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Berḳamani

The 1901 Jewish Encyclopedia

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Physician and author; lived probably in the first half of the thirteenth century, and wrote for an emir (Manṣur?) a treatise on hygiene in ten chapters, called in the preface: . There is a copy of this medical work in manuscript in the Imperial Library of Berlin, and Steinschneider has given an exhaustive description of it in his "Catalogue." Steinschneider rejects the identification of Berḳamani with one Jefet b. Sa'id of the twelfth century; though at one time he held him to be the probable author of a responsum () in Codex Petersburg 625 (compare Neubauer, "Ausder Petersburger Bibliothek," 1866, pp. 25, 118, note ). In the preface to this work it is stated that the treatise was compiled at the request of an Alexandrian statesman, whose name is conjectured to be either Al-Muḥsin or Al-Manṣur, and to whose personality reference is made on page 91b of the manuscript. The fact that he mentions no earlier author than Maimonides, whom he calls (Moses of Cordova), makes the tentative date, above given, all the more probable. It would seem from his familiarity with medical literature that he was a physician.