אבא מרי בן אליגדור

Abba Mari ben Eligdor, known in Provence as Sen Astruc de Noves (Senior Astruc), was a Talmudist, philosopher, astronomer and physician of the first quarter of the fourteenth century and one of the chachamim of Provence. He lived in the town of Salon. The years of his birth and passing are not known, but by 5095/1335 he is described as already very old.

He had written commentaries on the Chumash and on Iyov, chiddushim on several masechtot of the Talmud Bavli and on Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, and works on natural science, logic and metaphysics; only fragments survive, in manuscript, in libraries across Europe. His commentary on Iyov, preserved in several of them, is less an historical work than a philosophical inquiry into the sefer’s main theme of Divine justice. He holds that the book was written by Moshe Rabbeinu, and reads Iyov’s four friends as four positions on the existence of evil in the world — Elifaz denying it any reality, Bildad holding that the righteous suffer here to be rewarded the more in the world to come, Tzofar insisting that man cannot fathom the Divine will, and Elihu demonstrating philosophically what Elifaz accepted on faith. This approach is mentioned in the Talmud as well.

Two further works are attributed to him with less certainty, because he was at times confused with Moshe Narboni: a philosophical and allegorical commentary on Shir HaShirim in manuscripts at Cambridge and Oxford, and a Hebrew translation of Al-Ghazali’s Tendencies of the Philosophers. A Munich manuscript containing an introduction to the first book of Euclid, headed “written by Abba Mari, philosopher and teacher of truth,” is his own, though Steinschneider once doubted it. He also wrote a work of refutations against the Book of Secrets of Yosef Kaspi, which has been lost apart from quotations in later writers.

His talmidim included Kalonymus ben Kalonymus and the astronomer Shmuel ben Yehuda of Marseilles, who wrote in his introduction to a copy of the Almagest that he had toiled in astronomy with “the aged and perfect chacham, our teacher Rav Abba Mari, known among the people as Sen Astruc de Noves,” in the tower of Salon.