Solomon ibn Gabirol שלמה אבן גבירול

Solomon ibn Gabirol was born in Malaga about 1021 and died young, in his thirties; the place and circumstances of his death are poorly known, and some sources put it later.

He is one of those rare men who are great in two unconnected fields at once. As a poet he wrote Keter Malchut, "The Kingly Crown," a long poem on the greatness of the Creator and the smallness of man; among Sephardim it is recited on the night of Yom Kippur. As a philosopher he wrote Mekor Chaim, "The Fountain of Life," a book on matter and form, cast as a dialogue between teacher and pupil and citing almost no Jewish sources.

Hence the strangest fate of any book in Jewish literature. Mekor Chaim was translated into Latin as Fons Vitae, and in Christian Europe Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus argued with it, taking the author to be one Avicebron — an Arab, perhaps, or a Christian. The Hebrew original meanwhile was lost.

In 1846, in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, Salomon Munk compared the Latin text with Hebrew extracts in Shem Tov ibn Falaquera — and it became clear that Avicebron was Ibn Gabirol. For five hundred years the book had been read without anyone knowing who wrote it.