Abstract

While the works of Maimonides have justly received great attention and been printed and translated, those of his disciples who attempted to carry on their master's philosophical reinterpretation of Jewish religious texts have not. This dissertation makes available in print for the first time the Hebrew text of and an English translation of part of one such medieval work of philosophical exegesis. The work entitled Avvat Nefesh is a supercommentary on the commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra on the Pentateuch, but at various points in his elucidation of Ibn Ezra, the author stops to either give his own interpretation of the biblical text or else a lengthy essay on a theological/philosophical problem . ;Avvat Nefesh, or a portion of it, is found in some twenty-three manuscripts, seventeen of which have been utilized to one extent or another in this edition. Instead of constructing an eclectic text, a diplomatic transcript of the best the complete manuscript has been printed, and significant textual variants noted at the bottom of the page. ;The author of Avvat Nefesh is unknown, although Moritz Steinschneider attributed it to Asher ben Abraham Crescas, author of the Crescas commentary on Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Avvat Nefesh was most likely written in Provence in the second half of the fourteenth century, when interest in philosophy became widespread among the prosperous and educated Jews of that region and when supercommentaries on Ibn Ezra multiplied. The author of Avvat Nefesh also wrote a work entitled Seror ha-Hayyi m