Take particular care of your books.... When you lend a book to any one, make a memorandum of it before it leaves your house, and when it is returned cancel the entry. Every Passover and Tabernacles call in all your books that are out on loan.

Judah ibn Tibbon (c. 1120–c. 1190), the Provençal Jewish physician and pioneering translator of Arabic Jewish philosophy into Hebrew, is associated with a famous ethical “will” or letter of instruction to his son, Samuel ibn Tibbon. In that testamentary advice—written in the milieu of 12th‑century southern France, where Hebrew books were costly, hand-copied, and easily lost—he gives practical counsel on study, conduct, and the care of a personal library. The quoted lines come from his admonitions about lending books: he urges record‑keeping and periodic recall of borrowed volumes, timed to major pilgrimage festivals (Passover and Sukkot/Tabernacles), when communal rhythms made such accounting feasible.

The passage treats books not as casual possessions but as irreplaceable vessels of learning and communal continuity. Ibn Tibbon’s insistence on making a memorandum before a book leaves the house anticipates modern library practice: cataloging, circulation records, and scheduled audits. The advice also reflects a moral stance—stewardship of knowledge is a duty, and generosity in lending must be balanced by responsibility to preserve texts for future study. By anchoring the recall of loans to Passover and Tabernacles, he links intellectual discipline to religious time, suggesting that care for learning should be integrated into the recurring cycles of Jewish life.