"I Am Not Inferior to Them": Solomon Ibn Da ʾud's Introductions to His Arabic-to-Hebrew Philosophical and Medical Translations

This paper contributes to the growing scholarly understanding of the early thirteenth-century Arabic-to-Hebrew translation movement by examining the person, contextual milieu, and translational ethos of Solomon ibn Da ʾud (active ca. 1205–1233). Solomon, who translated works by Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn Rušd, furnished each translation with an introductory section. These three prefaces outline his original theory of translation, which offers an alternative to Ibn Tibbon’s and Maimonides’s models that is somewhat closer to al-Ḥarizi’s perspective. Furthermore, they offer a glimpse into the complex personality of an author who claimed to be the first to translate medical works into Hebrew despite the existence of Maimonides’s works, which were already in circulation, and who spuriously claimed to have commentated on Ibn Sīnā when in reality, he was plagiarising an earlier commentary on the former by Ibn Rušd.