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 called "the soul and intelligence of Aristotle." Jewish MSS. of Aristotle are rarely found without Ibn Rushd's commentary, and his paraphrases very commonly bear the name of Aristotle at their head. It was as the commentator that he held so high a position in Jewish thought, and it was as the final and authoritative commentator that he finally took his place in Latin scholasticism introduced by Jewish teachers.

The Muwahhid persecution scattered many of the Spanish Jews to Africa and to Provence and Languedoc. Those who took refuge in Africa, like Maimonides, retained the use of the Arabic language, but Arabic quickly became obsolete amongst those who had fled north. No doubt the refugees in Provence found it necessary to use the Provencal dialect for communication with their Christian neighbours, but that dialect had never yet been used for scientific or philosophical purposes; in Western Christendom Latin was invariably used for all educational and scholarly purposes, but the refugee Jews did not feel disposed to adopt a language which had no traditional associations for them and was altogether a foreign tongue never as yet employed for Jewish purposes. Under these circumstances the Jewish leaders deliberately copied the actual condition prevailing amongst their Jewish neighbours where the ancient Latin was in use as a learned language, whilst its derived dialects were the speech in everyday use, and so they revived the use of Hebrew as