R. Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen · c. 1247 (Hebrew self-translation from the author's earlier Arabic; this is a 14th-c. manuscript copy)
Read the translation (PDF) · Editorial footnotes (PDF)
The first scientific encyclopedia written in Hebrew. Midrash ha-Ḥokhmah — “The Exposition of Wisdom” — is the work of Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen (Ibn Matḳah) of Toledo, who wrote it first in Arabic and then rendered it into Hebrew himself around 1247.
The work gathers the philosophical sciences as they stood in the Arabic tradition and sets them out for a Hebrew reader in a single ordered sequence of treatises.
Its natural-science section is the most fully preserved part of this witness, and it proceeds through the body organ by organ — the lung, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys and bladder, the midriff, the belly — before turning to generation. There the treatises take up the womb, the nature of semen and which organ it issues from, the eggs of fish, the generation of bees, the shelled animals, and the causes of male and female, of resemblance and heredity, of milk. A further treatise treats hair: its thickness and fineness, its softness, the cause of the beard, the causes of its colours.
This is Aristotelian biology carried into Hebrew — the questions a thirteenth- century natural philosopher thought a complete account of living things had to answer.
Judah ha-Kohen belongs to the moment when Hebrew was becoming a language of science, and his self-translation from his own Arabic makes the transition visible in a single author. Encyclopedias like this one were how a Hebrew reader without Arabic gained access to the whole Aristotelian curriculum at once, and they shaped what later Hebrew writers — including several elsewhere in this corpus — could assume their readers already knew.
The translated witness is the Parma manuscript (Cod. Parm. 2769), a fourteenth- century copy. Its rubrics are executed in heavy display ink, and several are abraded to the point where the reading is uncertain; the translation marks those places rather than silently choosing.