In Search of the “Book of Figures”: Medicine and Astrology in Montpellier at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century

Abstract

The exchange of letters between Abba Mari of Montpellier (fl. 1300) and Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret of Barcelona (ca. 1235–1310), collected in the book Minfiat qena'ot [Zealous Offering], opens with a controversy over medical astrology. While the outcome of this controversy, the ban issued in the summer of 1305 in Barcelona against premature study of philosophy, constitutes a well-known event in Jewish history, it is not at all that clear why Abba Mari chose to attack his adversaries, the students of philosophy, by raising the issue of their alleged medical-astrological practices. The data in his first letters to Ibn Adret hint at what might have been the extent of these practices in Montpellier of 1300 as well as who the personalities that he had in mind might have been.From the very first letter we learn that at the source of all the trouble were some Jewish physicians in Montpellier–the name of Isaac de Lattes is specifically mentioned–who employed an astrological talisman which was supposed to bring relief to an ailing right kidney. To his great astonishment, Abba Mari came to learn in about the year 1300 that Ibn Adret was not ready to condemn such a practice and that he actually approved of it, while Abba Mari considered it to be straightforward idolatry.