Mostrador e enseñador de los turbados. Notes about the First Spanish Translation of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed

Abstract

Pedro de Toledo’s translation, Enseñador e Mostrador delos Turbados, is the earliest and most extensive philosophical text to appear in Spanish. The first translation into a vernacular language of RaMBaM’s Guide for the Perplexed is presented in Ms. 10289 of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. The text seems an intellectual battle-field. It presents some interesting and peculiar characteristics at once: a text covered with glosses of the translator himself, and comments, variant translations, philosophical and theological disagreements, the use of rabbinic and scriptural sources, by an anonymous critical commentator. These discrepancies show how the sensitive nature of the Maimonides ideas demands a particular hermeneutics, and offers an interesting view about the Spanish Jewish controversy in the fifteenth century.