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Shlomo Ben Avraham Ibn Aderet
Shlomo ben Avraham ibn Aderet ( he, שלמה בן אברהם אבן אדרת or Solomon son of Abraham son of Aderet) (1235 – 1310) was a medieval rabbi, halakhist, and Talmudist. He is widely known as the Rashba (Hebrew: ), the Hebrew acronym of his title and name: Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham. The Rashba was born in Barcelona, Crown of Aragon, in 1235. He became a successful banker and leader of Spanish Jewry of his time. As a rabbinical authority his fame was such that he was designated as El Rab d'España ("The Rabbi of Spain"). He served as rabbi of the Main Synagogue of Barcelona for 50 years. He died in 1310. Biography His teachers were Nahmanides and Yonah Gerondi. He was a master in the study of the Talmud, and was not opposed to the Kabbala. Aderet was very active as a rabbi and as an author. Under his auspices and through his recommendation, part of the commentary on the Mishnah by Maimonides was translated from the Arabic into Hebrew. His Talmudic lectures ...
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Barcelona
Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within city limits,Barcelona: Población por municipios y sexo
– Instituto Nacional de Estadística. (National Statistics Institute)
its urban area extends to numerous neighbouring municipalities within the and is home to around 4.8 million people, making it the
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Raymond Martini
Raymond Martini, also called Ramon Martí in Catalan, was a 13th-century Dominican friar and theologian. He is remembered for his polemic work ''Pugio Fidei'' (c. 1270). In 1250 he was one of eight friars appointed to make a study of oriental languages with the purpose of carrying on a mission to Jews and Moors. He worked in Spain as a missionary, and also for a short time in Tunis. A document bearing his signature and dated July 1284 shows that he was at that time still living. Biography He was born in the first half of the 13th century at Subirats in Catalonia; and died after 1284. It is speculated that he could have been of Jewish origin. According to Philippe Bobichon's analysis of the Ms 1405 (Sainte Geneviève Library, Paris), Raymond Martini converted during adulthood. In 1250 he was selected by the provincial chapter, sitting in Toledo, to study Oriental languages at a Dominican school which had been founded for the express purpose of preparing its pupils to engage in po ...
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Beth Din
A beit din ( he, בית דין, Bet Din, house of judgment, , Ashkenazic: ''beis din'', plural: batei din) is a rabbinical court of Judaism. In ancient times, it was the building block of the legal system in the Biblical Land of Israel. Today, it is invested with legal powers in a number of religious matters (''din Torah'', "matter of litigation", plural ''dinei Torah'') both in Israel and in Jewish communities in the Diaspora, where its judgments hold varying degrees of authority (depending upon the jurisdiction and subject matter) in matters specifically related to Jewish religious life. History Rabbinical commentators point out that the first suggestion in the Torah that the ruler divest his legal powers and delegate his power of judgment to lower courts was made by Jethro to Moses (Exodus ). This situation was formalised later when God gave the explicit command to "establish judges and officers in your gates" ( Deuteronomy ). There were three types of courts (Mishnah, trac ...
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Rationalism
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".Lacey, A.R. (1996), ''A Dictionary of Philosophy'', 1st edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. 2nd edition, 1986. 3rd edition, Routledge, London, 1996. p. 286 More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".Bourke, Vernon J., "Rationalism," p. 263 in Runes (1962). In an oldJohn Locke (1690), An Essay on Human Understanding controversy, rationalism was opposed to empiricism, where the rationalists believed that reality has an intrinsically logical structure. Because of this, the rationalists argued that certain truths exist and that the intellect can directly grasp these truths. That is to say, rationalists asserted that certain rational principles exist in logic, mathematics, ethics, and ...
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Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston, 2011. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arabs, Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece. Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as First language, mother tongues. Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility. MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is ...
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Mishnah
The Mishnah or the Mishna (; he, מִשְׁנָה, "study by repetition", from the verb ''shanah'' , or "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions which is known as the Oral Torah. It is also the first major work of rabbinic literature. The Mishnah was redacted by Judah ha-Nasi probably in Beit Shearim or Sepphoris at the beginning of the 3rd century CE in a time when, according to the Talmud, the persecution of the Jews and the passage of time raised the possibility that the details of the oral traditions of the Pharisees from the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE) would be forgotten. Most of the Mishnah is written in Mishnaic Hebrew, but some parts are in Aramaic. The Mishnah consists of six orders (', singular ' ), each containing 7–12 tractates (', singular ' ; lit. "web"), 63 in total, and further subdivided into chapters and paragraphs. The word ''Mishnah'' can also indicate a single paragraph of ...
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Maimonidean Controversy
The Maimonidean Controversy is the series of ongoing disputes between so called “philosophers” and so called “traditionalists”. The principle part of the controversy took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, but the questions raised have remained unresolved until today. The debates initially centered around Maimonides’ writings after they had been made accessible to French rabbinic scholars by translation to Hebrew from Judeo-Arabic and stood in direct relation to Maimonides’ project of mediating Jewish tradition and Greco-Arabic philosophy and science. However, characters within the controversy can often not be clearly ascribed to one camp (“philosophy” or “tradition”), these are simplified and polemic categories, used in the literature contemporary to the controversy itself. The four phases of the controversy No other Jewish philosophical writings have produced such controversy as Maimonides’ ''The Guide for the Perplexed''. The Maimonidean ...
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Maimonides
Musa ibn Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (); la, Moses Maimonides and also referred to by the acronym Rambam ( he, רמב״ם), was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. In his time, he was also a preeminent astronomer and physician, serving as the personal physician of Saladin. Born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain), on Passover eve, 1138 (or 1135), he worked as a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt. He died in Egypt on 12 December 1204, when his body was taken to the lower Galilee and buried in Tiberias. During his lifetime, most Jews greeted Maimonides' writings on Jewish law and ethics with acclaim and gratitude, even as far away as Iraq and Yemen. Yet, while Maimonides rose to become the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, his writings also had vociferous critics, particularly in Spain. Nonetheless, he was posthumously ackno ...
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Hartwig Hirschfeld
Hartwig Hirschfeld (; 18 December 1854 – 10 January 1934) was a Prussian-born British Orientalist, bibliographer, and educator. His particular scholarly interest lay in Arabic Jewish literature and in the relationship between Jewish and Arab cultures. He is best known for his editions of Judah Halevi's ''Kuzari''—which he published in its original Judeo-Arabic and in Hebrew, German and English translations—and his studies on the Cairo Geniza. Biography Hartwig Hirschfeld was born to a Jewish family in Thorn, Prussia. His father, Dr. Aron Hirschfeld, was a rabbi from Dirschau, and his maternal grandfather was the distinguished rabbi Salomon Plessner. After graduating from the Royal Marien Gymnasium in Posen, Hirschfeld studied Oriental languages and philosophy at the University of Berlin, at the same time attending lectures at Azriel Hildesheimer's '' Rabbiner-Seminar''. He received his doctorate from the University of Strasburg in 1878 and, after a year's compulsory ser ...
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Abba Mari
Rabbi Abba Mari ben Moses ben Joseph, was a Provençal rabbi, born at Lunel, near Montpellier, towards the end of the 13th century. He is also known as Yarhi from his birthplace (Hebrew ''Yerah'', i.e. moon, lune), and he further took the name Astruc, Don Astruc or En Astruc of Lunel from the word "astruc" meaning lucky. The descendant of men learned in rabbinic lore, Abba Mari devoted himself to the study of theology and philosophy, and made himself acquainted with the writings of Moses Maimonides and Nachmanides as well as with the ''Talmud''. In Montpellier, where he lived from 1303 to 1306, he was much distressed by the prevalence of Aristotelian rationalism, which (in his opinion) through the medium of the works of Maimonides, threatened the authority of the Old Testament, obedience to the law, and the belief in miracles and revelation. He therefore, in a series of letters (afterwards collected under the title ''Minhat Kenaot'', i.e., "Offering of Zealotry") called upon t ...
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Isaac Albalag
Isaac Albalag ( he, יצחק אלבלג) was a Jewish philosopher of the second half of the 13th century. Biography According to Steinschneider (''Hebr. Uebers''. pp. 299–306), Albalag probably lived in northern Spain or southern France. Graetz makes him a native of southern Spain. His liberal views, especially his interpretations of the Biblical account of the Creation in accordance with the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world, stamped him in the eyes of many as a heretic. Translation work Apart from this, he showed little originality, and was eclectic in tendency. This is illustrated by the fact that though he was an unreserved follower of Aristotle, he showed a leaning toward the Kabbalah, the excesses of which, however, he energetically opposed, especially the redaction of Biblical interpretations based on the assumed numerical values of the letters (Gematria). His most characteristic work was a translation (1292) of a part of Al-Ghazali's ''Maqasid al-F ...
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Abraham Abulafia
Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia ( he, אברהם בן שמואל אבולעפיה) was the founder of the school of "Prophetic Kabbalah". He was born in Zaragoza, Spain in 1240 and is assumed to have died sometime after 1291, following a stay on the small and windswept island of Comino, the smallest of the three inhabited islands that make up the Maltese archipelago. Biography Early life and travels Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father Samuel Abulafia instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. In 1258, when Abraham was eighteen years old, his father died, and two years later Abraham began a life of ceaseless wandering. His first journey in 1260 was to the Land of Israel, where he intended to begin a search for the legendary river Sambation and the Ten Lost Tribes. He got no further than 'Akko, however, because of the desolation and lawlessness in the Holy Land stemming from the chaos following the last Crusades; the war that ...
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