Avraham ibn Ezra

Wandering scholar who carried the learning of al-Andalus to Italy, France and England. His terse, grammar-driven Torah commentary is printed in nearly every Mikraot Gedolot, and he wrote on mathematics, astronomy and the calendar.

Who was Avraham ibn Ezra?

Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra was one of the most brilliant and wide-ranging minds of medieval Sepharad: a biblical commentator, grammarian, poet, mathematician and astronomer. His commentary on the Torah, prized for its precision and its refusal to bend the text, is printed in nearly every edition of the Mikraot Gedolot. Forced by circumstance into a life of wandering, he carried the learning of al-Andalus to the Jews of Italy, France and England, who until then had known little of it.

Tudela and al-Andalus

Avraham ibn Ezra was born around 1089 in Tudela, in northern Spain, then under Muslim rule. He grew up in the world of the Andalusian Golden Age and spent his early years among its poets and scholars, including Yehuda HaLevi, who became his friend. A tradition holds that his son Yitzhak married HaLevi’s daughter; Yitzhak, a poet himself, later traveled east with HaLevi and converted to Islam in Baghdad, a grief his father mourned in verse.

For the first fifty years of his life Ibn Ezra was known mainly as a poet. He wrote liturgical poems, poems of friendship, and wry poems about his own poverty and bad luck. One of the best known says that if he sold candles, the sun would never set, and if he dealt in shrouds, no one would ever die. His Shabbat song Ki eshmera Shabbat is still sung at Sephardi tables.

Wandering

Around 1140, the same year Yehuda HaLevi left for the Land of Israel, Ibn Ezra left Spain. The reasons are not certain; the Almohad invasions, which would destroy Andalusian Jewry within a few years, may have been one of them. For the rest of his life he moved from city to city: Rome, Lucca, Mantua and Verona in Italy; Béziers and Narbonne in Provence; Rouen and Dreux in northern France; and London, where he spent at least part of 1158.

Everywhere he went he wrote. The Jews of Christian Europe read the Bible through Rashi and the Midrash, and knew little of the scientific grammar and philosophy that had been developed in Arabic in Spain. Ibn Ezra wrote for them in Hebrew. Most of his great works were written during these wandering years, often at the request of a local patron.

The commentator

Ibn Ezra’s commentaries cover the Torah and most of the rest of the Bible. Their method is the search for peshat, the plain meaning, grounded in grammar and in the context of each verse. He criticized interpreters who read their own ideas into the text, and rejected explanations that ignored its language. His style is terse, often cryptic, and full of wit; generations of supercommentaries were written to explain it.

He was a faithful traditionalist in matters of law, insisting that the Oral Torah must be followed even where the plain meaning of a verse seems to point elsewhere. At the same time, he noted in veiled hints, which he called a “secret,” that a few verses in the Torah seemed to reflect a later time. Centuries later Spinoza cited those hints, and they have been debated ever since.

Grammar, science and the calendar

Ibn Ezra’s grammatical works, including Moznayim and Tzahot, brought the discoveries of the Andalusian grammarians, such as the three-letter root of Hebrew words, to Jews who did not read Arabic. He translated the work of Yehuda Hayyuj from Arabic into Hebrew.

He was also one of the leading Jewish scientists of the Middle Ages. His Sefer HaMispar taught arithmetic with the decimal place-value system, including the zero, which was then new to Europe. He wrote on astronomy and the astrolabe, on the Jewish calendar in Sefer HaIbbur, and many works on astrology, then considered a serious science. Several of these were translated into Latin and read by Christian scholars for centuries. A crater on the Moon, Abenezra, is named after him.

His short philosophical work Yesod Mora, written in London, explains the reasons for the commandments, and his Iggeret HaShabbat, also written in England, defends the traditional reckoning of the Shabbat from sunset to sunset.

Death

Ibn Ezra died around 1164–1167. The place is uncertain: traditions name Calahorra in Spain, Rome, and the Land of Israel, and some scholars think he died in England or France.

Avraham ibn Ezra’s legacy for Sephardim

Ibn Ezra was the great ambassador of Sephardic learning. Through his books, the precision, rationalism and scientific curiosity of al-Andalus became part of the heritage of the whole Jewish people. Every student of the Torah who opens a Mikraot Gedolot meets him beside Rashi and the Ramban, and every Sephardi family that sings Ki eshmera Shabbat on Friday night sings his words.

Sephardic connection

Andalusian polymath who transmitted Sephardic linguistic, exegetical, mathematical, and astronomical learning across Christian Europe