In 1323 del Barri is recorded as having been granted permission by King Sancho of Majorca to join the council of the Jewish community of Perpignan; and to travel and trade freely throughout the country, without having to wear a yellow badge or any other symbol to mark him out as a Jew.
Bonjorn appears to have been the only male heir; but his sisters mentioned in the document include one called Venges, who went on to become the wife of the celebrated Jewish author Joseph Caspi.
He duly presented the required statement of renunciation before the Jewish Beth Din at Perpignan; but then sought to cancel various clauses of the court's decision, presumably those relating to the dowry.
David called in legal experts from the king of Majorca to try to sway the court; in response the authorities of Esther's home town, Girona, weighed in on her side.
[6] Documents place David as still living in Perpignan in 1340; and again in 1352, when the king of Aragon, Peter IV, sent him a terse message to chase up some "astrolabe tables", complaining about their late delivery.
[11] According to the author, the book was composed at the request of a "distinguished friend", "one of the medical experts of our time", to be a "concise summary of astrology which a physician needs every day for the administration of purgatives, potions, and vomitives" (§8).
[14] Of the unnamed "books on the subject" claimed by David ben Yom Tov for his sources, the recent academic editors of Kelal Qatan identify several passages that show a clear debt to the Centiloquium then ascribed to Ptolemy, whom the author acknowledges by name, and the commentary on it by Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Misri (d. 912); and also the Sefer ha-Me'orot (1148), a work specifically on medical astrology by the celebrated Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra, whom the author also acknowledges at one point.
[16] According to the editors, astrology at most only ever had a marginal role in Jewish medical practice at the time; but they see David ben Yom Tob's Kelal Qatan as part of an uptick of interest in the subject in Catalonia and Southern France in the 14th century, which can be detected also in Hebrew works by Shem Tov ben Isaac of Tortosa and Pinchas of Narbonne, and Latin works by Bartholomew of Bruges, Bernard de Gordon and Arnau of Villanova.