Abraham Ibn Ezra on “The Scholars of India”: A Twelfth century Jewish view of Indian astrology

Authors

• Nadja Johansson

Abstract

Indian astrology was among the first forms of science to enter the Arab world in the 8th century. Four hundred years later, when the transmission process had turned toward the Latin world, the Spanish-born Jew, Abraham Ibn Ezra, participated vigorously in transmitting Arabic science to the West, including Indian astrology. This paper explores Ibn Ezra’s knowledge of and attitude toward the Indian astrological tradition, first providing an astrological doctrine about the Indian scientists themselves and then revisiting the introduction of Indian science into Islamic Spain. Ibn Ezra commented extensively on the tradition of astronomical tables that originated in India. He was well aware of several astrological rules of Indian origin, which in his works came to be closely connected with issues like theory and observation, weather-prediction and numerals.