Born Bagnols, (Gard), France, 1288
Died probably Provence, France, 20 April 1344
Gersonides left few letters and does not talk about himself in his writings; nor is his life discussed at great length by his contemporaries. He may have lived for a time in Bagnol sur-Ceze. It is probable that his father was Gershom ben Salomon de Beziers, a notable mentioned in medieval histories. Though Gersonides made several trips to Avignon, he most likely spent his entire life in Orange. There is some evidence that he may have followed the traditional occupation of his family, moneylending. With the decline of Spanish Judaism in the thirteenth century, Provence quickly became the cultural center for Jewish intellectual activity. The popes in Avignon had a lenient policy toward the Jews, whose creative life flourished, particularly in philosophy and theology. Although Gersonides spoke Provençal, his works are all written in Hebrew, and all of his quotations from Ibn Rushd , Aristotle , and ...
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Selected References
Dahan, Gilbert (ed.) (1991). Gersonide en son temps. Louvain: E. Peeters.
Feldman, Seymour (1967). “Gersonides’ Proofs for the Creation of the Universe.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 35: 113–137.
Freudenthal, Gad (1987). “épistemologie, astronomie et astrologie chez Gersonide.” Revue des études juives 146: 357–365.
— (ed.) (1992). Studies on Gersonides: A Fourteenth-Century Jewish Philosopher-Scientist. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Gersonides. Sefer ha-Heqesh ha-yashar (On valid syllogisms, written 1319). (Translated into Latin as Liber Syllogismi Recti. Recently translated by Charles H. Manekin as The Logic of Gersonides. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).
— Sefer Ma’aśeh hoshev (The work of a counter, written 1321). (Edited and translated into German by Gerson Lange. Frankfurt am Main: Golde, 1909).
— Sefer Milhamot ha-Shem (The wars of the Lord, written 1329). Riva di Trento, 1560; Leipzig, 1866; Berlin, 1923. (Recently translated into English as The Wars of the Lord by Seymour Feldman. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984–1999).
— Perush ҁal Sefer ha-Torah (Commentary on the Pentateuch, written 1329–1338). Venice, 1547; Jerusalem, 1967.
Goldstein, Bernard R. (1974). The Astronomical Tables of Rabbi Levi ben Gerson. Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 45. New Haven, Connecticut: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.
— (1985). The Astronomy of Levi ben Gerson (1288–1344): A Critical Edition of Chapters 1–20. New York: Springer-Verlag.
— “Levi ben Gerson’s Astrology in Historical Perspective.” In Dahan, Gersonide en son temps, pp. 287–300.
— “Levi ben Gerson’s Contributions to Astronomy.” In Freudenthal, Studies on Gersonides, pp. 3–20.
Goldstein, Bernard R. and David Pingree (1990). “Levi ben Gerson’s Prognostication for the Conjunction of 1345.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 80, pt. 6: 1–60.
Langermann, Y. Tzvi (1989). “Science, Jewish.” In Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R. Strayer, pp. 89–94. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
— “Gersonides on the Magnet and the Heat of the Sun.” In Freudenthal, Studies on Gersonides, pp. 267–284.
— (1999). “Gersonides and Astrology.” In Levi ben Gershom: The Wars of the Lord, edited by Seymour Feldman, Vol. 3, pp. 506–519. New York: Jewish Publication Society of America.
Rudavsky, T. M. (2000). Time Matters: Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Rudavsky, T.M. (2014). Gersonides: Levi ben Gerson. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_512
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