Letters regarding the Finzi family, homiletical commentary on the story of Joseph, and Hebrew translation of Avicenna, Sefer ha-seder ha-katan (Canon of Medicine, abridged)

Letters regarding the Finzi family, homiletical commentary on the story of Joseph, and Hebrew translation of Avicenna, Sefer ha-seder ha-katan (Canon of Medicine, abridged)

This compact Hebrew manuscript provides evidence of the intellectual exchanges that animated the daily life of one of Northern Italy’s most prominent Jewish families, the Finzi. The first portion of the volume contains copies of twenty letters in which the names of various members of the dynasty occur frequently. The first letter identifies the astronomer and mathematician Mordekhai Finzi (ca. 1407–76), Yehudah of Rhodos (Rhodes?), and Abraham Kohen as “men of influence at the courts of the Pope and the King of France.” Lastly included is the Sefer ha-seder ha-katan, an anonymous translation from Arabic into Hebrew of an abridgment of Avicenna’s Qānūn fī al-ṭibb (Canon of Medicine), which begins with a list of human limbs and their qualities, and proceeds to the middle of the third book, which is dedicated to special pathology, or diseases concerning single organs.

Author: Avicenna; Translator: Anonymous

1490

Manuscript on paper, 21 fols.

University of Pennsylvania, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection, LJS 469

Italy