| Summary: | A Jewish thinker who flourished in Provence around the fourteenth century, Juda ben Isaac ha-Cohen (in the manuscript he is called hameʿayen) interpolated his own thoughts about essence and existence into Moses ben Joshua Narboni's commentary on the Intentions of the Philosophers by the Moslem theologian al Ghazâlî. This Hebrew interpolation is to be found in a famous Paris manuscript (No. 956) in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Finding that Narboni had not sufficiently explained the controverted question of essence and existence, and especially that he did not quote in full a rather large section of ibn Rushd's Tahafut al-Tahafut, thus causing unnecessary misunderstandings, Juda Cohen explains sentence by sentence this whole passage of ibn Rushd, which is, according to him, indispensable for a complete understanding of that question. The plan of Cohen's development is the following: first of all he quotes a passage from al-Ghâzalî's Tahafut al-Falasifa and then he quotes ibn Rushd's refutation. Since that difficult section of ibn Rushd's Tahafut al-Tahafut has been translated into French by the late Professor Georges Vajda, not only in the Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire de Moyen Age but also in his Isaac Albalag, Averroïste Juif, Traducteur et Annotateur d'al-Ghazâlî (Paris, 1960), we need not stress its importance. There is, however, another point which deserves our whole attention: the Munich Hebrew manuscript (Staatsbibliothek, Steinschneider's catalogue... p. 60, No. 110 fol. 168) which also includes Narboni's commentary on al-Ghazâlî's Intentions of the Philosophers has at the same passage as in Paris 956 a rather lengthy development on the controverted question of essence and existence. This text was written by an anonymous commentator and although it has nothing to do with Juda Cohen it draws on the same sections of ibn Rushd's Tahafut al-Tahafut. This text will soon be published with a French translation.
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