128 CHAPTER FIVE
Davidson’s claim that this treatise was misattributed to Maimonides met
(as Davidson predicted) with scholarly re sistance, based mostly on internal
evidence and on the manuscript evidence.^19 The information provided by
Ibn al- Qifti was not brought to bear in this context, but if the suggestion
made here is accepted, Ibn al- Qifti may be our only contemporary source
to mention Maimonides’ authorship of an early work on logic.
There can be no doubt, of course, that the study of the Talmud was
Maimonides’ bread and butter (or, as Maimonides would put it, bread
and meat). But Davidson’s narrow defi nition of Maimonides as “a Tal-
mudic student” predetermines his image of what Maimonides could or
could not have written. It also creates a misconceived, compartmental-
ized view of medieval thought and scholarship. Contrary to Davidson’s
view, it was not unusual for a particularly bright teenager to be con-
sulted by people of rank, in theoretical as well as in practical matters;^20
and, in what pertains to philosophy or science, Muslims did not think
twice of commissioning works from non- Muslims. Furthermore, if the
suggestion offered above is accepted, this treatise was not commissioned
from Maimonides, but rather prepared as a digest of a work commis-
sioned from another person. Such a digest would be, by all accounts,
suitable for the work of a young, albeit advanced student.
Ibn al- Qifti, whose text was not available to Derenburg and Steinsch-
neider, seems to corroborate the hunch of these two remarkable scholars,
that the Treatise on Logic was a youthful work of Maimonides. As an
introductory work, the treatise was not meant to be either innovative or
comprehensive, but rather a compilation of elementary concepts. In some
of the manuscripts of its Hebrew translation, its title is preserved as A
Treatise on Some Logical Terms (qetsat millot ha- higayyon).^21 Ibn al- Qifti‘s
terse reference seems to refl ect this version of the title, saying that Mai-
monides composed or compiled [a work] on some elements of logic (shadda
ashya min al- mantiqiyyat).
In addition to mathematics and logic, Maimonides also studied medi-
cine. Two leading historians of medicine were in the position to have fi rst-
hand information about him: Ibn al- Qifti (d. 1248) was a very close friend of
Maimonides’ disciple, Joseph Ibn Shimon; and Ibn Abi Usaybia (d. 1270)
was a colleague of Abraham, Maimonides’s only son, at the Nasiri hospital
(^19) See Davidson, Moses Maimonides, 313. On the manuscript evidence, which on the whole
does not support Davidson’s claim, see Hasnawi, “Réfl exions sur la terminologie logique de
Maïmonide et son contexte farabien,” 69– 78.
(^20) Avicenna practiced medicine when he was barely sixteen; see D. Gutas, Avicenna and the
Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden,
1988), 27.
(^21) Steinschneider,Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters, 434 and notes there.