The Relation between the Extant Hebrew Versions of Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics

The Middle Commentary on the Physics ( = MCPh) did not survive in Arabic, but only in what Steven Harvey refers to as an “Arabic outline,” and its Hebrew translation is traditionally ascribed to two translators: Zeraḥiah b. Sheʾaltiel Ḥen, who translated the work in 1284 in Rome, and Kalonymos b. Kalonymos, who translated the work in 1316 in Arles. In the past, scholars have identified a certain affinity between the two versions, and ascribed it to the influence that Zeraḥiah’s translation had on Kalonymos. In my talk, I will suggest that Kalonymos was not merely influenced by Zeraḥiah while translating the commentary, but that his version is in fact a revision of Zeraḥiah’s Hebrew text. In order to support this, my talk will focus mainly on three manuscripts - JTS 2358, St Petersburg EVR I 424, and BnF héb 943 – which, I argue, contain a version which descends from an exemplar of an intermediary stage of the revision process. As further evidence of this process, I will point to Kalonymos’ employment of Zeraḥiah’s translation of Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption in the former’s translation of Averroes’s Middle Commentary on that work. I will conclude by suggesting a wider hypothesis concerning the relation between the literary output of the two translators.