Guía de Perplejos — Maimonides

Introduction to the "Dalālat al-ḥā’irīn" or Guide for the Perplexed

Issue 01 — Fall 2019 — Session 02 — Microliteratures: In the Margins of the Law
By Jesús R. Velasco | Published on September 11, 2019

Moshé ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, also called by his acronym RaMbaM (Rabbi Moshé ben Maimon) started writing his "Dalālat al-ḥā’irīn" or "Guide for the perplexed" for his pupil, Josef ben Judah, who had left Fustat for Aleppo, in 1190. Maimonides wrote his work in Classical Arabic, in Hebrew script (Judeo-Arabic). He composed the work in three parts that he sent to his pupil as installments. In 1200, he reorganized his drafts and produced a definitive version of the treatise, which was immediately translated in Hebrew, under the title of "Moreh Nevukhim" by Samuel Ibn Tibbon, from Lunel, in southern France, (completed in 1204). Iberian poet and translator, Judah al-Harizi (d. ca. 1230) also composed a translation of the "Guide" --the latter was the model for the Spanish translation of 1419. There were latin translations of the work during the 13th century, and the work was known and studied in some universities.

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We will be focusing on Maimonides’s dedication and introduction to his own work (until page 65 of the suggested edition). The dedication establishes the main reason and the conditions of possibility of the work itself, while the introduction lays out the main concepts that will establish heuristic and hermeneutical rules, as well as the possible distribution and understanding of the work itself. The edition I am attaching is the following one:

Maimónides. Guía de perplejos. Ed. David Gonzalo Maeso. Madrid: Trotta, 2015.

You can also consult the following English translation, with a rich introduction and notes:

Maimonides. The Guide of the Perplexed. Ed. Shelomoh Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Pedro de Toledo produced a Spanish translation of the text in the fifteenth century, in 1419 (parts 1 and 2, translated in Zafra) and 1432 (part 3, translated in Sevilla), for the library and studium of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Lord of Zafra. It’s extant in one single manuscript now held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid (MSS/10289). Have a look at the first pages of the manuscript and the transcription. We will pay some attention to that during the seminar. I gave an idea about this text in my article “La producción del margen” (also attached as a pdf).

Guía de Per­plejos — Maimonides

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Guía de Perplejos — Maimonides