Saadia Azankot Explained

Saadia ben Levi Azankot (;) was a 17th-century Jewish Moroccan Orientalist.

Biography

Azankot lived in Holland in the first half of the seventeenth century, where he was teacher of Jewish literature to Johann Heinrich Hottinger.^{[1] [2]}

He published a versified paraphrase of the Book of Esther in Amsterdam in 1647, rhymed in the form of an acrostic, under the title Iggeret ha-Purim .^[3] The Bodleian Library holds two manuscripts bearing his name: one containing a transcription of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic characters, which Azankot made for Jacobus Golius between 1644 and 1645 and contains at the end a poem with Azankot's acrostic;^[4] the other manuscript containing Hebrew translation of the Lamiat al-Ayam of Husain bin Ali, appended to a printed copy of the same.^[5]

Notes and References

1. Book: Poole, William. Early Oxford Hebraism and the King James Translators (1586–1617): The View from New College. Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord. Mordechai. Feingold. Leiden. Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions. 22. Brill. 2018. 978-90-04-35905-5. https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004359055/BP000003.xml. 10.1163/9789004359055_004. 59–81.
2. Web site: איך זה שלרמטכ"ל הראשון ממוצא מרוקאי יש שם אשכנזי?. he. Haaretz. Elon. Gilad. 12 January 2014.
3. Book: Lajb. Fuks. Renate G.. Fuks-Mansfeld. Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands, 1585–1815: Historical Evaluation, and Descriptive Bibliography. 1984. Brill. 90-04-07056-7. 132.
4. Book: Neubauer, Adolf. Adolf Neubauer. Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the College Libraries of Oxford. 1886. 438. Clarendon Press. Oxford. No. 1240.
5. Book: Neubauer, Adolf. Adolf Neubauer. Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the College Libraries of Oxford. 1886. 511. Clarendon Press. Oxford. No. 1438.