Sacred Texts  Judaism 

The Duties of the Heart by Rabbi Bachye, tr. by Edwin Collins [1909]

This slim volume translates from the Rabbi Bachye, who wrote one of the first systematic treatments of philosophical Ethics in 12th century Spain. This was during a period of Jewish intellectual cross-fertilization with Islamic culture. Although Bachye was an orthodox Rabbi, he treats Ethics (the Duties of the Heart, in his words) as a universal science, derived from first principles such as the belief in God. This short book also runs very deep.

According to the introduction to this book, this was the first text to be published in the Wisdom of the East series. So if you collect these you might want to be on the watch for copies of this specific volume. The particular edition we ended up using is a second printing, but there is no reason to suggest that it had any differences with the first edition.