ABSTRACT
Abū’l-Barakāt Hibat Allah ibn Malka al-Baghdādī is the Arabic honorific epithet for the Jewish philosopher Rabbi Baruch ben Melekh,1 sometimes referred to as Nethanel ben Eli, who lived in the second half of the eleventh until the middle of the twelfth century (d. 1165). He was born in Balad near the city of Mosul,2 in what is today northwest Iraq. Mosul in the twelfth century was a thriving city with a Jewish population of over 25,000 households.3 Nearby to the west of Mosul in Syria lies the renowned city of Aleppo also known as Ḥalab, and to the southeast the central focal point of both Jewish and Islamic cultural activity during this period, the city of Baghdad. The name Nethanel was used by Abū’l-Barakāt’s student Isaac ben Abraham, (Yitzhak ben Avraham) Ibn Ezra, in a poem that he composed in his honor, upon the completion of Abū’l-Barakāt’s commentary on Ecclesiastics, which Isaac wrote down. In this poem he refers to Abū’l-Barakāt “as one of [his] time,” as he was commonly called in the Arabic – awḥad al-zamān.4 Abū’l-Barakāt was considered a very great philosopher, as the above appellation shows, and it is often remarked that the Arab community considered him to be a philosopher of the stature of Aristotle. It is known that he lived a fairly long life for some ninetyfive years, approximately from 1070-1165. It was during this period that he worked as a medical physician and wrote his magnum opus, the Kitāb alMu‘tabar. He was famous for his novel cures in medicine,5 while his philosophy was a major challenge for the traditional conceptions of the Aristotelian school of thought during and after this period. In 1163, at the age of ninety-three, Abū’l-Barakāt is said to have converted from Judaism to Islam along with two others, his student Yitzhak and his medical student, the mathematician Samuel ben Judah (ibn Abbas).6
