Person · 5030–5100 AM · 1270 CE — 1340 CE
Rabbi Jedaiah ha-Penini of Béziers רבי ידעיה בן אברהם הבדרשי, הפניני
he wrote the most reprinted Hebrew poem of the Middle Ages
Behinat Olam is thirty-seven chapters on what this world is worth, written after the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306.
He began early: Baqqashat ha-Memin at fifteen, Sefer ha-Pardes at seventeen, Ohev Nashim at eighteen.
His chief act was not the poem but a letter. The Iggeret Hitnatzelut is an open epistle to the Rashba against the ban of 1305 forbidding the study of philosophy before the age of twenty-five. He argues that Jewish scholars pursued science for the sake of faith and not against it, and defends Maimonides. He wrote also commentaries on Averroes and Avicenna, and a philosophical exposition of the aggadah.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Iggeret Hitnatzelut, after 1305 — an open answer to the Rashba on the ban concerning philosophy
Scholarship
- The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) — the years, the early books and the Iggeret Hitnatzelut
Basis: documents and evidence.