“FROM MOSES TO MOSES” 173
identifi ed it without his student’s help.^69 His sarcastic remark, however,
is very telling. In the Silencing Epistle Joseph rec ords a disputation he
had held with the Gaon regarding the witch of Ein Dor (2 Sam. 28). The
Gaon has compared the witch’s conjuring up the prophet Samuel to a
divination by mandal. In this divination technique a young child, looking
in a bright (usually liquid) surface, serves as the medium for conjuring up
the souls of the dead. When Joseph disdainfully asked whoever has seen
such mediums, the Gaon, unfazed, responded: “They can be found in
our place, in Baghdad (indana fi baghdad).” Maimonides’ sardonic ex-
pression “in their place, in Baghdad” seems to refer to this episode re-
corded by Joseph in his epistle.^70
Moreover, in his epistle, Joseph claims that the Gaon’s written text
repeated the arguments he had presented in the preceding oral disputa-
tion. It is therefore possible that Maimonides had assumed the Gaon’s
treatise to include these words, which in fact belonged only to the oral
disputation.
Technically, then, it seems that Maimonides’ immediate trigger for
writing his treatise was his student’s epistle and the quotations it con-
tained of the Gaon’s treatise. But the ties that connect Maimonides’ es-
say to his student’s are not just technical. It should be stressed at this
point that determining the order of composition of the three essays is
signifi cant not only for reasons of archival, chronological precision, but
as a key to their correct interpretation. The sequence of events presented
here suggests that the immediate reason for Maimonides’ composition
was not the Gaon’s homiletic treatise but rather the urge to respond to
his own chosen public, his disciple Joseph (just as the Gaon’s immediate
reason for writing was the wish to address his constituency, the digni-
taries of Baghdad). In reading Maimonides’ treatise we must therefore
(^69) My working hypothesis being here, as throughout this book, that Maimonides was an
avid reader, who took pains to remain abreast of contemporary scholarship in general and
philosophical scholarship in par ticular; cf. Langermann, “Samuel ben Eli’s Epistle on Res-
urrection,” 53 and 58. On Abu al- Barakat’s place in Islamic philosophy, see S. Pines,
“Etudes sur Awhad al- Zaman Abu’l-Barakat al- Baghdadi,” Revue des Etudes Juives 8
(1937): note 4.
(^70) Another example of this sort of veiled reference can be seen in Maimonides’ insistence
on his own style. In all his writings, he says, he attempts to be as brief as possible because
“our purpose is not to add volume to our books (takbir ahjam al- kutub;Epistles, 331;
Finkel,Treatise, 24). This declaration recalls the accusation of Joseph that the Gaon had
introduced into his essay some elements that serve only to add volume to his treatise (“li-
yukbirahajm al- maqala”; see Stroumsa, The Beginnings of the Maimonidean Controversy,
35). In this last example, however, one could argue that it is the student who echoes Mai-
monides’ wording rather than the other way around, whereas in the case of the mandal epi-
sode the primacy of Joseph’s epistle is unquestionable.