“FROM MOSES TO MOSES” 171
won the discussion. Much later, however, upon returning to Baghdad
from one of his business travels, he discovered that the Gaon had pub-
lished his treatise, in which he repeated the arguments he had presented
in the oral debate. Joseph reacted by writing his Silencing Epistle, and by
writing to Maimonides to inform him of this development. The epistle
belongs to the genre of basic refutation in which lengthy paragraphs of
the opponent’s text are quoted and refuted.^63 Such works have an infor-
mative as well as a theological role, as they systematically present the
opponent’s claims. They tend, however, to be relatively unsophisticated,
since their structure is not in dependent but determined by that of the
refuted composition. In a protracted disputation, such works would
usually represent the fi rst stage, whereas later refutations of the same
opponent could afford to stray further afi eld from the refuted work.
This is indeed the case with Joseph’s epistle, which was apparently sent
to Maimonides immediately after it was written.^64 It presents quota-
tions from the Gaon’s text and endeavors to demonstrate Joseph’s aware-
ness of their absurdity as well as his indignation and his fi lial loyalty to
Maimonides.
Maimonides’ fi rst reaction, still in private correspondence, was an at-
tempt to calm his student down. He referred to his student’s missive, ex-
pressing surprise that Joseph saw the necessity to send to him the Gaon’s
treatise as a proof of the latter’s ignorance. For Maimonides this igno-
rance, typical of simple- minded preachers, required no proof.^65 He also
promised to compose a comprehensive treatise on the subject, and to
send the manuscript shortly to Joseph.^66 It is thus only after receiving his
student’s work, with the quotations from the Gaon’s treatise that it con-
tained, that he decided to react publicly, by dedicating an essay to the
subject.
This sequence of events suggests that Maimonides’ immediate reason
for writing his Treatise on Resurrection was not the Gaon’s treatise bear-
ing the same title, but rather Joseph’s epistle. This chronology is corrobo-
rated by the content of the text. Only a relatively short passage of Maimo-
nides’ treatise directly attacks the Gaon, and it does so rather mildly. Most
of the treatise is devoted to theoretical and exegetical problems related to
(^63) Such basic refutations often include in their titles either the words al-raddala... (liter-
ally: “A response to... ), or (as is the case of Joseph’s Silencing Epistle) belligerent words
indicating their polemical intention, or both. See, for example, AbuHusayn b. Uthman
al-Khayyat,Kitab al- Intisar wa’l-radd ala Ibn al- Rawandi al- mulhid (Le livre du triomphe
et de la réfutation d’Ibn al- Rawandi l’hérétique), ed. A. N. Nader (Beirut, 1957).
(^64) Joseph may have sent the Epistle to Maimonides shortly before making it public, but it
is also possible that the publication of the Epistle was parallel to the correspondence.
(^65) Epistles, 297, and see above, chap. 4, apud notes 160– 61.
(^66) Epistles, 298.