Isaac ibn Albalia

Origins and early life

Isaac ben Baruch ibn Albalia was born in Córdoba in 1035 into a Jewish family of the old aristocracy of al-Andalus that claimed descent from the exiles Titus had brought from Jerusalem — a Jew by birth, lineage and office, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica records, and this fiche needs no more.

Work and career

He was a friend of Samuel ha-Nagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, and in 1065 dedicated to Samuel's son Joseph his treatise Sod ha-Ibbur, The Secret of Intercalation, on the mathematics of the Jewish calendar, which made his name as an astronomer; the massacre of the Jews of Granada in 1066, in which Joseph was killed, drove him to Seville. There, in 1069, the poet-king al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, the most brilliant of the taifa princes, appointed him court astronomer and astrologer — the science the kings of the age consulted before every war — and at thirty-one made him nasi, prince, of the Jews of his kingdom, an office he held for some twenty years and used, the sources say, to better the legal and social standing of the Jews of Seville.

He was also a rabbi and a Talmudist, the author of a commentary on the difficult passages of the Talmud, Kuppat ha-Rokhelim, The Peddler's Basket, which is lost, and a poet whom Moses ibn Ezra praised; his son Baruch became the teacher of Abraham ibn Daud, the historian of Spanish Jewry, who was his nephew and preserved his memory. When the Almoravids took Seville in 1091 and the courts of the taifas fell, he moved to Granada, and died there in 1094.