IBN TIBBON, MOSES BEN SAMUEL

(b. Marseilles, France; fl. Montpellier, Frnce, 1240-1283)

medicine, philosophy, translation.

Moses ben Samuel was related to Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon and father of the Judah ben Moses ibn Tibbon who took part in the struggles between Manimonideans and anti-Maimonideans that occurred at Montpellier, aligning himself with the former. He spent most of his life in Montpellier. He wrote a number of works, most of them commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. Among them is one that deals with the weights and measures mentioned in those works.

Ibn Tibbon is most significant as a translator from Arabic into Hebrew of Ibn Rushd (commentaries on Aristotle: Physics, De caelo et mundo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteora, De anima, Parva naturalia, Metaphysics, Problems), Themistius (commentary on Book A of the Metaphysics), al-Batalyūsī (Kitāb al-hadā’iq), al-Fārābū (Kitāb mabādi’), Maimonides (Kitāb al-sirāj, Kitāb al-farā’id, Maqāla fi sina’at al-mantiq [dealing with philosophy and religion], and Regimen Addressed, On Poisons and Antidotes, Commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates [on medicine]) , Euclid (Elements), Geminus (Introduction to Astronomy), Theodosius of Bithynia (Spherics), Jābir ibn Aflah (Islāh al-majistū), Muhammad al-Hassār (treatise on arithmetic and algebra), al-Bitrūjī (Kitāb al-hai’a), Ibn Sīnā (Canticum, The Small Canon), Ibn al-Jazzār (Viaticum peregrinantis), Hunayn ibn Ishāq (Isagoge Johannitii ad tegni Galeni), al-Rāzī (Antidotary, Division and Distribution of Diseases).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For the MSS see Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebräischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters . . . (Berlin, 1893; repr. Graz, 1956), index, 1062, and the references given there.

For general information, see E. Renan and A. Neubauer, Rabbins français (Paris, 1877), repr. from Histoire littéraire de la France; George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, II (Baltimore, 1931), 847 and index; and Max Schloessinger, in Jewish EncyclopediaVI (New York, 1906), 545–548. Also see references in the article on Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon in this Dictionary.

J. Vernet