Ibn Gabirol

Jewish poet and philosopher

• Born: c. 1020
• Birthplace: Málaga, Caliphate of Córdoba (now in Spain)
• Died: c. 1057
• Place of death: Probably Valencia, Kingdom of Valencia (now in Spain)

Ibn Gabirol created a form of poetry written in biblical Hebrew. His version of Neoplatonic philosophy came to be integrated within Christian Augustinian thought.

Early Life

Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol (IHB-uhn gah-BEE-rawl) was probably born in Málaga. The sources for his biographical data are allusions in his poems, references in the works of the Jewish commentator Moses ibn Ezra (c. 1060-c. 1139) and the Arabic historian Ibn Saՙid (c. 1029-1070), and Hebrew legends, many of which were published in the sixteenth century in Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

Western scholars index his name in a variety of ways: Most list him as Ibn Gabirol, others as Gabirol, and a few as Solomon ibn Gabirol. His name in Arabic was Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn Yaḥya ibn Gabirūt; in Latin, he was known as Avicebron, Avicenebrol, Albenzubron, and variations thereof. There is no agreement as to the meaning of the name Gabirol. Some have suggested that it is a diminutive of the Arabic word yabir (power), while others see it as affixing the Hebrew word El (God), to yabir. The uncertainty in dates is caused, in part, by the sources’ use of different calendars. Ibn Ezra wrote of poets and poetics in the eighth century of the fourth millennium (4800 of the Hebrew year), which approximates 1040, while Ibn Saՙid used the Muslim calendar.

In 4800 (of the Hebrew year), according to Ibn Ezra, “lived Abū Ayyūb Selomo son of Yehuda ibn Gabirol, the Cordoban.” From this, it has been concluded that Ibn Gabirol’s parents had lived in Córdoba, capital of Muslim Iberia, whence they fled, probably in 1013 during the fundamentalist revolution that shattered the unity of the Umayyad caliphate. The family went to Málaga, where Solomon was born an inference from his custom of appending “Malki,” meaning “of Málaga,” to his name in his writings. His poems suggest that his father had been prominent in Cordoban society before the turmoil and that his parents suffered from something akin to tuberculosis.

According to his self-description, Ibn Gabirol was small, homely, and weak; he suffered from a skin disease. He was educated in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek literature as well as philosophy, science, and theology; indeed, Ibn Gabirol was wont to complain that he was treated as a Greek. Various sources describe him as vain, argumentative, and hot-tempered.

Life’s Work

By his own report, Ibn Gabirol’s first five poems were written when he was sixteen or younger. The most significant of these is Azharot , a nonmetrical versification of the 613 Commandments. Shortly after this time, the family moved to Saragossa, where Mundir I (r. 1029-1038) had established an independent kingdom that attempted to maintain the sophisticated lifestyle of the Umayyads. Mundir and his immediate heirs welcomed all poets and philosophers. One of the leading figures at court was the Jewish Yekutiel ibn Hasan, who befriended the young poet. During this period, Ibn Gabirol wrote several works, including elegies on the death of Hai ben Sherira Gaon (939-1038), leader of the Hebrew Academy at Pumbedita, and Anaq (necklace), a four-hundred-line didactic poem on the importance of Hebrew grammar, of which only eighty-eight lines have survived.

Around 1039, Ibn Gabirol lost his father and his patron: His father apparently succumbed to tuberculosis, and Yekutiel was assassinated by rivals at the palace. In 1040, Ibn Gabirol wrote two elegies in honor of his former patron. Around the same time, he wrote a poem that he dedicated and sent to Samuel ha-Nagid (Ibn Nagrella; 993-1056), vizier to Badis, king of Granada, whose forces had just defeated the rival king of Seville. Samuel, one of the most influential Jews of the period, sent financial assistance to the poet, who remained in Saragossa completing, in Arabic, his major study of ethics, Kitāb iṣlā al-akhlāq (1045; The Improvement of Moral Qualities, 1901). About that time, Ibn Gabirol’s mother died. Alone in the world and dependent on a patron for support, he went to Granada. Apparently, Samuel had known Ibn Gabirol’s parents in Málaga. He took the orphan under his protection, and Ibn Gabirol came to call him “my father.”

After arriving in Granada, Ibn Gabirol wrote a long, mournful poem expressing his feeling of despair on leaving Saragossa. In 1048, Nissim ben Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahim, leader of the Kairwan (Tunisia) Jewish community, arrived in Granada to arrange a marriage between his daughter and Samuel’s son. Nissim (c. 990-1062) was a noted theologian, and Ibn Gabirol spent a year listening to his public disputations and commentaries. It has been surmised that Samuel had abandoned Ibn Gabirol because of some uncomplimentary comments the poet had made about Samuel’s poetic style, and that Ibn Gabirol became dependent on Nissim. This interpretation, however, seems doubtful, since Nissim himself was dependent on Samuel’s largesse and Ibn Gabirol was not the type to sit at anyone’s feet.

Ibn Gabirol was the first of the significant Hispano-Hebrew poets and philosophers who wrote in both biblical Hebrew and Arabic. At this time, all Jews could read Ibn Gabirol’s Hebrew poetry, but Jews and Christians who lived outside the Arabic world could not read works written in Arabic. During the period 1167-1186, Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon translated The Improvement of Moral Qualities into Hebrew. Meanwhile, Christians had become interested in Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical work. In the mid-twelfth century, his major philosophical study, of which no Arabic copy has surfaced, was translated from Arabic into Latin as {I}Fons vitae{/I} (fountain of life; English translation, 1963). A century later, Shem Tov ben Joseph Falaquera translated portions of the Arabic manuscript into Hebrew, but the Hebrew reading public found it of little interest.

As time went by, most of the Arabic manuscripts were either lost or destroyed by Muslim fundamentalists. Jews preserved the Hebraic poetic and ethical works and Christians the Latin philosophical works. The result was that Jews knew nothing of Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical opera; certain fifteenth and sixteenth century Portuguese Jewish philosophers, for example, considered “Albenzubron” a Muslim. Christians, on the other hand, knowing nothing of his Hebrew poetry, considered “Avicebron” a Muslim or an Arab convert to Christianity. In the mid-nineteenth century, Solomon Munk realized that Falaquera’s Hebrew translation and the Latin Fons vitae were based on the same lost Arabic source. Munk published an extensive work demonstrating that Ibn Gabirol and Avicebron were one and the same.

Ibn Gabirol worked simultaneously on religious and philosophical poetry and prose. Except where internal evidence is available, there is little indication as to the order of composition of his works.

Hebrew was not the daily language of Iberian Jews; most spoke Arabic. Biblical Hebrew and the Hebrew of the commentaries, however, were known to all Jews. Secular poetry, if it had existed in biblical times, did not survive. There developed in Palestine under Byzantine influence, however, a form of poetry (payytanim ) that was used in religious services and for special occasions. This form, based on stress rather than meter, and with various patterns of rhyme, was brought to Iberia and flourished there. During the height of the Umayyad caliphate, Jewish courtiers employed this poetic form for secular purposes. Around the same time, Jewish scholars embarked on an intensive study of biblical Hebrew; the result was an expansion of the biblical vocabulary. Ibn Gabirol was a proponent of biblical Hebrew, and his earliest poems followed the model of the payytanim. Gradually, his poems took on the characteristics of the most sophisticated Arabic stylists, but the language was the expanded biblical Hebrew. His secular poems became models, and copies quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean.

It was in Ibn Gabirol’s religious poetry, however, that he reached the summit of his creativity. Using biblical Hebrew but infusing the poems with imagery and meters derived from Arabic poetry, he created works of such lasting beauty that they are still used in Hebrew prayer books. There is a pessimistic quality to these poems. While this dark mood is consistent with the stylistic temper of Arabic poets during the last decades of Umayyad Iberia, it also reflects Ibn Gabirol’s own experience of being forced into exile after the death of Yekutiel and his family’s memories of the flight from Córdoba. There is a yearning for redemption in his poetry; the poems are mystical and personal. Unlike his secular poems, which are marked by bravado and arrogance, Ibn Gabirol’s religious works are filled with longing and humility.

The poem Keter Malkhut (The Kingly Crown, 1911) is, in part, a restatement of Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy and a confession of sins. In his system, the incorporeal God, derived from a Platonic or Neoplatonic conceptualization, is all-powerful: “Thou art Lord, and all creatures are Thy servants and adorers.” Following Plato, Ibn Gabirol visualized the soul as temporarily inhabiting the body, but he did not fall into the Platonic concept of reincarnation. The work demonstrates Ibn Gabirol’s knowledge of Islamic science, particularly astronomy. The last portion of the poem, the confession of sins, is used in some Sephardic prayer books at Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

Ibn Gabirol was a Neoplatonist at a time when Jewish intellectual life was focused on Aristotelian ideas. Scholars such as Judah ibn Tibbon or Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) either did not know or thought unimportant Ibn Gabirol’s philosophical writings, while Falaquera thought him a follower of Empedocles. In reality, one can trace Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy to ideas in Aristotle, Galen, Plotinus, Proclus, and various Hebrew and Muslim philosophers and theologians. The form of Fons vitae is the Platonic dialogue, and Plato is the only philosopher mentioned.

Rejected by Jewish and Christian Aristotelians, Ibn Gabirol was quickly accepted by Christian Augustinians. Because he had developed a philosophical and theological system without reference to Hebrew tradition, Christians considered his work a valid instrument for bolstering Augustinian teaching. Starting with the translator/commentator Dominicus Gundissalinus, Ibn Gabirol’s cosmology and methodology influenced thirteenth century Christian theologians such as William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste, Saint Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Saint Bonaventure, and Raymond Lull. The Christians took Ibn Gabirol’s concepts of light and of the plurality of forms and incorporated them into Augustinian Scholasticism.

The Improvement of Moral Qualities, an ethical work that has survived in both the Arabic original and Ibn Tibbon’s translation, became popular among Jews. Because of the numerous biblical citations, it was clearly marked as Jewish and seemed to hold little interest for Christians. The work is original in that the author lists twenty personal traits, each of which he links to one of the five senses. In the Arabic original, there is a diagram later used by Kabbalists in developing their theories.

If Ibn Gabirol wrote any biblical commentaries or Kabbalist tracts, none has survived. Abraham ibn Ezra of Tudela (1089-1164), a noted theologian, cited Ibn Gabirol seven times in his comments on the Bible. There is extant a comment by Ibn Gabirol on the Garden of Eden passage in Genesis in which that passage is treated allegorically: Eden is dealt with not as a specific place but as a generalized preexisting atmosphere, while the garden represents the real world. There is also extant a satirical poem in which, like the Kabbalist writers, Ibn Gabirol makes use of the fact that each Hebrew letter has a numerical value. The values of the letters in the word for water, for example, total ninety, while those in the word for wine total seventy, proving that water is superior to wine.

Through the years, scholars have been discovering bits and pieces of Ibn Gabirol’s canon; a diwan (collection of poems), for example, was found in Cairo. References to many undiscovered poems exist. Ibn Gabirol boasted that he had written twenty books, but only two have been found. Two others attributed to him, a Latin translation titled De anima and a Hebrew translation titled Mivhar ha-Peninim (maxims; 1546), are questioned by most authorities.

Ibn Gabirol never married; he averred that his only loves were poetry and philosophy, avenues to truth. According to Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol was thirty years old when he died in Valencia. That would be around 1050 or 1051. Hebrew tradition places his death in the year 4830, or 1069/1070, when he was fifty. Ibn Saՙid states that “Sulaiman ibn Yakhaya, known by the name of ibn Gabirūl of Sarakotha . . . died . . . in the year 450,” that is, between February, 1057, and February, 1058. Scholars accept the latter date because it is the most exact; moreover, whatever is reported regarding Ibn Gabirol after 1057/1058 seems to involve magic and fantasy: that he created a female golem out of wood, or that he was murdered in Valencia by a rival Arabic poet who hid Ibn Gabirol’s body under a fig grove, and the deed was discovered when a tree began to produce miraculous fruit.

Significance

Ibn Gabirol was the product of a sophisticated Arabic civilization that permitted intellectual and religious freedom. During its zenith, that society accepted Greek science and philosophy. The Iberian Jews not only adapted aspects of Arabic culture and learning but also began a renaissance of biblical studies. Ibn Gabirol was an extraordinary stylist in both Arabic and Hebrew. He helped fashion the philosophical vocabulary of Arabic and the sensual vocabulary of Hebrew. As the author of at least 175 religious and 146 secular poems in biblical Hebrew, he was known as the Nightingale; his philosophical works crossed sectarian lines. That the Muslim fundamentalists burned his manuscripts while the Jews rejected his philosophy and the Christians paid no attention to his poetry reflects the limitations of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian civilizations and not the genius of Ibn Gabirol.

Bibliography

Gilson, Étienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1955. A significant work, written by a leading Thomist who pays special attention to the Aristotelian aspects of Hebrew and Arabic philosophy but also includes a brief summary of Ibn Gabirol’s Platonism and its impact on Christian thinkers.

Goldberg, Isaac, ed. and comp. Solomon Ibn Gabirol: A Bibliography of His Poems in Translation. Washington, D.C.: Word Works, 1998. A collection listing translations of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry into more than a dozen languages, including English.

Husik, Isaac. A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy. 1916. Reprint. New York: Atheneum, 1969. One of the earliest studies of the subject. Includes an excellent chapter on the development of Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy and ethics. The section on ethics is perhaps one of the best available.

Ibn Gabirol. Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Translated by Peter Cole. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Part of the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation series, this collection provides a selection of Ibn Gabirol’s poems. Includes a bibliography and index.

Myer, Isaac. Qabbalah. 1888. Reprint. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1970. Links Ibn Gabirol with the Kabbalists. The work is interesting, though quite speculative. Author’s explanation of the drawings in Ibn Gabirol is significant.

Sarna, Nahum M. “Hebrew and Bible Studies in Medieval Spain.” In The Sephardi Heritage: Essays on the History and Cultural Contribution of the Jews of Spain and Portugal, edited by R. D. Barnett. New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1971. An excellent study of the Hebrew renaissance in Muslim Iberia, placing Ibn Gabirol’s work in the context of both that Hebrew renaissance and the dominant Arabic civilization.

Sirat, Colette. A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The author examines the intellectual sources of Hebrew philosophy the Bible, tradition, Aristotelianism, and Platonism demonstrating how each of these helped shape emerging philosophical positions. One section details Ibn Gabirol’s fusion of Hebrew religious thought with Neoplatonism.

Tanenbaum, Adena. The Contemplative Soul: Hebrew Poetry and Philosophical Theory in Medieval Spain. Boston: Brill, 2002. Presents a critical history of writing about the soul in Hebrew poetry and Jewish philosophy in Andalusian Spain, including the work of Ibn Gabirol. Provides an extensive bibliography and index.