Samuel Kansi

Origins and early life

Samuel Kansi was a Jewish astronomer of Provence in the fourteenth century, one of the Hebrew-writing men of science who made the Jewish communities of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin a centre of astronomy in the late Middle Ages.

Work and career

His surname comes from the Hebrew word keneset, assembly, and corresponds to the name D'Escola, borne by several Provençal Jews of the period. He wrote the introduction to the Shesh Kenafayim, the Six Wings, the astronomical work of Immanuel ben Jacob of Tarascon, a set of tables for calculating eclipses and the phases of the moon that circulated far beyond the Jewish world. He is also thought to be the author of a commentary on the astronomical tables of Jacob ben David ben Yom-Tov Bonet.

In 1406 a Samuel d'Escola, who may well be the same man, copied at Avignon the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, the great code of Jewish law; the manuscript is what survives of that hand.

Later years

Almost nothing else is known of his life, not the year of his birth nor the year of his death, and what remains of him is what remains of most medieval Jewish scholars: a name at the head of a text, and the work itself.