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data, secular and religious newspapers, oral histories, unpublished letters, parish
records, and other material unearthed in Church archives — whose breadth and depth
are one of the book’s major strengths. Other strengths include the good treatment of
gender and the overall clarity and readability of the prose (including the remarkably
clear historical background presented in first chapter which could be quite useful for
teaching undergraduates).
While the study concludes in the early 1970s, the epilogue does consider changes that
have affected ethno-Catholicism in Houston over the past three decades. Treviño offers
brief discussions of the rise in Latin American immigration to the United States, the
decline of liberal politics, and the explosion of Latino evangelical Protestantism. One
question begged by his conclusion is the state of the current relationship between
ethno-Catholic and evangelical identities in the Mexican American community. Addi-
tionally, it would be nice to see greater attention paid to the fascinating tension between
inclusion and outsiderness which Treviño’s study raises, whereby on the one hand,
Mexican Americans’ place on the margins helped sustain their ethno-Catholic identity,
while on the other hand, Mexican Americans’ ethno-Catholic identity helped them
move in from the margins as they claimed rights as full American citizens.
LAURA PREMACK
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

DIANA LOBEL: A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Baha Ibn

Paqūda’s Duties of the Heart. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007: pp. xiv + 362.
With almost two-thirds of the text taken up with Notes, Bibliography, Index, and
Acknowledgments, this is a most scholarly study of a difficult topic, difficult in at least
two ways: the first, of course, the subject matter — the interaction between Jewish and
Muslim thinkers in tenth- and eleventh-century El Andalus — the second, the political
implications of understanding such a relationship in the first decades of the twenty-first
century. Diana Lobel is quite successful in the first of these difficulties, and almost
ignores, and therefore does not come to grips with, the second even though the very
topic calls out for some comments.
Lobel’s ten chapters cover many of the issues raised by Bahya Ibn Paqūda’s Hidāya
or Duties of the Heart, although these units of discussion do not match the ten gates
of approach the Jewish philosopher-mystic outlines. Her analysis is quite clear and
explicit, so far as the subject allows. Working from the original Arabic text in its most
recent edition, she uses Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation as a guide, but more often tests
the philological and philosophic matters against both the Muslim and earlier Greek
traditions, as well as occasionally other rabbinical writings. Mostly, however, Lobel
explains one part of the Hidāya against another to show more precisely what Bahya
means by key words and phrases. She tends to see the author as refining the Greco-
Arabic ideas into a more intense inwardness and then measures that inwardness against
the mature articulation of these issues in Maimonides. In this way, Bahya can be seen
as more poetic than rational, and more psychological than juridic (or halachic).
This book is not an intellectual history, and Lobel makes clear in her first chapter that
not only are the dates of the Hidāya and its authorship unclear or controversial, but
consequently that the lines of influence back and forth between Muslim, Jewish, and
sometimes even Greek or Christian traditions, has to remain problematical. More than
that, though, insofar as the subtitle of this book claims to be concerned with “A
Sufi-Jewish Dialogue,” the nature of that dialogue is left in abeyance. On the one hand,

© 2009 The Authors

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if dialogue means a kind of impersonal sharing of basic ideas and processes of thought,
then it can be seen that Ibn Paqūda indeed is in dialogue with Sufi sources in their
various modes. He learns from the Arabic translations and commentators how to read
the Platonic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Aristotelian authors of Late Antiquity,
and he uses their Muslim conceptual frames to engage with the Hebrew Bible and
rabbinical books in a philosophical-mystical manner. The same may be said for the way
in which the Hidāya relates to Sadya Gaon and other earlier and then later Jewish
philosophical and spiritual texts. On the other hand, if dialogue means something more
personal — whether in actual conversations, debates, or learned meetings — then there
seems to be little or nothing that can be adduced about the author or his Duties of the
Heart. This word or phrase, this image or that idea seem like those in other books earlier
or later: that is all.
Excellent as are Lobel’s close philological readings of key passages in Bahya’s book,
there remain important questions which she does not address and which are relevant to
the specific historical moments in which the supposed dialogue took place between
Jewish mystics and Sufi practitioners in the Muslim lands of Iberia and North Africa —
and these are questions pertinent today in regard to our contemporary clash of civili-
sations. For example, if José Faur is correct that Gaonic and Sephardic rabbinic thought
is premised on a radical concept of horizontal relations between God and humanity
under a juridical contract (the be’rit entered into at Sinai) and that this legal code at once
grants to God His divinity under the Law and to human beings their dignity and
integrity inside history, then any influence from Islam (or Christianity, for that matter)
will either have to be accommodated to Judaism through significant changes or so
distort the premises of halachic tradition as to invalidate them altogether.
There are times when Lobel’s discussions do admit of such interpretations, but they
are insufficiently developed and too fragmented to warrant proper generalization.
Insofar as the Hidāya does stand between Saadya Gaon’s work and the great books of
Maimonides, then it would seem that Bahya, like all great Sephardic writers, is open to
learn from the wise men of the nations in a humanistic Jewish way. However, insofar as
there are qualities in his mysticism that point towards the mythological muddle of the
later Zoharistic kabbalah, it may be that essential rabbinic understanding of the Law has
been compromised. Much remains to be done after Lobel’s wonderful efforts.
NORMAN SIMMS
University of Waikato

© 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation © 2009 Association for the Journal of Religious History