A Few Chapters from the Guide
century. In that form, it was available to St. Thomas Aquinas, whose thought, for example, bears the imprint of Maimonides. History dealt blow after blow to the health of Jewish thought around the Mediterranean. In the 12th century, the fanatical Almohad sect overran Muslim Spain, making the area barely livable for Jews. Maimonides himself fled to Egypt at that time, and exhorted his fellow Jews to escape as well. Later, after the Christian conquest of Spain, the Jews had to deal with “mob attacks and forced conversions,”1 which came to a violent head in 1391. By the early 15th century, however, “some kings and distinguished noblemen” began to feel a restless curiosity towards the philosophical and the occult; these Christians, in fact, comissioned translation after translation into Spanish of the great works of Jewish thought from the previous centuries. Many of the translators, in fact, were conversos, or New Christians, former Jews who still carried with them the knowledge of Hebrew. Under the rule of Juan II (1406-1454) in Castille and Alfonso V (1416-1458) in Aragon, Jewish thought again flourished, in close contact with the rising Christian intellectuals of the time. It was in this context that one converso, Pedro de Toledo, was commised to translate the Guide into Spanish. Of the three parts of the Guide, the first two were translated around 1419 in Zafra, and the third in Seville by 1432. Now, not much 1 All quotations from Moshe Lazar’s introduction to the published Spanish text.
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