Berakhyah Ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, Sefer Ko’aḥ ha-Avanim (On the Virtue of the Stones)

The lore of the supposed magic and medical virtue of stones goes back to the Babylonians and peaks out in the lapidary literature of the Middle Ages. The famous work of Marbode of Rennes, which made lapidaries a very popular type of medieval scientific literature, was translated into numerous vernacular languages. The Jewish tradition, missing a particular lapidary literature of its own, absorbed non-Jewish works like that of Marbode. Several Anglo-Norman Marbode translations could be identified as the main source of the present edited Hebrew lapidary Ko'aḥ ha-Avanim, written by Berakhyah Ben Natronai ha-Nakdan around 1300. The edition is accompanied by an English translation, a source study, and a linguistic analysis of the Romance, mostly Anglo-Norman, terms featuring within the text in Hebrew spelling.


Berakhyah Ben Natronai ha-Nakdan,
Sefer Ko’aḥ ha-Avanim (On the Virtue of the Stones),
Hebrew text and English translation, with a lexical analysis of the Romance terminology and source study,
edited by Gerrit Bos and Julia Zwink,
= Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval, Vol. 40.

E.J. Brill, Leiden - Boston 2010.
189 pp, 16 plates.
ISBN 9789004183100