Maimonides in His World. Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker

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100 CHAPTER FOUR

in Maimonides’ environment, in al- Andalus as well as in North Africa.^80
A similar list appears in the Ghayat al-hakim, as well as in “The Epistles
of the Pure Brethren.”^81
Among the books mentioned in this context by Maimonides, al-
Filaha al- nabatiyya is the best known, and the only one that survived in
its entirety. This fact brought scholarly attention to focus on this work
and contributed to creating the impression that Maimonides attempts
to identify the Nabateans (a specifi c and identifi able nation) with the
Sabians. While Maimonides does describe this book as “the most im-
portant book about this subject,^82 he also emphasizes that he has re-
viewed all the books on the subject, or at least all material translated
into Arabic. He repeatedly cites the books he read and their infl uence
on the development of his thought. As noted by Pines,^83 it appears that
Maimonides believed that his written sources on the Nabateans were
reliable historical accounts. At the same time, it is also obvious that he
read this work as a phenomenological document, and not as a detailed
description of any par ticular nation. We may say, with Steinschneider,
that Maimonides identifi es as Sabian anything related to astrology.^84
For Maimonides, the boundaries of the Sabian millawere not determined
by ethnic, geo graphically defi ned identity, but rather by the astrological
literature.^85
It is thus relatively easy to identify the sources from which Maimo-
nides could have drawn the various components of his theory; the the-
ory itself, however, as a consolidated entirety, cannot be found in these
sources.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the Arab heresiographical or
philosophical sources available to Maimonides had attempted to draw
an inventory of Sabian literature, with the al-Filaha al- nabatiyya as its


(^80) On Hermetic literature preserved in the Cairo Genizah, see A. Eliyahu, “Genizah Frag-
ments from the Hermetic Literature,” Ginzei Kedem 1 (2005): 9– 29 [Hebrew]. As sug-
gested by Gregor Schwarb, the presence of these texts in Egyptian Christian- Arabic litera-
ture after Maimonides suggests that they were also available for Maimonides in Egypt (and
not just a literary bag he carried with him from al- Andalus); see G. Schwarb, “Die Rezep-
tion Maimonides’ in der christlich- arabischen Literatur,” Judaica 63 (2007): 24– 38.
(^81) SeeGhayat al-Hakim, 83 (Picatrix, 80), 179 (190), 339 (309), and 19, 190, 198, 242
(Picatrix, 187, 200, 201, 253); see also Rasail Ikhwan al- Safa, 4: 295.
(^82) Guide 3.29 (Dalala, 378:18; Pines, 518). On Maimonides’ use of this book, see, P. Fen-
ton, “Une source arabe du Guide de Maïmonide: L’agriculture nabatéenne d’Ibn Wahshi-
yya,” in Lévy and Rashed, eds., Maïmonide philosophe et savant, 303– 33.
(^83) Pines, “Translator’s Introduction,” cxxiii.
(^84) See Steinschneider, “Zur pseudepigraphischen Literatur, insbesondere der geheimen Wis-
senschaften des Mittelalters aus hebräischen und arabischen Quellen,” Wissenschaftlische
Blätter aus der Veitel Heine Ephraim’schen Lehranstalt (Beth Ha- Midrasch) in Berlin (Ber-
lin, 1862), 3: 3.
(^85) Cf. Stern, “The Fall and Rise of Myth in Ritual,” 190, 224.

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