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composition of the Septuagint text (by seventy rabbis for King ptolemy
ii philadelphus) and the skeptical, academic critique (that the Greek
translation of the Bible was made for Jews who no longer understood
hebrew). he explains that “the israelites do not accept the sanctity of
the Septuagint.” rather, “they disavow anything within it that contra-
dicts the torah that is in their hands. they consider anything that is
inconsistent to be a corruption [taḥrīf] that was introduced later into
the Septuagint for religious purposes.”^96 In this case, I would argue,
Moyal must have had the islamic polemical concept of taḥrīf in mind as
he wrote these words. he appears to be attempting to show that Jews
are aware of the problem of taḥrīf and eschew those texts that suffer
from it. this may well be a nod to Moyal’s Muslim readers, an effort
to portray Jews as sensitive to the matters that concern Muslims about
Judaism and at the same time to defend Judaism’s own scripture.
there is, however, another potential implication of this passage.
the Septuagint was, after all, accepted by the Orthodox Church. One
standard piece of evidence mustered to support the Islamic accusation
of biblical taḥrīf is the fact that there were three different versions
of the Bible: the Jews’ hebrew Bible, the Samaritans’ Bible, and the
christians’ “Greek Bible” (the Septuagint).^97 By associating taḥrīf with
the Septuagint, Moyal may be intimating that Muslims were correct
in discerning textual “corruption” in the Bible; Muslims were simply
mistaken in their assumption that the Jews’ hebrew Bible was not the
original. taḥrīf, in other words, may have occurred, but the results can
be found only in the Christians’ Bible, the Septuagint, that product of
corrupted hellenistic Judaism. If this reading of Moyal is correct, it
would be a case of simultaneous apologetics toward Islam and polemics
against Christianity. perhaps because of Moyal’s interest in gaining the
sympathy of Christian arab readers, this point is not made explicit.^98
Muslim polemicists’ charge of Jewish taḥrīf at times extended be-
yond corruption of the Bible. “Jewish oral tradition, seen as an unau-
thorized addition to Scripture,” explains hava Lazarus- Yafeh, “is also
considered to be part of this falsification.”^99 thus Moyal’s decision to
begin his at- Talmūd not only with Pirkei avot, which itself begins with
(^96) Ibid., 29.
(^97) Ibid. See hava Lazarus- Yafeh, “Taḥrīf,” in eI (^2).
(^98) the question of the accuracy and authenticity of Bible translations was on the
minds of fin de siècle arab intellectuals. there were two major arabic Bible transla-
tions undertaken in the nineteenth century: the first by protestants (1856– 1865) and
the second by catholics (1876– 1880). the respective merits and faults of each were de-
bated widely in arabic journals through the end of the nineteenth century. See Sehayik,
“Demut ha- yehudi bi- reʾi ʿitonut ʿarvit beyn ha- shanim 1858– 1908,” 98– 102.
(^99) Lazarus- Yafeh, “Taḥrīf.”