This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Xu Shanwei. It is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation by Clio Walker, based on Xu’s book and sources actually consulted, using a first-person guide’s voice. It is neither a new personal travelogue by the professor nor a chapter-by-chapter reproduction. Authorization does not imply his individual approval of every additional interpretation.

In the second half of the twelfth century, in the small town of Lunel in southern France, a physician wrote a long testament for his son.

One passage reads almost like a ledger. I have given you a large library, so you never need to borrow books. Other students have to run about looking for books and often never find them; you, thank God, lend and never borrow. Of many books you own two or three copies.

Then comes the complaint. But you let me down. You hide from all your books. You do not care to know them, not even their titles. If you saw your own books in someone else’s hands, you would not recognize them.

The father was Judah ibn Tibbon. The son who worried him was Samuel. Judah also told him to read the weekly portion of the Pentateuch in Arabic every week. It would build up his Arabic vocabulary, “and will be of advantage in translating, if thou shouldst feel inclined to translate.”

That son was the one who later turned Maimonides’ Arabic Guide of the Perplexed into Hebrew.

The last story ended by promising to look for the Jewish scholars on the other side of the Toledo translation table. Xu Shanwei writes that Western Jews made the largest contribution to the translation movement, and that most of these non-Christian translators left no names.

The further I looked, the clearer it became that this bridge did not lead only into Latin. It had a second lane, into Hebrew, and into studies and libraries that Latin readers never saw.

The Land Book of Barcelona

Begin with a man whose name did survive.

In the first half of the twelfth century Barcelona had a Jewish scholar named Abraham bar Hiyya. The Latins called him “Savasorda,” a title taken from an Arabic rank meaning roughly “head of the guard.” He held an official post in the city’s administration.

He wrote in Hebrew a Treatise on Measuring Areas and Volumes. One of its books explains how to divide triangular and four-sided fields into equal shares among partners or heirs. To write it he created, for the first time, a whole mathematical vocabulary in Hebrew.

He is said to have lamented that his fellow Jews in Provence knew neither Arabic science nor the Arabic language. He wrote his own books in Hebrew, and he helped others put books into Latin.

Xu Shanwei writes that the Italian scholar Plato of Tivoli and others came to Barcelona to translate, and that the local scholar bar Hiyya helped them turn many Arabic works into Latin. In 1145 Plato translated bar Hiyya’s own measuring book into Latin as the Liber embadorum, the Book of Areas. Modern scholars comparing the manuscripts have found that the Latin contains a proof missing from every Hebrew copy, and suggest that Plato may have consulted the author while he worked.

Xu adds that the book was the first to introduce Arabic trigonometry and methods of mensuration to Christian scholars, and that Fibonacci’s Practical Geometry clearly shows its influence. Current scholarship is more cautious. How much Fibonacci owed it is unclear; his main source seems to have been a different Arabic book on measurement.

Still, bar Hiyya’s name lasted. More than four hundred years later, in 1565, the Venetian scholar Francesco Barozzi copied the work by hand and wrote on its title page: The Book of Areas, composed in Hebrew by Savasorda the Jew, translated into Latin by Plato of Tivoli, cleansed of countless errors by Barozzi.

Galippus, the Mozarab in our last story, left his name only in one Englishman’s book. Bar Hiyya was luckier. He did not only read texts aloud for others. He wrote books of his own.

Two Names in Toledo

Back to Toledo.

Last time we read the preface to the Latin translation of Avicenna’s On the Soul. Who was the “Avendauth the Israelite” who read the Arabic aloud in the vernacular?

In 1954 the French scholar Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny proposed that he was the Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Daud. Recent research has added a good deal of support, and one scholar has called him the driving force behind Toledo’s Latin translations of Avicenna.

Ibn Daud was born around 1110 in Muslim southern Spain, perhaps in Córdoba. He says he was educated by his maternal uncle, a teacher and communal leader in Córdoba who died in 1126. In 1147 the Almohads from North Africa invaded al-Andalus, and many Jews fled north. Ibn Daud probably moved to Toledo some time after that.

Around 1160–61, in Toledo, he wrote two books. One was a work of philosophy in Arabic. The original is lost; it survives in two Hebrew translations from the late fourteenth century, as The Exalted Faith. The other was a history in Hebrew, The Book of Tradition, which became a classic of Hebrew literature.

At the start of the philosophical book he explains why he wrote it. Some beginners in philosophy, he says, cannot keep the lamps of philosophy and religion burning together: once the lamp of philosophy is lit, the lamp of religion goes out. He wanted to keep both alight.

If d’Alverny was right, the same man had two names. In a Latin preface he is an “Israelite” reading a text aloud for an archdeacon. In the Hebrew world he is the first thinker to bring Aristotle’s philosophy into Jewish thought systematically.

Latin readers saw only their own end of the bridge.

According to a Toledan writer of the early thirteenth century, ibn Daud died a martyr in Toledo around 1180.

From Granada to Lunel

Ibn Daud fled north to Toledo. Others went further, all the way to southern France.

Judah ibn Tibbon was one of them. Born in Granada around 1120, he left Spain in the middle of the twelfth century. Israel Abrahams, who edited and translated his testament, presumed that he was driven out by the same Almohad persecution that drove Maimonides from Córdoba. In 1160 the traveller Benjamin of Tudela passed through Lunel and found him practising medicine there.

Lunel was a small place, but a very lively centre of Jewish learning. Yet the Jews of Provence, unlike those of Spain, did not know Arabic. And the most important works of philosophy, grammar and science of those generations, including the books of Jewish scholars themselves, were mostly written in Arabic.

So Judah began to translate. Saadia, Ibn Janah, Ibn Gabirol, Bahya and Judah Halevi, Jewish authors who wrote in Arabic, came into Hebrew through his hands. His son later called him “the father of translators.”

Xu Shanwei counted the Western Jewish translators of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose names are known: thirty-eight in all. Twenty-one of them translated from Arabic into Hebrew, producing 133 works. The books on that road were meant mainly for Western Jews themselves. Xu also reckons that over those two centuries Jews made up about forty percent of all the translators.

Now back to the testament.

The Father’s Bookcases

The testament survives in a single manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It plainly was written more than once and added to over the years.

The father begins with what he has given. For these twelve years I have denied myself the ordinary pleasures and pastimes of men for your sake, and I still toil for your inheritance. Seeing that you were gifted, I travelled to the ends of the earth to fetch you a teacher of secular learning, and minded neither the cost nor the dangers of the road.

Then the son’s failings. Seven years and more ago you began to learn Arabic writing, and despite all my pleading you would not obey. He points to Samuel the Nagid of Granada, who rose to high office entirely through his Arabic pen.

The boy’s Hebrew hand was no better. The father paid his teacher thirty gold pieces a year. When he asked the teacher to teach the boy to write the letters, the teacher replied that one letter a year would be enough for him.

There is a sting in these lines, and they also sound exactly like a father anxious about his son. Abrahams called the tone one of “querulous affection.”

The finest passages are about books.

My son, make your books your companions. Let your cases and shelves be your gardens and pleasure grounds. Walk in their paradise, gather their fruit, pick their roses. When you grow tired, go from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow.

He tells his son how to keep a library. Check the Hebrew books at every new moon, the Arabic books every two months, the bound volumes every quarter. Put a written list in each compartment of the bookcase, so that a glance tells you which shelf holds the book you want. Keep the loose leaves tucked inside the volumes; they hold important things he collected and copied out. Do not destroy any writing or letter he leaves behind.

Lending had rules too. Never refuse a book to someone who cannot afford to buy one, but lend only to people who can be trusted to return it. Write a note before a book leaves the house, and when it comes back, draw your pen through the entry. At every Passover and every Tabernacles, call in all the books that are out on loan. Cover the bookcases with good rugs and keep them from damp and mice, for your books are your treasure.

To see his daughters married, he crossed the sea three times and pawned his own books.

A Letter Telling Him Not to Come

The son did not waste those books in the end.

Samuel ibn Tibbon was born in Lunel around 1165 and studied Arabic, philosophy and medicine. He cared far more for philosophy than for poetry.

In the 1190s he began translating Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides, another Jew who had left Spain, was then living in Egypt and serving the sultan as a physician. He had written the Guide in Arabic, which the Jews of Provence could not read.

When Samuel came to hard passages, he wrote to the author. In 1199 Maimonides sent a long reply.

The letter opens with praise for the father. Scholars from Granada had long told me of Judah’s great learning and the clarity of his Arabic and Hebrew, Maimonides writes, but I did not know he had left a son. Reading your letters, I was delighted and amazed: how could someone born among the “stammerers” master Arabic like this?

The Arabic his father had nagged him about for seven years had taken hold after all. Abrahams noticed it too: on this point the son did listen.

One passage is about translation. A translator who renders each word literally and clings to the word order of the original, Maimonides says, will run into great difficulty, and the result will be doubtful and corrupt. He should first grasp the sense completely and then say it clearly in the other language. That means changing the word order, using several words for one or one for several, adding words and taking them away.

Another passage is about himself. Samuel wanted to come to Egypt and ask his questions in person. Maimonides advised him not to risk the sea voyage; he would gain nothing by coming. Then he described his day.

I live in Fustat, and the sultan lives in Cairo. I must go to him every day, early in the morning. If he, or any of his children, or anyone in his harem is unwell, I dare not leave Cairo, and spend most of the day in the palace. As a rule I do not get back to Fustat until the afternoon, and by then I am almost dying of hunger. The antechambers are full of people, Jews and gentiles, nobles and commoners, judges and bailiffs, friends and enemies. I get down from my mount, wash my hands, and go out to ask the patients to bear with me while I eat a little, the only meal I take in twenty-four hours. Then I see patients and write prescriptions. People come and go until nightfall, sometimes until two hours and more into the night. I talk with them and prescribe lying down, from sheer fatigue, and when night falls I can scarcely speak. A fellow Jew can see me privately only on the Sabbath.

He says he wrote the letter hiding in a corner where no one would think to look for him, sometimes leaning against the wall, sometimes lying down, because he had grown old and weak.

Near the end he wrote: when you have finished the translation you have begun for our brethren, come, but do not hope to gain anything for your studies.

The Son Did It His Own Way

The interesting thing is that Samuel did not translate the way Maimonides told him to.

Scholars have found that although he consulted the author, he mostly ignored his advice and kept to the terms and methods his father had established. His translation is literal. It follows Arabic syntax and coins new Hebrew words on Arabic models. Style mattered less to him than exact meaning.

In 1204, in Arles, he finished the first version. That same year Maimonides died in Egypt.

Soon the poet Judah al-Harizi produced a rival translation in elegant biblical Hebrew, much easier to read. Samuel would not let it stand. He issued a revised version with a glossary explaining the strange new words in his translation, and in its preface pointed out that his rival did not understand philosophy. That glossary was the first major dictionary of philosophy in Hebrew.

For readability, Samuel lost. For influence, he won. For centuries afterwards, anyone writing philosophy in Hebrew used his method and his words.

He did go to Egypt in the end, twice, returning from Alexandria in 1210 and again in 1213. On the voyage home in 1210 he finished translating Aristotle’s Meteorology, the first work of Aristotle ever put into Hebrew. For that book he had also consulted manuscripts in Toledo and Barcelona.

Maimonides had told him not to risk the sea. He sailed to Egypt anyway, but by then the man who had told him not to come was gone.

The Son-in-Law Goes to Naples

Samuel’s son-in-law was Jacob Anatoli, born around 1194 in southern France, perhaps in Marseille. He studied mathematics and philosophy with his father-in-law. People around them thought the hours he spent with Samuel on mathematics and philosophy were a complete waste of time.

Anatoli preached on the Sabbath and explained Scripture through philosophy and allegory, which brought opposition. In 1231 he left Provence for Naples, where he served Emperor Frederick II as physician and translator.

The third story in this series described Frederick’s many-tongued court. Xu Shanwei’s table of translators includes a French Jew who worked for him in Naples, and Anatoli’s career fits that entry.

In Naples he translated into Hebrew Averroes’ middle commentaries on Aristotle’s logic: Porphyry’s Introduction and Aristotle’s Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics. He was the first to put Averroes’ commentaries into Hebrew. His colophon for these translations, dated March 1232, says the work was done to please Emperor Frederick, lover of learning, who supported him. He translated astronomy in the mornings and logic in the evenings. In 1235, in Naples, he finished Ptolemy’s Almagest.

The court also had a Christian scholar, Michael Scot, who had translated Aristotle and Averroes from Arabic into Latin. Anatoli later wrote a book of sermons, The Goad of the Students, in which he quotes Scot’s readings of Scripture some seventeen to twenty times. He calls him “the sage with whom I associated” and treats him as his second teacher after his father-in-law.

He expected objections, and dealt with them in his preface. Whatever this scholar taught, he says, he recorded in the scholar’s name, because he did not want to parade in borrowed clothes and win a name for learning. No one should criticize or despise him for quoting the man because he was not of our people. Things should be judged on their merits; it does not matter whether this man said them or someone else.

In Toledo, a Jewish scholar’s name was nearly swallowed by a Latin preface. In Naples, a Jewish scholar wrote a Christian’s name into his own Hebrew book, again and again.

Back into Latin

The Hebrew road seemed to lead only into Jewish libraries. It did not stop there.

Samuel translated three short treatises by Averroes and his son on how the human intellect joins the “active intellect,” the first works of Averroes to appear in Hebrew. Later someone put together a Latin version from his Hebrew.

Anatoli’s translation of Averroes’ logical commentaries came back too. More than three hundred years later Jacob Mantino translated the first three books from Anatoli’s Hebrew into Latin, and they were printed with other works of Averroes between 1550 and 1553.

By the fourth generation the books were flowing the other way. Judah’s great-grandson Jacob ben Makhir lived in Montpellier, and the Latins called him “Profatius.” He wrote in Hebrew a book on a new kind of quadrant, which was translated into Latin as early as 1299. The almanac he computed for Montpellier around 1300 also passed into the Latin world. According to scholars, Copernicus and Kepler both cited his astronomical work.

Xu Shanwei writes about him as well. In 1276 Robert, a Christian astronomer at Montpellier, made a new kind of quadrant. A little over ten years later Jacob made a more advanced one, and his book was translated into Latin at least three times.

Counting from Judah’s bookcases, more than a century had passed, and four generations.

Epilogue

Xu Shanwei quotes an American scholar: the Jews played such a large part in these translations that they could be called “the Nestorians of the West.” The Nestorians were the Eastern Christians who had once translated Greek books, from Greek or Syriac, into Arabic.

But much of the Jewish bridge cannot be seen. Half of it was built in Hebrew, which Latin readers could not read. The other half was built in Latin prefaces and title pages, where the names often changed shape: Savasorda, Avendauth, Profatius.

In his testament Judah ibn Tibbon told his son: when you lend a book, write it down; when it comes back, draw your pen through the entry.

Most of the books that crossed this bridge never reached the day their entry was struck out. They went from Arabic into Hebrew, and from Hebrew back into Latin, and stayed on the road.

Next time we follow Aristotle’s books into the years after they were banned.

Sources and editorial boundaries

1. Authorized base text: Xu Shanwei, Eastern Learning’s Westward Transmission and the Revival of Western Culture. Used: the passage on the international character of the translation movement (most non-Christian translators left no names; Western Jews contributed most); the passages on Jewish cultural centres moving from North Africa and Spain to southern France and Italy, and on Plato of Tivoli and others translating in Barcelona with Abraham bar Hiyya’s help; Table 2–9 and the following passage (38 named Jewish translators in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 21 of them from Arabic into Hebrew with 133 works; Jews about 40 percent of all translators and 29.3 percent of translations; Arabic-to-Hebrew work aimed mainly at Western Jews); the “Nestorians of the West” quotation; the passage on Robert’s 1276 quadrant and Jacob ben Makhir’s improved quadrant, translated into Latin at least three times; the passage on bar Hiyya’s practical geometry and its influence on Fibonacci; the translators’ table entry on a French Jew working for Frederick II in Naples; and the passage on Nestorian translation from Greek or Syriac into Arabic. Read in full. Material already used in stories 3, 4, 6, 9, 10 and 15 (working in pairs, Gerard’s helpers, Moses Sefardi, the Alfonsine Tables, Maimonides’ Regimen, Abraham ibn Ezra and the numerals, the division of labour in the On the Soul preface) is not repeated. 2. Israel Abrahams (ed. and tr.), Hebrew Ethical Wills, Part One (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1926), pp. 51–92, Judah ibn Tibbon’s “A Father’s Admonition,” Hebrew with English translation; Internet Archive scan text read in full (archive.org/details/hebrewethicalwil01unse). Used: the editor’s introduction (born Granada c. 1120; forced to leave Spain in the mid-twelfth century, the cause “may be presumed” to be the Almohad persecution; found by Benjamin of Tudela practising medicine at Lunel in 1160; “father of translators”; translator of Bahya, Judah Halevi, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Janah; single Bodleian manuscript, Neubauer 2219,3; signs of repeated revision; “querulous affection”; Samuel took the Arabic advice to heart and was complimented by Maimonides); and the passages of the testament on the library, the twelve years, the teacher of secular sciences, seven years of refusing Arabic writing, Samuel the Nagid, thirty gold pieces and “one letter a year,” the garden image, weekly Arabic reading “if thou shouldst feel inclined to translate,” crossing the sea three times and pledging his books, checking the books by new moon, two months and quarter, shelf lists and loose leaves, lending rules, rugs against damp and mice, the loan memorandum, and recalling loans at Passover and Tabernacles. The story paraphrases Abrahams’s English; it is not a direct translation from the Hebrew. 3. James T. Robinson, “Samuel Ibn Tibbon,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006, rev. March 2024), read in full. Used: Samuel c. 1165–1232, born in Lunel, “a small but very active rabbinic center”; his education; Judah c. 1120–1190 and his translations; the Guide begun in the 1190s, correspondence with Maimonides, first edition at Arles in 1204, revised edition with glossary in 1213; Maimonides’ “Letter on Translation” surviving only in Hebrew; Samuel “generally ignored the latter’s advice, and continued to follow the translation terminology and traditions of his father”; his literal method and calques; al-Harizi’s rival version and Samuel’s response; the glossary as the first major Hebrew philosophical lexicon; two trips to Alexandria (returning 1210 and 1213); the Meteorology finished on the voyage home in 1210, the first Hebrew Aristotle, with manuscripts consulted in Toledo and Barcelona; the three treatises on conjunction as the first Averroes in Hebrew and the Latin De animae beatitudine based on the Hebrew; Jacob Anatoli c. 1194–1256 as son-in-law and chief disciple; Jacob ben Makhir as the last major figure of the family. 4. Maimonides, Letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon (1199), tr. Leon D. Stitskin, Letters of Maimonides (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1983), pp. 130–36, as excerpted in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3; read. Used: praise of Judah and reports from Granada scholars, “I did not know, however, that he left a son”; “one born among the ‘stammerers’”; the rule against word-for-word translation; writing in a secluded spot, leaning on the wall or lying down; advice not to risk the voyage; the daily round between Fustat and Cairo, the single meal, patients into the night, private interviews only on the Sabbath; “when you have completed for our brethren the translation you have commenced.” The original was in Arabic and survives in several Hebrew versions (an abstract of a Hebrew University study of the manuscript tradition suggests it may combine two letters written about ten days apart; abstract only, not used in the story). 5. Resianne Fontaine, “Abraham Ibn Daud,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006, rev. Sept. 2024), read in full. Used: c. 1110–1180, perhaps born in Córdoba, taught by his maternal uncle (d. 1126); move to Toledo presumably after the Almohad invasion of 1147; the Arabic philosophical work (lost; two late fourteenth-century Hebrew translations, Ha-Emunah ha-Ramah) and the Hebrew Sefer ha-Qabbalah, both c. 1160/61 in Toledo; “for if the lamp of philosophy is kindled, the lamp of religion goes out”; the first systematic attempt to integrate Aristotelianism into Jewish thought; martyrdom in Toledo c. 1180 reported first by Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen (first half of the thirteenth century); d’Alverny’s 1954 identification with Avendauth, now with “strong support,” and Bertolacci’s “motive force.” 6. Michael Friedman, “Practices of Textual Changes in Medieval Mathematical Manuscripts: The Case Study of the Division of Geometric Figures in Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret and Liber embadorum,” manuscript cultures 25(1) (2025): 61–91, CC BY 4.0, PDF read. https://doi.org/10.15460/mc.2025.25.1.10. Used: bar Hiyya c. 1065–1145; “Savasorda” from sâhib al-shurtah; the title as “A Treatise on Measuring Areas and Volumes”; the first full Hebrew mathematical terminology; Plato of Tivoli’s Liber embadorum of 1145 and possible cooperation; the extra proof in Latin Book III; Book III on dividing lands among partners or heirs; Fibonacci’s debt unclear, his main source apparently Abu Bakr’s Liber mensurationum (after Høyrup 2019); Barozzi’s 1565 copy, Dublin, Trinity College MS 390, title page: “Liber de areis a Savasorda Iudeo in Hebraico compositus et a Platone Tiburtino in Latinum sermonem translatus, a Francisco Barocio infinitis erroribus expurgatus.” 7. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson, “Abraham bar Hiyya,” MacTutor History of Mathematics (1999), read. Used: official post in Barcelona; Levey (DSB) quoted: “he deplored the lack of knowledge of Arab science and language among the people of Provence. He wrote his own works in Hebrew, but he helped translate … works into Latin.” MacTutor’s dates (1070–1136) differ from Friedman’s; see note 12. 8. Luciana Pepi, “Jacob Anatoli,” Federiciana (Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2005), read in full. Used: born c. 1194 in southern France, probably Marseille; married Samuel’s daughter and studied with him; Provençal Jews did not know Arabic; opposition to his philosophical Sabbath sermons; left for Naples in 1231 at Frederick II’s invitation as physician and translator; the March 1232 colophon “per compiacere il desiderio dell’imperatore Federico, ‘l’amante delle scienze, che mi sostiene’”; Averroes on the Isagoge, Categories, De interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics; the Almagest finished in Naples in 1235; Malmad ha-Talmidim c. 1237–40, Scot as “il sapiente con il quale collaborai,” cited twenty times; and the preface: “io ne accettavo l’interpretazione e la scrivevo, riferendola in suo nome, non intendendo gloriarmi di vesti prese in prestito, per farmi fama di sapiente. Né mi si critichi, né mi si disprezzi per quanto ho riferito a suo nome, non appartenendo egli al nostro popolo. Le cose vanno analizzate in se stesse, e non ha importanza se le abbia dette questi o un altro” (Pepi’s rendering of the Hebrew; the story paraphrases it). 9. H. G. Enelow, “Anatolio, Jacob ben Abba Mari ben Simson,” The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (1901), read. Used: contemporaries thought his hours with Samuel a waste; the first Hebrew translator of Averroes’ commentaries; astronomy in the mornings, logic in the evenings; Güdemann’s count of seventeen citations of the Christian sage, identified by Senior Sachs as Michael Scot; Graetz’s identification with Roger Bacon’s “Andreas,” rejected by Steinschneider. Also Umberto Cassuto, “Anatoli, Jacob ben Abba Mari ben Samson,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (via encyclopedia.com), read: physician to Frederick II; Scot’s Latin translations of Aristotle and Averroes; whether Anatoli assisted Scot is “doubtful”; Jacob Mantino’s Latin translation of the first three books from Anatoli’s Hebrew, printed 1550–53. 10. J. Vernet, “Ibn Tibbon, Jacob ben Machir,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (PDF at MacTutor), read. Used: born c. 1236, died Montpellier 1305; Latin name Prophatius Judaeus; Judah as his great-grandfather; the Quadrant of Israel (1288–93), translated into Latin by Armengaud Blaise in 1299; the almanac computed for Montpellier and dated 1 March 1300; “cited by Copernicus, Reinhold, Clavius, and Kepler.” 11. Wikidata: Q127398 (Maimonides, d. 13 December 1204), Q338123, Q745336, Q958438, Q330821, Q31439; coordinates from Q318082 (Lunel), Q48292 (Arles), Q2634 (Naples), Q23973753 (Fustat, the present Fustat park area of Old Cairo). 12. Editorial boundaries: no dialogue or inner life is invented for Judah, Samuel, Maimonides, Anatoli or Scot. The testament, the letter, the preface and the colophon are paraphrased from the English or Italian renderings listed above; nothing in quotation marks in the Chinese is a direct translation from Hebrew or Arabic. “Querulous affection” is Abrahams’s phrase. Abrahams says the reason Judah left Spain “may be presumed”; the DSB says unrest in Granada; the story says “presumed.” The ibn Daud–Avendauth identification is presented as a proposal (“if d’Alverny was right”). That Anatoli “fits” Xu’s table entry is the editor’s comparison; Xu does not name him. Whether Anatoli helped Scot translate is disputed and is not asserted. The purpose of Samuel’s trips to Egypt is unknown and is not stated. Bar Hiyya’s dates vary (1065/1070–1136/1145) and are not given. For Jacob ben Makhir’s almanac the DSB gives “1 March 1300 (1301 a.d.)”; the story says only “around 1300.” “Stayed on the road” is the editor’s closing line. 13. Base text check: Xu says Fibonacci’s Practical Geometry was “clearly” influenced by bar Hiyya; Friedman, following Høyrup, finds the extent unclear; the story gives both. Xu says Jewish scholars helped Plato of Tivoli and others translate in Barcelona; research says only that Plato and bar Hiyya “may” have cooperated on the Liber embadorum; the story follows Xu and marks the research conjecture as “may.” 14. Map: 1160, Benjamin of Tudela finds Judah practising medicine at Lunel; 1199, Maimonides writes from Fustat; 1204, Samuel finishes the first version of the Guide at Arles; March 1232, Anatoli’s colophon at Naples. Barcelona (place of the 1145 Latin translation not stated in the sources), Toledo (ibn Daud’s books, c. 1160/61, date uncertain) and Montpellier (the almanac, c. 1300) are left unmapped.