Dodi Ve-Nechdi (Quaestiones Naturales)

one known, Adelard himself, or someone else, may not have written a French version, a summary, or an adaptation of this very work. Though I have searched in vain for such a French version, I am personally not at all sure that, by some chance, one might not yet be discovered under a quite different title.

Such a discovery would clear up a very important point, for it would explain the cause of the great discrepancy that exists in the order, length, and language of the various Hebrew adaptations of the “Quaestiones” as they appear in the much fuller Munich manuscript on the one hand, and in the fragmentary or briefer manuscripts at Oxford (evidently identical with that at Florence) and Leyden. In fact, David Bloch, a scholar of Hebrew literature. Bloch thinks that while the rendering of the fuller form was made from the Latin, the abridged version seems rather to have been made from the French. Steinschneider opposes this opinion, saying that no proof is given for the assumption, and that the French words which occur here and there do not justify it, as translators from Latin not infrequently substituted a vernacular form, or it may have been the copyists who did so.

In the absence, therefore, of such a discovery—and there is only the most slender suspicion that any such French version exists—we are thrown back upon the Latin original of Adelard, which has not been reprinted since the first edition in 1480, and certainly never yet rendered into English.

My primary concern was naturally the editing and translating of Berachya’s “Dodi Venechdi” (Uncle and Nephew); but, in order to pursue a comparative study of Berachya’s Hebrew version and Adelard’s Latin original, I deemed it both useful and necessary to also prepare an English translation of Adelard’s Latin, and to incorporate in this volume the first English rendering of these “Quaestiones naturales.”

The earlier Hebrew bibliographers, though referring to Berachya’s other works, do not seem to have known his “Dodi,” and there could therefore be no question with them as to its origin.

In the article on Berachya in “Les Rabbins Français” (Renan-Neubauer, 1877), there is a reference to Berachya as the translator of the “Quaestiones naturales” (of Adelard), and the writer remarks that “according to M. Bloch, we ought to ascribe to our Berachya questions on physics, under the...