154 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



illustrious ones in the whole history of civilization. The men I 

 have mentioned hailed from every part of Islam; a few of them 

 wrote in Persian, but even for those Arabic was a privileged lan- 

 guage. Yet by the end of the eleventh century the main task of 

 the Arabic scientists — as far as it concerned the whole world and 

 not only themselves — was already completed, and after that time 

 the relative importance of Muslim culture declined steadily. Dur- 

 ing the twelfth century its prestige was due even more to its past 

 than to its present achievements, great as these were. In the mean- 

 while, Christians and Jews were feverishly pouring out the Greco- 

 Arabic learning from the Arabic vessels into the Latin and Hebrew 

 ones. 



The Christians were far ahead of the Jews in this new stage 

 of transmission, and that for a very simple reason. Down to the 

 eleventh century the philosophic and scientific (as opposed to 

 the purely rabbinical) activities of the Jews were almost exclu- 

 sively confined to the Muslim world. The Jewish philosophers, 

 grammarians, and scientists who lived under the protection of 

 Islam were generally well treated, and some of them — like Hasdai 

 ibn Shaprut in Cordova — attained positions of high authority and 

 became the intellectual as well as the political leaders of their 

 time. These Jews of the Dar al-Islam were bilingual; Hebrew was 

 of course their religious language and probably also their do- 

 mestic one, but for all philosophic and scientific purposes they 

 thought in Arabic. They had no need of translations. On the 

 contrary it was much easier for them to read a medical book in 

 Arabic than in Hebrew. Sometimes they would copy Arabic manu- 

 scripts in Hebrew script, but even that was not really indispen- 

 sable; it was more a matter of convenience than of necessity. 



On the other hand, as soon as the Latin Christians began to 

 realize the importance of the Arabic literature, since only a few of 

 them could ever hope to master a language as alien to their own 

 and written in such illegible and mystifying script, they longed for 

 translations and did all they could to obtain them. By the end of 

 the eleventh century their longing was partly fulfilled by Con- 



