סעדיה אבן דנאן

Rabbi Saadiah ben Maimon ibn Danan (Saadia ibn Danan, סעדיה אבן דנאן) was a rishon of the fifteenth century, a dayan, poet, grammarian, Tanach commentator and chronicler, and one of the important talmidei chachamim of Spain and North Africa in the generations after the riots of 5151 (1391). He was born in Granada and was appointed dayan of the city, where his knowledge of the Talmud made him widely known. He is called “the first” Saadiah ibn Danan because several of his descendants carried the same name.

One of his best-known rulings concerns the standing of the anusim (Jews forced to convert) of Spain after the Inquisition. He held that those who had converted, above all in the first generation but also afterward, are not to be treated as gentiles: they are full anusim, or at the least Jews whom the halacha counts as wicked. After the expulsion from Spain he settled with his father in Oran, in Algeria, and was niftar there in 1493.

At least nine of his works are known. On language he wrote Sefer HaShorashim on Hebrew, a Hebrew–Arabic dictionary with a Talmudic lexicon in Arabic beside it, and a treatise in Arabic on the essentials of the Hebrew language; he was the first to set Hebrew meter beside its Arabic counterpart. In Torah he wrote a commentary on perek 53 of Yeshayahu, a commentary on sugyot of the Talmud, and a volume of teshuvot. He also wrote a philosophical treatise on the shapes of the Hebrew letters, a poem in praise of the Rambam’s Moreh Nevuchim, and Maamar al Seder HaDorot, a chronicle of the kings of Israel and the leaders of the Jewish people through the generations. His descendants, the ibn Danan family, were a long line of rabbis and chachamim in the city of Fez.

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