ר׳ שלמה בן יהודה אבן גבירול

ר׳ שלמה בן יהודה אבן גבירול (approximately 1021/22–1057/58), known to Latin scholastic philosophy as Avicebron, was one of medieval al-Andalus's greatest Hebrew poets and its earliest major Jewish Neoplatonic philosopher. His family came from Córdoba during the political breakdown of the caliphate, and he was probably born in Málaga, the city he claimed through the signature al-Mālaqī. Taken to Zaragoza as a child and orphaned young, he received a wide education in Hebrew grammar, rabbinic literature, astronomy, mathematics, Arabic culture and philosophy. His poems portray chronic illness, bodily suffering, precocious learning, isolation and fierce awareness of his talent, but autobiographical verse is rhetorically fashioned evidence and cannot always be read literally. By sixteen he was composing sophisticated liturgical poetry. The Zaragoza courtier ר׳ יקותיאל בן יצחק became his patron; after ר׳ יקותיאל was killed during the coup of 1039, ר׳ שלמה produced two powerful elegies and lost vital political protection. At about nineteen he completed הענק, a four-hundred-line Hebrew grammatical poem now largely lost. Around 1045 he composed in Judaeo-Arabic תיקון מידות הנפש, an ethical psychology connecting twenty character traits with the five senses and bodily temperaments. Soon afterward conflict with Zaragoza's communal elite appears to have driven him away. Later sources and poems connect him with ר׳ שמואל הנגיד in Granada and with ר׳ נסים בן יעקב around 1048–49, but the duration and even precise locations of these patronage relationships remain uncertain; claims that he formally taught ר׳ יהוסף הנגיד or studied personally under ר׳ נסים go beyond secure evidence. His philosophical masterpiece, ינבוע אלחיאה—known in Hebrew as מקור חיים and in Latin as Fons Vitae —presents a dialogue on matter, form, divine will and the structure of reality. It argues that spiritual as well as bodily substances are composed of matter and form, a doctrine later called universal hylomorphism. Because the work contains no overt biblical or rabbinic citation, its Latin author 'Avicebron' was long taken to be Muslim or Christian. ר׳ שלמה מונק established in the nineteenth century that Avicebron was ר׳ שלמה אבן גבירול by matching the Latin work with Hebrew excerpts preserved by ר׳ שם טוב בן יוסף אבן פלקירה. Within Jewish culture, his influence was sustained most visibly by his Hebrew verse. His secular poetry ranges across praise, friendship, satire, nature, wine, riddles, grief and the pursuit of wisdom; his liturgical poetry joined biblical Hebrew, Arabic quantitative meter, philosophy and intense confession. כתר מלכות, his forty-part meditation on God, cosmos, human frailty and repentance, became part of Yom Kippur worship in many communities. He probably died in Valencia in 1057/58 while still in his thirties. Later stories that an envious poet murdered and buried him beneath a fig tree, or that he created a female golem, belong to legend rather than recoverable biography.