Aben Ezra was born about A.D. 1092 at Toledo, of a family already distinguished for learning and literary ability. He was an eminent commentator and Cabbalist, a writer on grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, celebrated also as a physician and a poet. His commentaries include nearly the whole of the Old Testament, the earlier prophets being the only ones on which he has not written. Being a man of substance, he was able to gratify his fancy for travelling, which was a rare taste in those days, but possessed by several others of his brethren also. The places at which his various writings were composed may serve to illustrate the extent of his wanderings. Thus one of his treatises is dated from Mantua, another from Rome, a third from London, and a fourth from some Greek city, and the like. He visited Africa also, as well as Palestine, and conferred with learned men of his own race at Tiberias, where the Patriarch of the West had once fixed his abode. He died on his return from this pilgrimage, in his seventy-fifth year, A.D. 1174. Posterity has bestowed on him the title of ‘Hachacham, or the Wise,’ and learned men of all races and ages have done justice to his genius and learning.[113] Still more renowned for the extent and variety of his knowledge was Moses Maimonides. He was born March 30th, 1135, in Cordova. His father, Maimon, held the office of Judge of the Jews in his native city, which, indeed, for generations past had been almost hereditary in his family. Two different accounts are given us of his early youth; one says that he showed from the first symptoms of extraordinary ability, and his father began, almost from his cradle, to instruct him in the elements of science; the other, that he was treated by his family generally with contempt, because his mother had been a woman of inferior birth, and by his father with harshness, on account of his intellectual dulness. According to the latter statement, he was sent away from home to be under the charge of another teacher, but returned home so greatly improved in learning and manners that the opinion of his relatives respecting him was altogether changed. He studied astronomy and medicine under the famous Averroes. It was in this last-named science that he became especially excellent, both as a practitioner and a writer. From Averroes, also, he acquired the knowledge of the writings of Aristotle, which were unknown in Western Europe at this date.