Ibn Janah
990 CE–1055 CE · Rishonim · Cordoba
Rabbi Yonah ibn Janah (c. 990–c. 1055), known in Arabic as Abu al-Walid Marwan ibn Janah, was the greatest Hebrew grammarian and lexicographer of the Middle Ages. Born in Córdoba and trained in Lucena, he fled the collapse of Córdoba during the Berber upheavals and settled in Zaragoza, where he practiced medicine and wrote. His masterwork, the Kitab al-Tanqih (Sefer HaDikduk), paired the first complete Hebrew grammar (Sefer HaRikmah) with a dictionary of over two thousand roots (Sefer HaShorashim); together they laid the scientific foundation for all later Hebrew philology and were drawn on by exegetes from Ibn Ezra to the Radak.
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CordobaקורדובהAl-Andalus, Spain
What they did here
Born in Córdoba around 990 and educated there until the Berber siege and sack of the city.
Cordoba in this era
In the 10th century Cordoba, capital of the Umayyad caliphate, was one of the largest cities in Europe and the centre of Andalusi learning. Under the patronage of the Jewish courtier Hasdai ibn Shaprut it also became the first home of Hebrew grammar and poetry in Spain: Menahem ben Saruq and Dunash ben Labrat worked there, and the grammarian Ibn Janah was born there before moving to Zaragoza. After the caliphate collapsed (1031) and the Almohads took the city (1148), many Jews left; Maimonides, born there in 1138 (some sources say 1135), left with his family.
About Cordoba
Córdoba, on the Guadalquivir in Andalusia, southern Spain, came under Roman rule in the 3rd century BCE and, as Colonia Patricia, became capital of the province of Baetica; Seneca was a native. Taken by Muslim forces in 711 or 712, it became the seat of the Umayyad emirate founded by Abd al-Rahman I in 756 and of the caliphate proclaimed in 929, which ended in 1031. Its Great Mosque was begun in the 780s. The city was the birthplace of the Islamic scholars Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), later its chief judge, and the Quran commentator al-Qurtubi, and of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (usually dated 1138). Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba in 1236, and the mosque became a cathedral.
In Cordoba at the same time
Across the traditions, in Cordoba at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Ibn Janah’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Dunash ben Labrat, Shmuel HaNagid, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, Bachya ibn Pakuda
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.