Professor Steven Harvey has honored us with a 28-page critique of our 2012 paper, “Avicenna among medieval Jews.”Footnote 1 In our opinion, his text is wanting in both form and substance.
Form. At the request of the editor of ASP, we will not comment on the tone and style of Professor Harvey's text. We trust that readers will notice how much this ad hominem attack on us deviates from normal scholarly discourse, in disregard of the maxim, “The words of wise [men are] heard in quiet” (Eccles. 9:17).
Substance. Professor Harvey is unquestionably a master of the bibliography of secondary literature. His “Notes” provide some references that usefully complement those we gave in our study and will be helpful in writing a fuller account.
We will not enter into a point-by-point polemic with Professor Harvey. We only want to offer a few brief conceptual clarifications that we already made in our paper, but that apparently escaped Professor Harvey, or that he passed over in silence.
1. We tried to offer a nuanced way of looking at Avicenna's presence in a given author's writings: in particular, we distinguished those writers who accepted his views and those (the great majority) who discussed them or simply referred to them. This allowed us to identify those thinkers with a total adherence to Avicenna's views (we called them “committed Avicennians”) and the others (“eclectic Avicennians”). Only in the case of the former can one really speak of Jewish Avicennism. This important distinction is swept under the carpet by the use of the vague term “influence.” (Professor Harvey wonders why we took issue with this concept although we have used it in the past – a strange remark if one considers that scholarship is not supposed to stagnate.)
2. In this connection we introduced the notion of “doctrinal item” to refer to a situation in which a thinker appropriated a number of discrete and unconnected Avicennian ideas and integrated them in his thought one at a time. This again seems an improvement over “influence,” which lumps together everyone who adhered to Avicenna's views in toto (or nearly so) and those who borrowed only selected items.
3. We took care to distinguish between Arabophone Jewish authors and those who read only Hebrew. The former could (in principle) read any of Avicenna's works, whereas the latter depended on translations (which were late and few) or had only indirect knowledge of Avicenna via the writings of members of the first group. This distinction seems trivial and self-evident, but more often than not is ignored in writings on the history of Jewish thought, where Jewish thinkers are all jumbled together as if their Jewishness was the only relevant cultural factor.
4. We discussed Arabophone Jews in the West and in the East under separate headings. Given the cultural differences between these regions of the Islamic world, this distinction, too, seems self-evident, but has not often been applied.
5. In our paper, we discussed the reception of both the philosophical and the medical writings of Avicenna and asked the obvious question of whether the two reception processes are related. As far as we can see, this has not been done before; in his “Some Notes,” too, Professor Harvey excludes Avicenna's medical writings from his purview, their philosophical importance notwithstanding.
6. We called attention to the fact that numerous thinkers drew on Avicenna without mentioning his name, either deliberately or out of ignorance. As a result, Avicennian ideas were employed by authors who were not aware of their pedigree. We dubbed this phenomenon “Avicennian knowledge without Avicenna” and believe it throws useful light on the way Avicenna was “present” in Jewish thought.
7. We devoted a separate discussion to authors who accessed Avicennian knowledge via Latin works. In this connection we also distinguished between scholars living in Italy (where access to Latin culture was not rare) and in the Midi (where it was exceptional until the end of the 14th century).
8. In general, we were careful not to look at Jewish scholars as affiliated with a monolithic culture, but as belonging to a local Jewish culture, which was in turn interconnected with other such cultures. Put differently, we avoided offering a history of disembodied texts and tried to adopt the stance of the cultural historian who studies texts in contexts.
It is embarrassing to have to write a laudatio of one's own writings, but Professor Harvey pushed us into the corner. Our article of 2012 is the first attempt to draw a map of Avicenna's presence in the medieval Jewish cultures. By means of the distinctions listed above, we sought to offer readers a nuanced and structured view of different kinds of “reception,” at different times and places, and in various cultural environments. In this context we respectfully took exception to Professor Harvey's speculation, published in 1992, that the paucity of Hebrew translations of Avicenna was due to a letter in which Maimonides advised Samuel Ibn Tibbon that Avicenna's works were slightly inferior to al-Fārābī's.Footnote 2 We argued that a multifaceted cultural phenomenon straddling eras and centuries cannot be simplistically explained as due to a single letter, even by the Eagle of the Synagogue, which was ignored by the addressee himself. We believe that a future attempt to write a comprehensive account of “Avicenna among the Jews” will take these dividing lines into account as it seeks to fill in or rectify many details.
Twenty-four years after Professor Harvey published his 1992 piece an exemplary full study of “Avicenna among medieval Jews” would have been more useful to the advancement of knowledge than lessons addressed to other scholars.
