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The New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division
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Sefer ha-Tapuah
attributed to Aristotle
(Bologna, 1546-7; copyist: Samuel Archivolti).
Such was the stature of Aristotle for the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages that it began to matter to some less Aristotelian Jews that Aristotle should himself be Jewish. Contended though it was that he was born a member of the tribe of Benjamin, another view, more popular since less arbitrary, rested on what was almost a syllogism: Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor; Alexander's campaigns led him to Jerusalem, and, according to talmudic tradition, to an encounter with the high priest, Simeon the
Righteous; therefore, Aristotle came along for the ride, met Simeon, was duly impressed by his righteousness, converted on the spot and abandoned those views that were most distinctively Aristotelian. According to this line of conjectural history, his later writings, composed in Hebrew and less strident in their rationalism, were suppressed by the Catholic Church. The only late-period work to escape this fate was his Book of the Apple. The slight Liber de pomo is one of the curiosities of Greco-Arabic literature. A treatise on death supposedly dictated by Aristotle as he lay dying, its Platonic viewpoint, the absence of a Greek version of the text (which was rendered into Latin from the Hebrew), and its claim to be "Aristotle's last work" conspired to make it a (relatively) plausible candidate to be the one relic that proved Aristotle's final submission to the irresistible charms of Judaism.
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