אברהם ביבג'ו

Rabbi Avraham ben Shem Tov Bibago (Abraham Bibago, אברהם ביבג’ו; c. 1420–1489), whose name is spelled in several ways, was a rishon of Aragon in the generation of the expulsion — a rav, rosh yeshiva, darshan and philosopher. Born to Rabbi Shem Tov, he lived first in Huesca, where in his youth, in 5206 (1446), he wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics that mentions his wife and children. In 5225 (1465) he and his brother, a physician, stood at the head of the sages of Huesca when an anus who had returned to Judaism underwent brit milah publicly before them. By 1471 he headed a yeshiva in Saragossa, where philosophy formed a central part of the curriculum. He had entry to the court of King Juan II of Aragon, and there took part in disputations before the king with representatives of the Catholic Church.

His main works are Derech Emunah, also called Derech Emunah HaGadol, a defense of Judaism, and a commentary on Ibn Rushd’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He also wrote Etz Chaim and Zeh Yenachamenu. In Derech Emunah he takes a moderate philosophical line, adopting basic Aristotelian concepts and using them to ground a conservative understanding of Judaism. The idea of emunah that gives the book its name is a case in point: he accepts from Aristotle that perfection of the intellect brings a person to olam haba (the next world) and is the summit of human achievement, but, against Aristotle, he places that highest perfection in belief in the Torah of Israel rather than in critical theoretical inquiry.

Bibago took part in the intellectual controversies of fifteenth-century Spain. He defended philosophy as a legitimate branch of Jewish learning, while criticizing those philosophers who set faith aside. Like Rabbi Yehudah Messer Leon he read widely — Christian writers, Latin works, and Hebrew translations from the Arabic — and he made an effort to understand Christian theology and its methods of proof, faulting zealotry and beliefs held without knowledge. He argued that the sages of the Talmud were versed in many disciplines, among them Euclidean geometry, mathematics, engineering and natural science.

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