Masarjawaih

Origins and early life

Masarjawaih was a Jewish physician of Basra, active in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, an Aramaic- and Syriac-speaking Jew of Persian origin according to several sources; he was born a Jew, lived as one, and the Arabic bibliographers who preserve his name — Ibn al-Nadim in the Fihrist, later Ibn Abi Usaybi'a — identify him plainly as such.

Work and career

Under the Umayyad caliph Marwan I, about the year 683, he translated from Syriac into Arabic the Pandects of Ahron of Alexandria, a medical compendium in thirty books, and added two books of his own. That translation is the earliest named rendering of a major medical work into Arabic, made roughly a century and a half before the great translation movement of Baghdad under al-Ma'mun, and it opened Arabic medicine to the Greek and Syriac inheritance: the Pandects were the channel through which the earliest description of smallpox and much Alexandrian pharmacology reached Arabic readers, and al-Razi still quotes Masarjawaih by name in the tenth century.

He also wrote treatises on the medicinal properties of foods and of plants, of which fragments survive in later compilations, and he served as physician to the caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, who reigned from 717 to 720. This fiche notes plainly that nothing certain is known of his life beyond these facts, and that the sources are the Arabic biographical tradition rather than any Jewish record; his son Isa is also named as a physician.

He stands at the head of the long line of Jewish physicians in the Islamic world that runs through Isaac Israeli and Maimonides.