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What with finishing my own book, I didn’t do nearly as much reading for pleasure as I would have liked. Here’s what I did (and didn’t) read in the year that was:

Most delicious alphabet soup of hardware: Feynman’s c-clamp, used to test o-ring resiliency as a member of the Rogers Commission, as described in his Why Do You Care What Other People Think?

It’s very different to listen to an audiobook without having first watched the TV episode based on it rather than the other way around: The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter, read by Kevin Whately

Expected Philip Roth. Got Joseph Roth instead: Jacobo el mutante by Mario Bellatín

Book I wish I  lived my life in such a way so as to be able to have written: Teaching Plato in Palestine by Carlos Fraenkel

Not a guidebook but I put in a ton of sticky notes as I read and then walked around Jerusalem with it all the same: Till We Have Built Jerusalem by Adina Hoffman

I have dragged a copy with me on every single flight to Madrid that I have taken since 2004, this year being no exception (three flights to Madrid), and still haven’t actually managed to read: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Two details about Finland that I found during my visit there to be surprisingly accurate: The close-knit-ness of the Jewish community, as illustrated in Behind God’s Back by Harri Nykanen; and the apparent predilection for hot pepper-flavored foods, as illustrated in The Core of the Sun by Johana Sinisalo

Art forger whose life and work make me want to go on a grand tour of Europe to see all the museums he duped: Reinholt Vasters, as profiled in Noah Charney’s The Art of Forgery

Book I started with high hopes but have been put off by the stultifying writing and therefore have no charming little tidbit with which to characterize it and, in fact, may not finish it in 2017: Tolkien and the Great War by John Gath

Favorite source of book recommendations: NPR’s Science Friday occasional science and sci-fi literature episodes

Sometimes you can have been staring at something completely obvious for nothing short of years without realizing it, and then all of a sudden it comes into very sharp focus. This just happened to me recently, with the copying date of a manuscript I’ve been working with since 2012 suddenly becoming apparent. To be fair, I’m not the first scholar to have worked with the manuscript, so I’m far from the first to have overlooked it. I was in very good company in not having noticed the date. But I also like being the one who noticed that it was there. This blog post, then, is sort of a preview of a ḥiddush, a new discovery, that will be published in my book early next year.

The colophon of Bodleian MS Mich. 50.3 begins with the phrase: “This was completed — praise the lord God! — by the hand of Yoav.” It then has a funny little abbreviation, the Hebrew letters aleph-yud-mem-nun.

With the help of the dictionary of acronyms, I had already identified the letters as an abbreviation for the biblical phrase: אנא יי מלטה נפשי, which comes from Psalm 116. But it kept nagging at me. Scribes will often cite biblical verses in their colophons, but this one is a little weird and a little obscure. It’s not what I would expect to find in a colophon. And so I kept coming back to it, opening up the image file and staring at the manuscript page on my computer screen. And finally, suddenly, it occurred to me that this phrase might be a chronogram, an abbreviation that indicates a date through the numerical values of the letters. I suspected that it wasn’t — that if it were, someone else would have figured that out by now — but I figured I’d do the math anyway just in case.

The letters in this abbreviation add up like this: aleph = 1, yud = 10, mem =40, nun = 50. Chronograms often omit the leading 5 in the thousands place; so for example, this year is 5777, but it might be indicated with letters that add up to 777. If we restore an extra 5,000 to the numerical value of the chronogram in this colophon, we get 5101, which is the year that runs across 1340-41 of the common era. Up until now, the manuscript has  been dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries on the basis of the script, so reading the abbreviation as a chronogram actually comports totally with the paleographic evidence and so it is reasonable to date the copying of the manuscript to that year.

The strangeness of the phrase chosen to yield the chronogram still leaves me with a question, one I can only speculate about at this point. Psalm 116 comes from the hallel cycle of psalms, recited as part of the liturgy at the three major pilgrimage festivals, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Hallel is recited at other time, too, so it’s not as secure an identification, but I wonder whether choosing a phrase from hallel indicates that the scribe, Yo’av, finished copying the manuscript just before one of these holidays, that is, sometime between Sukkot (with the 15th of Tishrei falling on 7 October, 1340) and Shavot (with 6 Sivan falling on May 23, 1341).

So, in case it is useful for anyone to know, the upshot is this: The earliest and most complete surviving copy of Judah ibn Tibbon’s ethical will was copied 150 years after the author’s death and the text’s dissemination in 1190, in the fall of 1340 or the spring of 1341. Ultimately this is a question of the reception and readership of the ethical will and what particular value it might have had for the Jews of Provence and northern France at a particular nadir of Jewish-Christian relations and the end of the Maimonidean Controversie. Being able to date the manuscript gives us some context for the reception and transmission of what is a very Andalusi text to a  wider audience.

Following a truly bizarre exchange on Twitter a few months ago, the racial animus that inheres in the term moor has been on my mind. It’s not just social media, either: I’m teaching a Muslim Spain course this fall and using Richard Fletcher’s Moorish Spain as the main text, which meant that I had to devote part of my lecture on race in the Middle Ages to why we don’t use that term even though Fletcher does, and what it means for us to live with the book this semester and to try to do better than its author does when we write and talk about questions of race. It’s been percolating in the back of my head, then, and so it is perhaps not surprising that the role of moor in Spanish historiography and popular perception made its way into the talk I gave at the University of Minnesota this week. What follows is the introduction to that talk, which went on to discuss the ways in which Judah utilizes Arabic and Arabizing literary forms to advocate for the preservation of the literary culture of al-Andalus:

This statue that you are looking at, located in the Realejo district of the Spanish city of Granada, is known in the popular parlance as “el moro,” or, “the moor.” A colleague at the University of Granada assures me that the locals are fond of placing a cigarette between his lips (or just rolling up a piece of paper to look like one), and so he also called, colloquially, “el moro fumando,” that is, “the smoking moor.” When academics speak about Islamic Spain in, the convention is to avoid the term moor or moro, a word that manages to be, simultaneously, uselessly imprecise and full of racial animus. Originating from the Latin word MAURUS, the term moro never acquires a precise definition in the way that words like Ishmaelite or Saracen do; it also goes on to be imbued with a regular and fierce racial animus that makes it a term best avoided. Yet despite our scholarly understanding of this term, we have not yet adequately conveyed the racism of this term to the popular world, where it is still common currency: In movies and certain kinds of commentaries that valorize the Crusades to different political ends. In a Harry Potter Reddit forum devoted to determining whether Salazar Slytherin is actually a crypto-Moor. In the annual “Cristianos y Moros” festivals in Spain and, interestingly, in Mexico. And even in title the popular history that I am using as the textbook this semester in my freshman-level introductory course: Richard Fletcher’s Moorish Spain. And so when I look at this picture in an out-of-the-way plaza in the shadow of the Alhambra, I wonder how rank-and-file lay citizens understand the honor bestowed by the existence of the statue they call “the moor”: In memory of a noble savage, perhaps? As a part of their history that they will render as strange and other as possible after accepting, grudgingly, the impossibility of escaping it? Without fully knowing the depths of the racism encoded in such a moniker?

But to borrow a turn of phrase from yet another popular phenomenon, Sarah Koenig’s smash-hit first season of the podcast Serial: “The villain is not a moor, exactly.” Nor, in this case, is he even a villain. The statue popularly misidentified as “el moro” and plied generously with cigarettes was cast by the Granadine sculptor Miguel Moreno in 1988 to represent a fellow native son of Granada, the 12^th-century Jewish physician and translator Judah ibn Tibbon. As fine an Arabist as they come and a lover of Arabic philosophy, but not a Muslim and, in no possible ill-conceived way, a moor.

Yet the transformation of this figure from the father of the medieval Hebrew language that would go on to become the single philosophical lingua franca for Jews into a nameless moor, the butt of local pranksters’ jokes, is unknowingly a perfect reflection of his intellectual biography: From Judah to moor, this is the figure who, more than anyone, made Arabic philosophy available to a European Jewish audience that would never have known it otherwise. His legacy is a Jewish one, to be sure, but it is that much more the Arabic literary culture of al-Andalus that he brought with him into exile. When the locals of Granada make Judah a nameless moor, they give him, however backhandedly, his firmly deserved place in the pantheon of Arabic authors of al-Andalus. Even though he was a translator, even though he was Jewish, even though he wrote and translated into Hebrew, Judah is, for better or worse, a moor through and through. His literature is Arabic and his culture Arabized, and so, not-so-miraculously, he is lumped in with all of “them.” To be able to pass as a member of a different despised faith amongst the modern citizens of his native city, in effect, proves the legacy of his literary and cultural project. Judah was an Arabic writer and his culture of reading an Andalusi-Arabic one, a Franco-Jewish thinker no less a “moor” than Tariq ibn Ziyad or Averroes.

That Judah is memorialized in contemporary Granada as a nameless moor is a double insult, to be sure — a racializing and an erasure — but paradoxically it is also the surest proof of the success of his own endeavors. It seems a shame that he is run together with so many figures and subsumed under the anonymous heading “moor,” but here he is, remembered — however ham-fistedly and forgetfully — as he would have wanted to be: as an Arabic writer of al-Andalus.