MUQAMMIṢ, DAVID BEN MERWAN AL-

David ben Merwan al-Muqammiṣ was one of the first medieval Jews to respond to the philosophical challenge of Muslim rationalism. Nothing about his life is known with any certainty, but he probably flourished in the early years of the tenth century. According to the account given by the tenth-century Karaite historian Kirkisani, David al-Muqammiṣ was a native of Raqqa, in Mesopotamia. Born into the Jewish faith, Kirkisani stated, al-Muqammiṣ became a Christian and then studied philosophy and theology at the well-known school of Nisibis, in Syria. Later, as reported by Kirkisani, he returned to Judaism but is supposed to have made good use of his Christian learning in his commentaries on Genesis and Ecclesiastes, which have been lost. In the latter part of the nineteenth century some quoted fragments of al-Muqammiṣ's philosophical work were discovered in Judah ben Barzilai's Hebrew "Commentary on the Sefer Yezirah " (early twelfth century). In addition, a substantial section of al-Muqammiṣ's major work, ʿIshrūn maqālāt (Twenty Chapters), in the original Arabic, was found by Abraham Harkavy in 1898 in the Russian Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, but it was never published.

This fragmentary and incomplete knowledge enables us to assert that al-Muqammiṣ's thought was deeply rationalistic, influenced in this direction by the Muʿtazilites (Arab theologians). His philosophy was, like theirs, generally cast in an Aristotelian mold, modified by some Neoplatonic elements. He shared with all Muslim philosophers a rigorous view of the divine unity; possibly it was the crystallization of this conviction that led to his rejection of Christianity and his return to Judaism. His discussion of the nature of the concept of unity as applied to God led him to distinguish between several ways of speaking about unity in ordinary language and to realize that none of these ways suggests what we mean in speaking of the unity of God, which is unique. More generally, al-Muqammiṣ argued, whenever we use the language of description we imply comparison and classification; however, God is incomparable and unclassifiable. Strictly, then, whether we speak of God in the language of the Bible or in that of philosophy, our language cannot be understood in any ordinary sense. If God is One, then each expression we use in speaking of him must be synonymous with every other expression. To use a variety of different expressions adds nothing, therefore, to our description of God. Al-Muqammiṣ suggested, however—anticipating Moses Maimonides in this suggestion—that although the different attributions add nothing positive, they do have the value of denying their antonyms.

In al-Muqammiṣ, then, we have the first suggestion in medieval Jewish philosophy of the theory of negative attributes. On other matters, such as the doctrine of rewards and punishments, al-Muqammiṣ seems to have had no difficulty in blending the traditional thought of the rabbis into his rational system.

See also Aristotelianism; Islamic Philosophy; Jewish Philosophy; Maimonides; Neoplatonism; Rationalism.

Bibliography

works by al-muqammiṢ

ʿIshrūn maqālāt (Twenty Chapters), edited and translated by Sarah Stroumsa as Dawud ibn Marwan al-Muqammis's Twenty Chapters. Leiden: Brill, 1989.

works on al-muqammiṢ

Ben-Shammai, Haggai. "Kalam in Medieval Jewish Philosophy." In History of Jewish Philosophy, edited by D. Frank and O. Leaman. London: Routledge, 1997.

Blau, Joseph L. The Story of Jewish Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1962.

Husik, Isaac. History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

"Muqammis." In Jewish Philosophy Reader, edited by D. Frank, O. Leaman, and C. Manekin. London: Routledge, 2000.

Stroumsa, Sarah. "Saadya and Jewish Kalam." In Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by D. Frank and O. Leaman. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Vajda, Georges. Introduction à la pensée juive du moyen âge. Paris: Vrin, 1947.

Vajda, Georges. "Le probleme de l'unité de Dieu d'après Dawud ibn Marwan al-Muqammis." In Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, edited by A. Altmann. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.

J. L. Blau (1967)

Bibliography updated by Oliver Leaman (2005)