Six Leaves of the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna in Hebrew Characters

Abstract

Kalila wa-Dimna is a collection of exciting moral stories written in a unique style, both in terms of narration and its technique of maintaining suspense.2 The stories in Kalila wa-Dimna are based on an imaginary dialogue between animals, and each story holds another internal story, which holds another, and so on.3 The book dates back roughly to the third or fourth century bce, and it was originally written in Sanskrit. In the eighth century, a Persian version was translated into Arabic by ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (died ca. 756 or 759ce). The original Persian copy has been lost though. Kalila wa-Dimna eventually became exceptionally popular throughout the world, which resulted in various copies and many translations, of which Hebrew, French, and Greek were among the oldest, produced around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.