Biography
Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nessiah, Rabbi Moshe ben Yitzchak (ר’ משה בן יצחק) of London, was a rishon of England who lived at the end of the twelfth century and the start of the thirteenth. He wrote on Hebrew grammar and compiled a dictionary of the Hebrew language. His mother was most likely the Jewish woman of Cambridge known as Comitissa.
As a young man he wrote Leshon Limmudim, a work on Hebrew grammar that has been lost; it is known only because he mentions it in his later sefer. That later work is Sefer HaShoham, the “Onyx Book,” whose title is formed from the letters of his name, משה. It shows that he knew some Arabic and was familiar with the works of Rabbi Yosef Kimchi. Part of it was printed in Oxford in 1882.
In the reign of Queen Elizabeth a tombstone of a Rabbi Moshe son of Rabbi Yitzchak was found at Ludgate in London. It had been taken from the Jewish cemetery in Jewin Street in 1215, during the uprising of the English barons against King John. If the stone is his, he was niftar before that year.
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Where traditions differ. It is not certain that the tombstone found at Ludgate is his, and his mother is identified with Comitissa of Cambridge.
Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nessiah of London was an English grammarian and lexicographer of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. His mother was probably a Jew nicknamed Comitissa of Cambridge.
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