תּוֹלְדוֹת
Rabbi Shmuel ibn Tzartza (שמואל אבן צרצה), also called Rabbi Shmuel ibn Sina, was a Jewish philosopher of Sefarad who was active in Palencia between about 1360 and 1380. The Spanish word zarza means a thorn bush, the same meaning as the Hebrew seneh.
He wrote two works. Mekor Chaim, completed in 1368 and printed in Mantua in 1559, is a peirush on the Torah built around the peirush of Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra. Miklol Yofi explains the aggadot of Chazal in both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi, in 151 chapters divided into seven parts.
He belonged to a circle of thinkers in fourteenth-century Spain who wrote on Rabbi Avraham ibn Ezra’s peirush on the Torah and explained at length its hidden references to astrology. Among them were Rabbi Shlomo ibn Yaish, Rabbi Shlomo Alkonstantin, Rabbi Shlomo Franco, Rabbi Ezra Gatiño, Rabbi Yosef Tov Elem and Rabbi Shem Tov ibn Shaprut, and he wrote more than most of them. At a time when the philosophy of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) held the field, he followed the older Neoplatonic school, and he drew on astrology in explaining the drashot of Chazal, the pesukim and the peirush of Ibn Ezra.
The poet Shlomo Reuveni of Barcelona and the astronomer Yitzchak ibn al-Chadib each wrote poems in his honor, the latter in 1377.
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ר' שמואל אבן צרצה מכונה גם רבי שמואל אבן סינא הוא פילוסוף יהודי ספרדי שפעל בעיר פלנסיה בין השנים (1360–1380), ונמנה עם החוג הנאו-פלטוני שפעל בספרד במאה ה-14. היה בין הפוריים בחוג זה מבחינת היקף כתביו הרחב.
Samuel ibn Seneh Zarza was a Spanish philosopher who lived in Palencia in the second half of the 14th century. According to Leopold Zunz, his surname is derived from the Spanish town Zarza, and is accordingly synonymous with the Hebrew "seneh." Of his life no details are known, for while in his notes on the Sefer ha-Yuḥasin Samuel Shullam states that Zarza was burned at the stake by the tribunal of Valencia on the denunciation of Isaac Campanton, who accused him of denying the creation of the world, historians have proved this assertion a mere legend. Although a comparatively unimportant writer, if his two works may serve as a criterion, Zarza ranked high in the estimation of his contemporaries, so that the poet Solomon Reubeni of Barcelona and the astronomer Isaac ibn Al-Ḥadib composed poems in his honor.