Abraham de Balmes ben Meir (born at Lecce, in the kingdom of Naples; died at Venice, 1523) was an Italian Jewish physician and translator of the early 16th century.
A short time before his death he was physician in ordinary to the cardinal Dominico Grimani at Padua.
Through his Latin translations of many Hebrew works on philosophy and astronomy he attained a great reputation in the Christian world.
He dedicated to Cardinal Grimani two of these translations: (1) of an astronomical work in Arabic by Ibn al-Heitham (died 1038), which had been translated into Hebrew by Jacob ben Machir, in 1372, under the title "Liber de Mundo"; (2) of the "Farewell Letter" of the Arabic philosopher Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), which he translated from the Hebrew under the title "Epistolæ Expeditionis" (MS. Vat.
In this work Abraham was the first to treat the syntax (which he called in Hebrew harkabah) as a special part of the grammar.
215) suggests, without evidence, that the printer Daniel Bomberg (who is supposed to have learned Hebrew from Balmes) translated this grammar.