Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol

Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol , c.1021-1058, Jewish poet and philosopher, known also as Avicebron, b. Malaga. His secular poetry deals partly with nature and love, but most of it reveals a gloom and bitterness engendered by his tragic life. Orphaned early, he spent much of his life contending with mediocre rivals and critics jealous of his scholarship. It is thought that he was murdered by a rival. Ibn Gabriol's religious poetry is filled with a mystic awe of God, and much of it has been incorporated into the Judaic liturgy. His great philosophical work, The Well of Life, showing the influence of Neoplatonism, was written in Arabic. In its Latin translation ( Fons vitae ), it exercised a great influence on Christian thought. The book is an attempt to explain the universality of matter, man's purpose in life, and the communion of man's soul with the spiritual sources that created it. His hundreds of poems and his book of ethics, The Improvement of the Moral Qualities, were also important.

Bibliography: See study by A. Cohen (1925).

Gabirol, Solomon ben Judah ibn (c.1020– c.1057). Jewish Spanish poet and philosopher. Solomon ibn Gabirol was the author of many Hebrew poems. Many of his religious poems have been preserved in the Sephardi and Ashkenazi prayer books and in Karaite liturgy; he was regarded as the outstanding poet of his time. In addition, two philosophical treatises survive: Mekor Ḥayyim (The Source of Life) is a discussion of the principles of matter and form; and Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh (The Improvement of the Moral Qualities) is concerned with ethics.