization of an imagined past” (200), this book maneuvers across disciplines to elucidate the complex historical moment in which Jewish intellectuals revivified and repurposed Arabic and Judeo-Arabic intellectual achievements for the incalculable edification of subsequent generations.
