נתן בן אברהם

Rabbeinu Natan ben Avraham, called Av HaYeshiva — President of the Academy — was an eleventh-century rav and commentator on the Mishnah who lived in Ramla in Eretz Yisrael and was niftar sometime between 1045 and 1051. His is the first known commentary covering the whole of the Mishnah.

Around 4771/1011 he travelled to Kairouan to see to a family inheritance, and while there learned under Rav Chushiel ben Elchanan, one of the great chachamim of the age. Business took him also to Fustat in Egypt, where he met the woman he married, a daughter of Mevorach ben Eli of that city. Near the age of forty he came home to Eretz Yisrael and settled in Ramla, and between 4798/1038 and 4811/1051 he contended with Rav Shlomo ben Yehuda of Yerushalayim over the gaonate, holding the backing of the communities of the golah while his rival held that of the local community and of the Fatimid governor of Ramla. He was in the end appointed Av Beit Din of Eretz Yisrael, the office second only to the gaon, and he held it until his passing.

His commentary, written in Judeo-Arabic, stands with Rav Hai Gaon’s commentary on Seder Taharot among the earliest we have on the Mishnah, and is the oldest to survive on all six sedarim; it circulated widely in the Jewish world in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Because it was composed in Eretz Yisrael, its explanations are held to carry an unbroken local tradition as to the meaning of difficult words. Rabbeinu Natan identifies more than a hundred of the plants named in the Mishnah, identifications that at times bear on halachah, and he notes their practical uses in his day — blossoms set into flagons of wine to give it their flavor, rose florets used to flavor olive oil and sesame. His readings often run close to those of the Rambam in his own Mishnah commentary, the two illuminating one another, though on several points they part.

The work reached later generations through an anonymous copyist of the twelfth century, apparently of Yemenite origin, who wove into it the explanations of several geonim; his fullest treatments are on Berachot, Shevuot and Avot. The Ramban brings the commentary in his own chiddushim on the Gemara, citing a gloss he had seen in old copies of the Mishnah written in Eretz Yisrael, which explained the word sippuk in Orlah to mean grafting one tree upon another. Rav Yosef Kapach rendered the whole of it into Hebrew, publishing an abridged edition between 1955 and 1958 and a second edition in 1965.