| Summary: | Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the books that has formed and shaped much of the ethical discussion in medieval Jewish philosophy. The Ethics deeply influenced Maimonides and his followers in the 13th century; however, it was not until the 14th century that Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was translated into Hebrew as an authoritative text.
The translator of Averroes' Middle Commentary managed to publish a second edition, and editing and commentaries added to that composition spawned further independent works. Among them is the Anonymous Hebrew Supercommentary on Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics based on the Sententia Libri Ethicorum, and the Latin commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Thomas Aquinas.
At the beginning of the 15th century, Rabbi Don Meir Alguades, chief rabbi of Castile and court physician to Henry III, translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Hebrew, this time directly from Grosseteste's Latin translations. Alguades' unique style subjected Aristotle's book to a process of the "Judaization," which can be seen in the insertion of verse fragments from the Bible and other canonical Jewish sources into the Aristotelian text. Alguades' translation had tremendous influence on Jewish thought during the hundred years following its publication. Some fifty years after Alguades' first complete translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to Hebrew, Joseph ben Shem-T&dotbelow;ob Ibn Shem-Ṭob (d. 1460) composed what he described as the first original Hebrew commentary of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
The uniqueness of this specific commentary is related to two factors: a. The author's extensive use of Scholastic material, most notably the Latin commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by Thomas Aquinas known as the Sententia Libri Ethicorum; b. the way in which Joseph b. Shem-Ṭob deepens the process of "Judaizing" Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. As part of this trend, Joseph b. Shem-Ṭob relies on Alguades' translation and utilizes it as a basis for his "Judaization," while at the same time deepening and expanding the influence of Alguades' translation and its ability to constitute a basis for the renewal of Jewish ethics in response to the challenges of the time.
This dissertation will explicate the new synthesis that Rabbi Joseph introduces into the complex relations between religion, ethics and philosophy, and the debt of Jewish philosophy to scholastic literature, an area that is often neglected even in general studies of the cultural relations between Jews and Christians in the late Middle Ages.
Original material from the following works will be appended: (1) Anonymous Supercommentary on Averroes's Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; (2) Preliminary Edition of Alguades' Hebrew translation of the Nicomachean Ethics; and (3) Joseph b. Shem-Ṭob's Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics.
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