El pròleg de Semtov ben Issac, el Tortosí, a la seva traducció hebrea del Taṣrif d'Abū-l-Qāsim al-Zahrawī

Abstract

The Hebrew translation of the Tasríf of the Andalusian physician Abú-l-Qásim al-Zahrawí, known as Abulcasis, made by Shem Tov ben Isaac (circa 1196-1267) is preceded by an introduction written by the translator, who was a Jewish physician from Tortosa but resident in Provence, in which he shows us the intellectual and practical concerns of the medical élites of the Jewish communities in the Western Mediterranean about the middle of the 13th century. Abulcasis Tasríf is a voluminous medico-surgical encyclopaedia written around the year 1000 and is considered the crowning achievement of twenty five years of medical practice and teaching in the field of the healing arts in his home town of Al-Zahra, near Cordoba. It is made up of thirty books or tractates dealing not only with medicine and surgery but also with a wide range of related subjects, such as pharmaceutical preparations, cosmetics, dietetics, midwifery, and psychotherapy. During the Middle Ages, the Tasríf was either completely or partly translated into Hebrew, Latin, Occitan and Catalan. The most popular tractates were the 1st, the 2nd and the 28th. There are several documentary data proving that Abulcasis work was widely disseminated throughout the length and breadth of the Occitano-Catalan lands. The existence of a Catalan translation can be inferred from some historical data, particularly a document issued in 1313 by Jaume II, king of the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon, ordering the payment of one thousand solidi of Barcelona to Judah, son of Astruc Bonsenyor, on account of the translation of an Arab medical work, which according to Cardoner i Planas, is the Tasríf. In that introduction Shem Tov informs us that he began the translation in the month of Elul of the year 5014 (= 1254 CE), when he was 58 years old (which means that he was born around 1196) and that he revised it in 1261. He also tells us that when he was 30 years old, i.e., in 1226, he travelled to Akko (Acre) in connection with his overseas tra