Jewish Averroism and the Reception of Islamic Aristotelianism

Ibn Rushd, known in Latin and Hebrew tradition as Averroes (1126–1198), the Córdoban jurist, physician, and philosopher whose extensive commentaries on Aristotle earned him the medieval Latin epithet "The Commentator," exercised an influence on later medieval Jewish philosophy that arguably exceeded his direct influence within his own Islamic Andalusian milieu, where philosophical Aristotelianism came under increasing suspicion after his own temporary exile and condemnation around 1195 under the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur. Jewish scholars, chiefly in Provence and Christian Iberia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, systematically translated Averroes's major, middle, and short commentaries on Aristotle from Arabic into Hebrew, in a translation movement led above all by the Ibn Tibbon family — Samuel ibn Tibbon (c. 1150–1230), his son Moses ibn Tibbon, and later Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286–after 1328) — and by Jacob Anatoli (c. 1194–1256), court translator to Emperor Frederick II in Naples.