The Sefer Almansur contains a pharmacopeia of about 250 medicinal ingredients with their Arabic names (in Hebrew characters), their Romance (Old Occitan) and occasionally Hebrew equivalents. The pharmacopeia, which describes the properties and therapeutical uses of simple drugs featured at the end of Book Three of the Sefer Almansur. This work was translated into Hebrew from the Arabic Kitāb al-Manṣūrī (written by al-Rāzī) by Shem Tov ben Isaac of Tortosa, who worked in Marseille in the 13th century. Gerrit Bos, Guido Mensching and Julia Zwink supply a critical edition of the Hebrew text, an English translation and an analysis of the Romance and Latin terminology in Hebrew transcription. The authors show the pharmaceutical terminological innovation of Hebrew and of the vernacular, and give us proof of the important role of medieval Jews in preserving and transferring medical knowledge.

This volume is part of a wider project aiming at mapping the technical medical terminology as it features in medieval Hebrew medical works, especially those terms that do not feature in the current dictionaries at all, or insufficiently.

The terminology in medieval Hebrew medical literature (original works and translations) has been sorely neglected by modern research. Medical terminology is virtually missing from the standard dictionaries of the Hebrew language, including Ha-Millon he-ḥadash, composed by Abraham Even-Shoshan. Ben-Yehuda’s dictionary is the only one that contains a significant number of medical terms. Unfortunately, Ben-Yehuda’s use of the medieval medical texts listed in the dictionary’s introduction is inconsistent at best. The only dictionary exclusively devoted to medical terms, both medieval and modern, is that by A.M. Masie, entitled Dictionary of Medicine and Allied Sciences. However, like the dictionary by Ben-Yehuda, it only makes occasional use of the sources registered in the introduction and only rarely differentiates between the various medieval translators. Further, since Masie’s work is alphabetized according to the Latin or English term, it cannot be consulted for Hebrew terms. The Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, which is currently being created by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, has not been taken into account consistently as it is not a dictionary in the proper sense of the word. Moreover, consultation of this resource suggests that it is generally deficient in medieval medical terminology. The Bar Ilan Responsa Project has also been excluded as a source, despite the fact that it contains a larger number of medieval medical terms than the Historical Dictionary. The present dictionary has two major objectives: 1) to map the medical terminology featured in medieval Hebrew medical works, in order to facilitate study of medical terms, especially those terms that do not appear in the existing dictionaries, and terms that are inadequately represented. 2) to identify the medical terminology used by specific authors and translators, to enable the identification of anonymous medical material.

The original Arabic text of Maimonides’ major medical work, Medical Aphorisms, was critically edited and translated into English by Gerrit Bos in the years 2004-2017, and published in earlier volumes of the book series The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides. The present work is a new critical edition of the medieval Hebrew translation by Nathan ha-Meʾati, who was active as a translator of scientific texts in Rome in the late thirteenth century, where his colleague Zeraḥyah Ḥen had completed a translation of the same Maimonidean text in 1277, only a few years earlier. Nathan aimed to provide the general reader with a translation that was easier to understand than Zeraḥyah's translation. The present critical edition of Nathan’s translation is primarily based on MS Paris, BN, héb. 1174, and not on MS Paris, BN, héb. 1173, used by Suessmann Muntner for his edition in 1959, as this copy suffers from many mistakes and corruptions.

In Novel Medical and General Hebrew Terminology from the Middle Ages, Volume 6 Gerrit Bos offers more terms not featuring in existing dictionaries as addition to his Concise Dictionary of Novel Medical and General Hebrew Terminology from the Middle Ages.

The vocabulary of Judaism includes religious terms, customs, Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish terms, terms related to American Jewish life and the State of Israel. All are represented in this new guide, with easy to read explanation and cross-references.

This volume contains studies based on papers delivered at the international conference of the PESHAT in Context project entitled “Themes, Terminology, and Translation Procedures in Twelfth-Century Jewish Philosophy.” The central figure in this book is Judah Ibn Tibbon. He sired the Ibn Tibbon family of translators, which influenced philosophical and scientific Hebrew writing for centuries. More broadly, the study of this early phase of the Hebrew translation movement also reveals that the formation of a standardized Hebrew terminology was a long process that was never fully completed. Terminological shifts are frequent even within the Tibbonide family, to say nothing of the fascinating terminological diversity displayed by other authors and translators discussed in this book.