For centuries Christian scholars studied Avicebron without realising he was a Jewish poet
Medieval Christian thinkers admired a philosopher called Avicebron, author of the Fons Vitae, and assumed he was a Christian or Muslim. Only in 1846 did Solomon Munk prove that Avicebron was Solomon ibn Gabirol, an 11th-century Jewish poet from Málaga whose name had been worn down by translators, syllable by syllable.
Ibn Gabirol was born in Málaga in late 1021 or early 1022, after his father, a prominent man in Córdoba, fled a political crisis in 1013. Orphaned young, with no siblings, he found a protector in the statesman Yekutiel ibn Hassan and moved to Zaragoza, a centre of Jewish learning. He was comfortably off but miserable: a disease from his teens, possibly lupus vulgaris, left him in constant pain, he thought himself short and ugly, and his cutting wit made powerful enemies. The poet Moses ibn Ezra wrote that his temper ruled his intellect.
He was precocious. By 17 he had written a poem listing all 613 commandments of Judaism and a 200-verse elegy for Yekutiel, and by 19 a 400-verse acrostic teaching Hebrew grammar. In his twenties he wrote, in Arabic, a treatise on improving moral character, and around 28 the Fons Vitae. Even his death is uncertain: accounts place it about 1058 in Valencia or in 1069 or 1070, and one legend says a jealous rival buried him under a fig tree whose fruit grew unnaturally sweet.
The Fons Vitae, a dialogue between master and pupil, argued that everything created, souls and intellects included, is made of matter and form, a doctrine called universal hylomorphism, and it stressed the divine will. The Arabic original is lost; it survived through a Latin translation made in 1150 by Abraham ibn Daud and Dominicus Gundissalinus of the Toledo translators. Because it quotes neither scripture nor rabbis, readers never guessed its author was Jewish. Munk found a Hebrew summary by Shem-Tov ibn Falaquera in Paris, matched it with the Latin, and solved the puzzle.
His fate is often compared with Philo's: overlooked by fellow Jews as a philosopher yet influential among Christians, in his case on medieval scholasticism. Jews did cherish him as a poet, and his Keter Malkut, the Royal Crown, recasts ideas from the Fons Vitae in verse.
Source: Solomon ibn Gabirol
