GALEN'S TEGNI: A SHORT HISTORY UP TO C. 1190

The Tegni was a foundational text of classical and then of medieval medicine. Starting in the fourth century C.E., the Alexandrians selected the Tegni as one of the four most important works to be studied.Footnote ¹⁹ This was the point of departure for the reception and transmission of this work in Syriac, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew.

Galen's work was first translated into Latin as early as the first half of the sixth century. This translation from Greek was done by Agnellus of Ravenna (then the capital of the Byzantine exarchate in Italy), along with other texts from the Alexandrian canon of Galen's works. Agnellus also composed a commentary on the Tegni and on two or three other works by Galen. The translation does not seem to have circulated widely, but the commentary may have influenced the later tradition.Footnote ²⁰

Roughly at the same time, but far to the east and independently, Sergius of Rašʿayna (d. 536), the early Greek-into-Syriac translator, included the Tegni among the works he translated (extant in part).Footnote ²¹ He chose to translate works by Galen not (or not only) on account of their empirical medical content, but because of their rigorous method of definitions and demonstrations. “Reading Galen,” Henri Hugonnard-Roche comments, Sergius “learns that scientific knowledge must go beyond experience, toward a theoretical understanding of the phenomena, using reason as a guide.”Footnote ²² Put differently, although all sciences go back to Aristotle, Galen is a useful complement. The Tegni's reliance on logic is particularly pronounced, so it fills the role described by Sergius particularly well.

In the Muslim-Arabic culture, the Tegni was translated by Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq twice: first into Syriac and somewhat later into Arabic.Footnote ²³ Like Sergius some three centuries earlier, Ḥunayn explains that the chief characteristic of Tegni is that it combines scientific theory with medical practice, making it highly useful both for the beginner and for the experienced physician.Footnote ²⁴ No less important than this translation itself, Ḥunayn composed an introduction to the Tegni, which was subsequently often transmitted together with Galen's work itself; an abbreviated version of this text was translated into Latin and is usually referred to as the Isagoge.Footnote ²⁵ It was to play a significant role in the Latin tradition of the Tegni and in the Hebrew translation that descended from it.

In the early eleventh century, the Egyptian physician Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān b. ʿAlī b. Ğaʿfar (988–1061/8), composed a commentary on the Tegni in Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq's translation (Šarḥ al- ṣinā‘a al-ṣaġīra li-Ğālīnūs), one among a number of his commentaries on medical works. In this detailed commentary, every passage (lemma) of Galen's text is followed by an explanation. That Ibn Riḍwān chose this text to gloss again bespeaks the fact that it was a medical textbook particularly suited for theoretically minded readers. This commentary, too, accompanied Galen's text during much of its later life. We will attend to Ibn Riḍwān later.

Back to Europe. In the late eleventh century, Galen's Tegni (without any commentary) was translated into Latin. The anonymous translation was done from the Greek, by someone working in the same milieu as Constantine the African (d. ante 1098/99).Footnote ²⁶ This Latin translation, which later was known as the translatio antiqua, soon became part of the collection of six basic medical works already known as Ars medicinae, including Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq's Isagoge.Footnote ²⁷ This collection was transmitted as a piece and became the basic textbook for medical education during the second half of the twelfth century; with some changes it maintained this status until the Renaissance and beyond. For our purposes, the significant point is that the Tegni and the introduction to it, Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq's Isagoge – which together are “indicative of the nature of medieval Galenism”Footnote ²⁸ – were part of a small canon of medical texts transmitted as a unit and used as the basic texts of medical education.Footnote ²⁹ As we shall see, one branch of the Hebrew tradition of the Tegni derived from this translation.

The 1130s witnessed the beginning of the Arabic-into-Latin translation movement that was to culminate in Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187). This large-scale cultural transfer brought many of the textual building blocks of what was to become Scholastic philosophy, science, and medicine into the purview of Latin culture.Footnote ³⁰ In the course of this wave, earlier versions of four of the canonic texts were replaced by new translations, now accompanied by commentaries.Footnote ³¹ Among them was the Tegni, consisting of both Galen's text itself (referred to as the translatio arabica) and ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, Commentum Haly. In the second half of the thirteenth century this composite text, in which Galen's text and Ibn Riḍwān's commentary were merged, was transmitted as such in the manuscripts and replaced the translatio antiqua in the Ars medicinae.Footnote ³² The modified Ars medicinae was studied in faculties of medicine for many centuries. In the middle of the thirteenth century, several medical commentaries translated from Arabic by Gerard of Cremona were added to this collection. In the Renaissance the enlarged collection of texts became known as the Articella (although the term is employed also retrospectively when discussing periods anterior to its coinage). Whereas the original Ars medicinae was mainly Hippocratic – the Tegni was the only Galenic text it included – the addition of new Galenic texts shifted the balance and created a “New Galen,” thereby “enshrin[ing] the authority of Galen” for centuries.Footnote ³³

A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF MEDICINE: ʿALĪ IBN RIḌWĀN'S COMMENTARY ON THE TEGNI

In many contexts, Galen's Tegni was transmitted and studied alongside ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān's commentary. This was also the case in the Hebrew tradition: we will argue that Ibn Riḍwān's commentary played a role in the reception of the Tegni in late twelfth-century Provence. A brief probe into the commentary is therefore apposite.

As is well known, Galen thought highly of philosophy. He viewed himself as a philosopher-physician and held that doctors must also be philosophers, a claim to which he even devoted a special treatise (Quod optimus medicus sit quoque philosophus).Footnote ³⁴ In Galen's works, “philosophy and medicine are constantly conjoined.”Footnote ³⁵ Galen sought to make his thought conform to Aristotelian norms in several respects, although many other strands of contemporary philosophical thought are prominent in his works.Footnote ³⁶

But Galen's image of himself did not enjoy the unanimous endorsement of the later philosophical tradition.Footnote ³⁷ Far from it. There was a significant tradition, mainly Arabic, of Galen criticism. Three strands can be distinguished. One of them was philosophical: a long line of philosophers looked down on Galen as a “mere physician.” (According to a tradition accepted by Arabic writers but which may be a mere legend, this dismissal goes back to Alexander of Aphrodisias.Footnote ³⁸) The gist of this view is fleshed out by al-Fārābī.Footnote ³⁹ The purpose of philosophy is to determine the perpetual and unchanging essences of beings, through a classification by genus and species. Medicine, by contrast, does not focus on essences, but on fleeting bodily “accidents,” which it seeks to preserve (in the case of health) or to modify (in the case of illness). In other words, medicine deals with particulars and reasons from experience, whereas science is concerned with universals and requires apodictic proofs, as laid down in the Posterior Analytics.Footnote ⁴⁰ By criticizing Galen from an Aristotelian stance, al-Fārābī sought to establish the primacy of philosophy over medicine.Footnote ⁴¹ From an Aristotelian perspective, it is difficult to assign medicine a secure place in the system of the sciences.Footnote ⁴² Much is at stake here: only intellection of essences contributes to the eternal felicity of one's soul. Somewhat paradoxically, this critique was often voiced by philosophers who were also professional physicians: al-Kindī, al-Rāzī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Bāğğa, Ibn Ṭufayl, Ibn Rušd, Maimonides, and ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī, among others. These physician-philosophers viewed Hippocratic-Galenic medicine from the vantage point of falsafa and its notion of science and looked down on philosophical writings by individuals who were “only doctors.”Footnote ⁴³

A second strand of the criticism of Galen was also Aristotelian. It consisted of more specific grievances, related to various biological and psychological details on which Galen contradicted Aristotle.Footnote ⁴⁴ A third and final strand consisted of strictly medical critiques, most of which have their point of departure in al-Rāzī's Doubts on Galen.Footnote ⁴⁵ In sum, then, although Galen remained the supreme medical authority, a number of physicians in the Arabic tradition, many of them also philosophers, wrote compositions taking him to task from a number of perspectives – philosophical, scientific, and medical.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is the context in which ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān wrote his commentary on the Tegni.Footnote ⁴⁷

Ibn Riḍwān (988–1061/8), an autodidact who came from very modest origins, was a practicing medical doctor who rose to become the personal attendant of the caliph al-Ḥākim (985–1021) and chief physician of Egypt.Footnote ⁴⁸ His horizons were wide: also an astronomer and astrologer, his commentary on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos includes a very detailed description of the supernova he observed in the year 1006. He was very fond of polemics and engaged in a virulent discussion with Ibn Buṭlān (c. 1038–1075), the renowned Nestorian Baghdad physician.Footnote ⁴⁹ Perhaps because he had no master who had endowed him with a commitment to a particular school of thought, he saw himself as standing with one foot in the medical tradition and the other in the tradition of Greco-Arabic falsafa. His works include numerous commentaries on Galen and other medical writers as well as commentaries on philosophical and scientific works, such as Aristotle's Physics, Ptolemy's Almagest and Tetrabiblos, and Porphyry's Isagoge, in addition to independent medical and philosophical treatises.Footnote ⁵⁰ Steinschneider, noting that he composed a work that described medicine as a way to acquire felicity – thereby making it a fully philosophical discipline – conjectured that Ibn Riḍwān's thought was connected to al-Fārābī's.Footnote ⁵¹ Ibn Riḍwān seems to have been familiar with Galen's Quod optimus medicus sit quoque philosophus (available in Arabic under the title Kitāb fī anna al-ṭabīb al-fāḍil faylasūf)Footnote ⁵² and in any case fully adhered to its view. He holds that only a physician who is also a philosopher deserves the title of a real physician (ṭabīb); the philosophically ignorant is a mere practitioner or quack (mutaṭabbib).Footnote ⁵³ He endeavors to reconcile what he considers to be the merely apparent incompatibilities between Aristotle and Galen on matters biological. Although he recognizes that “authorities” can err, he supposes that Aristotle's and Galen's views are both fundamentally correct and even composed a treatise (not extant) on the “Mediation between Aristotle and Galen.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In other cases of seeming contradictions between the two masters, he argues that they arise from readers' erroneous understanding.Footnote ⁵⁵ He explains away inconsistencies within Galen's works and contradictions between them and Aristotle's views.Footnote ⁵⁶ He also defends Galen against Rāzī's criticism.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ibn Riḍwān's philosophical notion of knowledge and his belief in the fundamental unity of the teachings of Aristotle and Galen underlie his commentary on the Tegni. Wishing to embed medicine within a philosophical framework (contrary to the strong tendency among his contemporary physicians to limit themselves to practical know-how), he offers a running commentary on Galen's text from the vantage point of the Aristotelian theory of science. Galen, we saw, intended the Tegni to be a sort of précis of his medical thought, one, moreover, that followed a strict logical order. ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān used this logical structure to present medicine as a discipline that satisfies the canons of the Aristotelian theory of science. This is already evident in the opening pages of the Tegni. We will offer a single example.

Galen, we recall, begins by presenting three ways of conducting a study: analysis, synthesis and the “dialysis (or decomposition) of the definition.” He goes on to explain that he will employ the last of these methods, because it is the only that can afford a comprehensive overview of the entire discipline and allow one to memorize its different parts. This is possible, however, only if the “analysis of the definition” proceeds from an “essential definition,”Footnote ⁵⁸ as distinguished from a definition simpliciter (“description”)Footnote ⁵⁹ that merely indicates the accidents attached to a thing.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ibn Riḍwān comments on this distinction by saying that “the ‘definition’ [i.e. essential definition] is that which posits specific differences, whereas the ‘description’ is that which distinguishes an object from another through inessential accidents.”Footnote ⁶¹ Galen then offers his definition of medicine as “the knowledge of health-related, disease-related, and neutral things”Footnote ⁶² and immediately proceeds to distinguish various meanings of this definition. But Ibn Riḍwān pauses to cast Galen's definition into a logical mold. He writes:

As if with a magic wand, Ibn Riḍwān's commentary on Galen's definition turned medicine into a science. First, Ibn Riḍwān lets us know that medicine proceeds on premises taken from natural science; i.e., it has a solid epistemological grounding. Second, medicine has an essence, so that its study provides a knowledge of essences.Footnote ⁶⁴ The knowledge about patients and their healthy or diseased bodies is transient and ephemeral, but medicine is a science of eternal entities. Thus, according to Ibn Riḍwān, medicine satisfies Aristotle's criteria for a scientific theory: as already noted (p. 3), he identifies Galen's “analysis” and “synthesis” with the Aristotelian demonstratio quia and demonstratio propter quid.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ipso facto, medicine acquires philosophical dignity and is worthy of study by philosophers. It can help the intellect pass from potentiality to actuality and ensure the eternal felicity of the doctor's rational soul. This is why Ibn Riḍwān reacted against the tendency of physicians of his day to make do with purely practical manuals of medicine, to the exclusion of more theoretical works.Footnote ⁶⁶ With Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, we now realize, the Tegni became one of the most “Aristotelian” and philosophical medical texts, a construal that allowed it to become the object of innumerable Scholastic commentaries,Footnote ⁶⁷ read not only by physicians but also by scholars.Footnote ⁶⁸

THE HEBREW RECEPTION OF THE TEGNI I: DOEG THE EDOMITE

“Doeg the Edomite” is the nom de plume of an anonymous repentant Jewish convert who executed 24 Latin-into-Hebrew translations of medical works in Provence in 1197–1199, for which feat he deserves the epithet “the father of the Latin-into-Hebrew translations.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Doeg was abreast of recent developments in Latin medicine (but unfamiliar with Arabic learning); in his selection of works he followed almost entirely the Salerno canon. It is thus no wonder that the works he translated include all 6 components of the Ars medicinae, including the Isagoge followed by the Tegni. Doeg wrote a preface to the entire corpus of his translations, which was discovered and published by Steinschneider.Footnote ⁷⁰ The first two translations listed by Doeg are (the Latin versions of) Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq's Isagoge and Galen's Tegni:

In Doeg's time, the Ars medicinae still included the translatio antiqua, not Gerard of Cremona's translatio arabica accompanied by Ibn Riḍwān's commentary.Footnote ⁷³ Thus, although Doeg's translation has not come down to us, it can be confidently stated that it is this version, which does not include the Commentarium Haly, that Doeg translated.

The fact that the Tegni was translated by Doeg is a natural consequence of its having been part of the canonical Ars medicinae and of its eminent status in twelfth-century Provençal Latin medicine. There is little we can say about the reception of this Hebrew translation. It seems to have had a short life; no copies are extant and no quotations from it have been identified. This is not surprising. Samuel Ibn Tibbon completed his own translation (to be discussed below) in 1199: it was made from Arabic and included ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān's commentary. Like all of Samuel's scholarly productions, it was a faithful Hebrew mirror of the underlying Arabic text: each lemma of the Galenic text of the Tegni is followed by Ibn Riḍwān's corresponding commentary. There are good reasons to think that this version quickly supplanted Doeg's, to which it was superior on several accounts. To begin with, the new translation, including Ibn Riḍwān's sophisticated commentary, contained much additional material and was thus much more useful than Doeg's. Moreover, the Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona (it too included Ibn Riḍwān's commentary) was not widely available to Christian physicians until the middle of the thirteenth century; hence Ibn Tibbon's version presumably gave its Jewish readers a “competitive edge” over their confreres. Later, in the second half of the century, when Gerard's version began to circulate widely, Ibn Tibbon's version was the only one that allowed Jewish physicians to acquaint themselves with this central medical textbook. Last but not least, although we cannot compare Doeg's (lost) translation with Ibn Tibbon's, we can state with confidence that the latter was superior to former. Consider why.

The massive introduction of Arabic science and medicine into Jewish Provence began in the middle of the twelfth century. It was the especial province of the Tibbonids, who led the Arabic-into-Hebrew translation movement and introduced exacting norms for Hebrew scientific translations that cast a shadow over earlier and contemporary translations. Moreover, many of Doeg's translations were translations from Latin of works that were themselves translations from Arabic, made by Constantine the African, and which were often much abbreviated (as noticed already in the twelfth century), at times to a point of jeopardizing their utility for the physician.Footnote ⁷⁴ By contrast, the Tibbonids and other scholars of Andalusian origin could translate the same works directly from the originals. Thus, a new and much superior medical corpus saw the light, independent of that from Salerno, which was transferred into Hebrew mainly by Doeg. All these circumstances presumably contributed to the rapid replacement of some of Doeg's versions.

We are fortunate to have palpable evidence for this claim. Moses Ibn Tibbon, Samuel's son, himself a very industrious translator, translated a number of medical works from Arabic into Hebrew, including (in 1259) the Zād al-musāfir by Ibn al-Jazzār (c. 895–979), better known under its Latin title Viaticum. This work, too, had been translated by Doeg, again from a Latin version by Constantine the African. Moses was aware of Doeg's translation and justifies his decision to retranslate the work as follows:

Moses Ibn Tibbon, we see, compared Doeg's translation of Zād al-musāfir with the Arabic original and found that it was imprecise and abbreviated (because his Latin Vorlage was).Footnote ⁷⁶ He points out that Doeg's extensive use of technical terms in “the tongue of the Gentiles” makes the work useless to some readers – presumably émigrés from al-Andalus who were not fluent in the Romance vernacular.Footnote ⁷⁷ We surmise that similar considerations contributed to the rapid replacement of Doeg's translation of the Tegni by the more precise translation of a superior text done directly from Arabic by Samuel Ibn Tibbon. All the more so because the latter included Ibn Riḍwān's prestigious commentary.

Doeg included the Tegni among his translations because of that work's prominent place in Latin medicine in late twelfth-century Provence as a part of the Ars medicinae canon. The rapid disappearance of Doeg's version does not imply that Galen's work found no reception, but, on the contrary, that it was read in another and better translation.

THE HEBREW RECEPTION OF THE TEGNI II: SAMUEL IBN TIBBON

The Arabic-into-Hebrew translation of Galen's Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary is found in six complete manuscripts and three partial manuscripts (two other manuscripts contain short fragments).Footnote ⁷⁸ The name of the entire work (Galen's work and Ibn Riḍwān's commentary) is always given as Melaḵah qeṭanah (= Small Art, henceforth: MQ), a literal translation of the Arabic title (al-ṣināʿa al-ṣaġīra). The colophons of two of the extant manuscripts of MQ ascribe the translation to Samuel Ibn Tibbon; one of them states that it was completed on Friday, 10 Elul [4]959 (September 3, 1199), in Béziers.Footnote ⁷⁹ Steinschneider accepted this attribution, noting that the data in the colophon are consistent with what we know about Samuel's life. He noted further that this was the first Arabic-into-Hebrew translation of a work by a Muslim writer.Footnote ⁸⁰ Subsequent scholars accepted this attribution unquestionably. Beginning in 2005, however, James T. Robinson has repeatedly raised doubts about this ascription and included the translation of the Tegni among Samuel's “spurious and doubtful” translations.Footnote ⁸¹ In our view, Robinson's (single) argument for his claim is invalid; on the contrary, numerous indications seem to confirm the attribution of the translation to Samuel Ibn Tibbon. The relevant evidence is discussed in detail in Freudenthal's paper in this issue of ASP (see n. 61). Here we assume the results of that inquiry and consider how this translation fits into Samuel's intellectual framework. One needs to be extremely motivated to translate a work whose Hebrew version exceeds 60,000 words. We should ask why Samuel chose this work for his very first translation. None of the extant manuscripts of MQ carries a translator's preface describing the book's merits or explaining the translator's motives.Footnote ⁸² Therefore, only a conjectural answer can be put forward, based on situating the translation in the context of Samuel's intellectual evolution.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon was active in two intellectual traditions: medicine came first, chronologically, followed by science, philosophy, and religious thought. Samuel received a medical education in his youth, probably from his father, Judah Ibn Tibbon, a physician himself.Footnote ⁸³ In his famous “Admonition” (or “moral testament”), Judah reminds his son: “You well know what Hippocrates has said […],” and Hippocrates' first aphorism follows. This may be an allusion to a common discussion of this text.Footnote ⁸⁴ Samuel certainly also practiced as a physician. Judah addresses his son as follows: “Stay not thy hand when I have left thee, but [continue to] devote thyself to the study of the Torah and the science of medicine.” Alluding to Samuel's (medical) “art” (melaḵteḵa), Judah notes with regret that after his marriage Samuel ceased to practice it “day and night,” as he had when he was single. He goes on to advise him about medical ethics – “though you takest fees from the rich, heal the poor gratuitously” – and on his medical practice: “Examine regularly, once a week, thy drugs and medical herbs, and do not employ an ingredient whose properties are unknown to you.” Judah reminds his son that he had not always followed his advice in medical matters: obviously Samuel practiced medicine, although not exactly according to his father's desires. And referring to Samuel's own ailments and those of his sons, Judah addresses him as one physician to a colleague. When he gives his son fatherly dietary advice he again alludes to his status as a physician: “All know that thou art periodically sick because of thy injurious diet,” and adds, “there is no more disgraceful object than a sick physician.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In addition, as Robinson noticed, Meir Halevi Abulafia (c. 1170–1244) addressed a letter to “Samuel Ibn Tibbon the Physician”;Footnote ⁸⁶ and one manuscript of the Hebrew translation of the Tegni ascribes it explicitly to “the physician R. Samuel son of R. Judah son of Saul Ben Tibbon.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Two (undated) medical prescriptions ascribed to Samuel are extant; one of them epitomizes his image: החכם הפילוסוף הרופא המובהק ר'שמואל אבן תיבון (“the savant, the philosopher, the distinguished physician, R. Samuel Ibn Tibbon”).Footnote ⁸⁸ The late R. Joseph Qafaḥ even suggested that Samuel Ibn Tibbon, being a physician by profession, lacked the command of the Arabic philosophical idiom that would have been necessary for translating Maimonides' Guide appropriately.Footnote ⁸⁹ Various allusions to medical ideas can be identified in Samuel's commentary on Ecclesiastes.Footnote ⁹⁰ So there can be no doubt that, at least in early adulthood, Samuel Ibn Tibbon was a renowned medical practitioner.Footnote ⁹¹

We have no evidence that Samuel practiced medicine in his later life; it would seem that he gradually shifted attention to his literary activity as a translator and scholar. Thus the translation of MQ (1199) is followed in quick succession by his Maimonidean translations, including the commentary on Mishnah Avot in 1202; the “Treatise on Resurrection” circa 1203–1205; the first version of the Guide of the Perplexed in 1204 (revised in 1213).Footnote ⁹² In the last two decades of his life Samuel turned to original compositions: in 1213 he completed the dense treatise Perush ha-millim ha-zarot (= Explanation of unfamiliar terms), which he appended to his translation of the Guide. Footnote ⁹³ Next (between 1213 and 1221), he wrote his commentary on Ecclesiastes. Above all, he was absorbed by his cosmogonical speculations, which led him to translate the Arabic version of Aristotle's Meteorology (1210) and compose his own original and bold Ma'amar yiqqawu ha-mayim, completed around 1231, shortly before his death.Footnote ⁹⁴ There thus seems to have been a deflection in Samuel Ibn Tibbon's intellectual itinerary: he began his professional life as a physician and only later became a translator and finally an author. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that, in the “Admonition,” Judah Ibn Tibbon, thought to have died shortly after 1190, repeatedly refers to Samuel's current activity as a physician and alludes to a possible career in translation as a future possibility only.Footnote ⁹⁵

The shift from medicine to philosophy and natural science was at least to some extent catalyzed by external circumstances. The epistolary exchanges between the sages of Provence, led by R. Jonathan of Lunel, and Maimonides began in the mid-1190s. The contact was initiated when the Provençal sages asked Maimonides questions relating to the validity of astrology, to which the latter replied between September 1193 and September 1195.Footnote ⁹⁶ In the following few years they wrote to Maimonides repeatedly, with queries concerning his Mishneh Torah and a request for a copy of the Guide, preferably in Hebrew. Maimonides replied tardily, but finally sent them (about 1197) the first two parts of the Guide in Arabic. For a translation of this text they could not read they turned to Samuel – but not only because he was his father's son. In a letter to Maimonides they explained their choice: “The Creator has granted us with a clever son, learned in all the sciences, whom his father, the rabbi, has instructed in [lit. made literate, limmedo sefer] [and taught] the Arabic language, son of the wondrous scholar, the excellent physician, Rabbi Judah Ibn Tibbon the Spaniard, who brought us benefit and instructed us and taught us out of the books of wisdom by translating for us [a list of Judah's translations follows]. Before the light of Eli [i.e. Judah Ibn Tibbon] was extinguished, the sun of Samuel of Ramot [= Samuel Ibn Tibbon] shone.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Samuel sent Maimonides questions concerning the translation of the Guide, to which the latter replied in a letter dated 8 Tishri 4959 (= September 30, 1199).Footnote ⁹⁸ This concatenation of events allows us to observe that Samuel set out to translate the Tegni (completed 3 September 1199) more or less at the same time as he was getting involved in translating Maimonides, notably the Guide, and, more generally, becoming a translator of scientific and philosophical works. At that time, his reputation as a learned man was already established – his “sun” had shone in the sky of Provence.

Samuel, we see, revised his intellectual agenda, probably during the fourth decade of his life: after a period of practicing medicine, he moved on to devote himself to Arabic-into-Hebrew translations and to scientific research. This change was gradual and may have been accidental rather than planned: the (flattering) request by the sages of Lunel to translate Maimonides' writings, followed by Samuel's personal exchanges with Maimonides, who treated him respectfully as a fellow-philosopher, presumably attracted Samuel to the vocation of translator of philosophical works (to which he applied himself with great scholarly rigorFootnote ⁹⁹), after which he gradually dropped his medical practice. His translation of the Guide in turn led Samuel to engage in inquiries into cosmogonical issues and become a scientist and philosopher in his own right.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Samuel's reorientation was probably smooth and easy. It was presumably no strain for the son of the “father of the translators” to become a translator himself, as his father had anticipated (supra, p. 21, near n. 95). It hardly needs to be said that from his youth Samuel was no stranger to philosophy: his father played a pivotal role in introducing Jewish religious philosophical thought into Provence. He hired a tutor in the “external sciences” for Samuel and encouraged him to study the rules of intercalation (which requires at least the rudiments of astronomy).Footnote ¹⁰¹ It can therefore be assumed with a fair amount of confidence that Samuel, like his father, was knowledgeable in philosophy even while he still practiced medicine. Socially, too, the transition was easy: as noted earlier, the hybrid social role of the philosopher-cum-physician was well entrenched in the Arabic cultural tradition to which Samuel Ibn Tibbon belonged. In sum, for Samuel, turning from the career (or social role) of physician to that of translator and author of philosophical and scientific works did not signify a rupture in his life, but rather a smooth change of orientation.

We should now ask: why the Tegni of all possible medical texts? We do not have to seek far for an answer. We know from Doeg the Edomite that in the last decades of the twelfth century Jewish physicians in the Midi were in great need of the texts of the Hippocratic-Galenic medical tradition. As a consequence of the introduction of Salernitan medicine to Provence in the second half of the twelfth century, Latin medicine was becoming “bookish”; Christian physicians had a growing medical literature at their disposal. Their prestige rose and they attracted Jewish patients. Doeg explains that it was this situation that moved him to translate a sizable part of the corpus of Salernitan medical works into Hebrew: acquiring the same authoritative knowledge as their Gentile counterparts would enable the Jewish doctors to regain the confidence of their Jewish clientele.Footnote ¹⁰² Samuel himself was obviously not affected by this external pressure: he was educated in the Arabic tradition and studied the medical literature in Arabic. But he was surely aware of the problem that faced the native Provençal Jewish doctors who did not know Arabic (or Latin); some of them may even have approached him for translations of medical works. Let us now imagine Samuel Ibn Tibbon, after he had resolved to translate a medical work from Arabic into Hebrew, contemplating the books in his armari,Footnote ¹⁰³ asking himself which of them he should begin with. Given his education and intellectual preferences, Galen's Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary was a reasonable and almost inescapable choice. It was a general overview of Galen's medicine and the best way to introduce the neophyte reader to the Galenic system. Moreover, as noted, the Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary was known and esteemed in Andalusia, as shown by its inclusion among the medical texts translated by Gerard of Cremona. The cultural preferences of the Tibbonids, including Samuel, were to a great extent Andalusian, too, so that Gerard's and Samuel's choice follow from analogous considerations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is likely that Samuel was also aware of the high standing of Tegni (as yet without Ibn Riḍwān's commentary) in Latin medicine as part of the Ars medicinae, which had been the backbone of medical education for centuries. In Provence, Jewish and Gentile physicians often mingled; the numerous le‘azim of medical terms throughout Samuel's Hebrew version of MQ attest to Samuel's intensive oral contact (in the vernacular) with non-Jewish doctors.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Nor is it excluded (although this must remain mere speculation) that Samuel saw the translation of Doeg the Edomite or heard of its existence and that this translation, which he would have considered unsatisfactory (as would his son six decades later), challenged him to produce a better translation of a more complete text. In any event, the simultaneity of Doeg's and Samuel's translations is a result of the fact that Galen's Tegni was a central medical work in the closing years of the twelfth century, prestigious enough in the Arabic and Latin cultures to attract two Hebrew translators.

But there is more to it. Galen's Tegni, especially with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, was also one of the more Aristotelian medical treatises. The logical-philosophical dimension of the work presumably added to its attraction for Samuel. As noted, in the late 1190s Samuel shifted the center of his interest from medicine to philosophy and science. In this context, the Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary was attractive to the budding philosopher on account of its philosophical dimension as well: it grounded the claim that medical science satisfied the exigent norms of Aristotelian epistemology and was thus a worthy object of study for philosophers. The Tegni, the prestigious and concise statement of Galenic medicine required by the Jewish doctors, would have been good enough. But with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary it acquired a philosophical status and was particularly alluring for Samuel on his way to philosophy and science as a profession. Inasmuch as this work straddled medicine and philosophy, it was the best fit for Samuel's “career plan” at this time. Further, we know that Samuel Ibn Tibbon taught classes at which scientific works were read.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Given the theoretical character of the Tegni with its commentary, it seems possible that Samuel judged that the Hebrew version of this text would be appropriate for his students.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon, we thus suggest, undertook the translation of Galen's Tegni as a result of the confluence of several factors. His family background “predestined” him to become a translator. As a physician it was natural for him to begin his translation activity with a medical work used in both the Arabic and the Latin cultures, and all the more so because he could include Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, as yet unknown among the Latins. Jewish doctors needed Hebrew versions of medical texts. The Tegni was a canonic work, suited to introduce Jewish readers to a new body of knowledge, and thus a high priority on the list of possible works for translation. Last but not least, with the addition of Ibn Riḍwān's commentary the Tegni acquired an additional, philosophical dimension that made it particularly appealing to Samuel Ibn Tibbon and, more generally, to the nascent community of Hebrew philosophy.