The Treatise of the Pool

The Treatise of the Pool is a remarkable, previously unpublished, Sufi text by the grandson of the celebrated philosopher Moses Maimonides. A translation of Al-Maqala al-Hawdiyya which is housed in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the manuscript is a rare and valuable work from a thirteenth century Jewish Sufi. In his foreword, Dr Fenton notes that: ‘Due perhaps to the persistence of family tradition, Obadyah’s doctrine exhibits many analogies with, and may perhaps elucidate obscurities in, the system of his illustrious forebear. At the same time it is certainly not without intrinsic value in itself, since Obadyah’s philosophical preoccupations differ markedly from those of his grandfather. To be sure, his system, couched in a peculiar Judeo-Arabic idiom, is permeated with a philosophical mysticism that owes much to the influence of Sufism’.