Solomon ibn Gabirol

Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol (Shlomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol) was born in Málaga around 1021 and grew up in Zaragoza, an orphan in poor health. His first patron there, the Jewish courtier Yekutiel ibn Hassan, was executed in 1039, and Gabirol mourned him in some of his finest poems. He wrote both secular poetry and hundreds of piyyutim, many still in the prayer books. His best known is Keter Malkhut ("Royal Crown"), a long poem on God's greatness, the structure of the universe and the frailty of man, which many communities recite on the night of Yom Kippur. He also wrote an ethical work, Tikkun Middot HaNefesh (1045). He died young, in Valencia, around 1058.

His philosophical masterpiece, Mekor Chayim ("Source of Life"), written in Arabic, survived mainly in a 12th-century Latin translation made in Toledo, Fons Vitae, which Christian scholastics read as the work of a Muslim or Christian thinker named "Avicebron". Only in 1846 did the scholar Salomon Munk prove, from Shem Tov ibn Falaquera's Hebrew extracts, that Avicebron was ibn Gabirol. He stands with Yehuda Halevi among the great poets of the Spanish golden age.