Israel ben Abraham: An Ashkenazic Translator of Aquinas?

This article presents an edition of a hitherto unidentified set of commented Hebrew excerpts from Thomas Aquinas’s Sentencia libri De anima. Preserved in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mich. Add. 25, and attributed to an otherwise unknown Jewish scholar named Israel ben Abraham, the excerpts reproduce the Latin text in different degrees of faithfulness to the original. They do not follow the structure of Aquinas’s commentary and seem to have been summarized and rearranged by the translator to reflect his own interests rooted in the study of Jewish philosophical texts, especially the works of Maimonides and Moses Narboni. In the introduction to the edition, I discuss the context of the excerpts as well as the identity of the translator, including the possibility that he was a Christian convert to Judaism.