ר' קלונימוס בן קלונימוס

Rav Kalonymus ben Kalonymus ben Meir (born in Arles in 5046/1286, niftar after 5088/1328), called Maestro Calo and appearing in Latin sources as Calo or Qalonymos, was a chacham of Provence, a philosopher and one of the great translators of his age. He learned philosophy and rabbinic literature at Salon-de-Provence under Rav Abba Mari ben Eligdor and Rav Moshe ben Shlomo of Beaucaire, and studied medicine as well, though he does not appear to have practiced it. His family stood among the first of Provençal Jewry; both he and his father carried the title Nasi.

He began writing at the age of twenty. From Arabic he rendered into Hebrew a wide shelf of works in medicine, mathematics and philosophy: Ha-Ammud be-Shorshei ha-Refuah of Ali ibn Ridwan, finished at Arles in 5068/1307 after his first version was lost the year before in the expulsion of the Jews from France; treatises of Galen on bleeding and on other matters of healing; Euclid on the five geometrical bodies; Archimedes on the sphere and the cylinder; works of al-Farabi and al-Kindi; Ptolemy on the planets; and a long series of the commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle. His Iggeret Ba’alei Chayim, which renders the twenty-first of the treatises in the encyclopedia known as the Brethren of Purity, was printed at Mantua in 5317/1557 and rendered later into Yiddish and into German. Nearly all his other translations remain in manuscript.

About 5074/1314 he settled in Avignon, and his connection with Robert, king of Naples, brought him to Rome on a scientific mission. The Jews of Rome held him in such regard that when his family called him home, the poet Immanuel of Rome wrote in the name of the kehillah to the Nasi Shmuel of Arles, protesting his departure. Of his own compositions there survive a letter answering Rav Yosef Kaspi, in which he honors Kaspi’s learning but faults his writing on Tanach and argues that a work treating the figures of Tanach without due respect ought not to have been published at all; Sefer Melachim on arithmetic, geometry and astrology, written at the request of a great king; a Purim parody, Masechet Purim, composed in Rome, which found many imitators after him; and Even Bochan, an ethical work of 5082/1322 in cadenced prose after the manner of the Bechinat Olam of Rav Yedaiah Bedersi. In it he sets out the emptiness of the stations men take pride in, and closes with the sufferings of Israel during the three years he was writing — the persecutions of the shepherds and the lepers, and the burning of the Talmud at Toulouse. Even Bochan was first printed at Naples in 5249/1489 and went through many editions.