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Updated: June 25, 2025
The fate of Gabirol in the history of Jewish literature was a peculiar one. Highly celebrated as a synagogal poet in the Sephardic as well as Ashkenazic community, his fame as a great philosopher was early overshadowed by his successors, and his chief work, the "Fountain of Life," was in the course of time quite forgotten. The Arabic original was lost and there was no Hebrew translation.
As Ibn Sina was corrupted by the Latin writers into Avicenna, and Ibn Roshd into Averroes, so Ibn Gabirol became in turn, Avencebrol, Avicembron, Avicebron; and the Scholastics who fought about his philosophy had no idea he was a Jew and celebrated as a writer of religious hymns used in the synagogue. He was regarded now as a Mohammedan, now as a Christian.
It seems that he was sent to Lucena, a Jewish centre, where he studied the Talmud with the famous Alfasi, and made friends with Joseph ibn Migash, Alfasi's successor, and Baruh Albalia, the philosopher. A poet by nature, he began to write Hebrew verses early, and soon became famous as a poet of the first order in no manner inferior to Gabirol.
God is above all being and at the same time is the cause of and pervades all existence. Gabirol must have felt not merely this purely philosophical difficulty, but as a Jew, Pantheism as well as impersonalism must have been objectionable to him. Hence he mitigates both by introducing the divine will as mediating between God and the world.
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