Avraham ibn Ezra רבי אברהם אבן עזרא
Bible commentator, grammarian, astronomer and lifelong wanderer
Avraham ibn Ezra was born in Tudela around 4849 and spent the first half of his life in Muslim Spain, among poets and scholars. Then everything collapsed: the Almohads came, communities were destroyed or forcibly converted, and his son, tradition says, was baptised in a distant land. From the age of fifty Ibn Ezra was a wanderer — Italy, Provence, northern France, London. He wrote of himself: «if I sold candles, the sun would never set».
In every city he wrote a book, because the Jews of Europe did not read Arabic and lacked what was ordinary in Spain. He brought them Hebrew grammar, mathematics, astronomy, decimal numerals — and above all his commentary on the Tanakh.
That commentary is a school of exact reading. Ibn Ezra holds to the plain sense: grammar, word meaning, the order of the verse. He argues with strained interpretations and with the Karaites, sometimes sharply. He also left hints from which later readers drew bold questions about the text of the Torah.
Ramban quotes him constantly, often in disagreement.