His Occitan name was En Bonet, which probably corresponds to the Hebrew name Tobiah;[1] and, according to the practices of Hachmei Provence, he occasionally joined to his name that of his father, Abraham Bedersi.
Bedersi's father, very much pleased with those evidences of his child's precocity, expressed his approbation in a short poem which in many editions is given at the end of the hymn.
The work contains only mere quibbles on Biblical passages, and is often very obscure; but, considering the age of the author, the facility with which he handles the Hebrew vocabulary is astonishing.
and reproduced by Joseph Luzzatto in Ozar ha-Ṣifrut, iii., is divided into eight chapters: At eighteen he published a work in defense of women, entitled Ẓilẓal Kenafayim (The Rustling of Wings) or Oheb Nashim (The Women-Lover).
The young poet dedicated this composition to his two friends, Meïr and Judah, sons of Don Solomon Dels-Enfanz of Arles.
[2] These poetical productions of Bedersi's youth were followed by a number of works of a more serious character, among which were: Beḥinat ha-'Olam (The Examination of the World), called also by its first words, "Shamayim la-Rom" (Heaven's Height), a didactic poem written after the 1306 expulsion of Jews from France, to which event reference is made in the eleventh chapter (compare Renan-Neubauer, Les Ecrivains Juifs Français, p. 37).
This poem is divided into 37 short chapters, and may be summarized as follows: The sage, though the highest type of humanity, is liable to the vicissitudes of fortune.
And yet the world is nothing but a tempestuous sea; time is naught but a bridge thrown over the abyss connecting the negation that preceded existence with the eternity that is to follow it.
Can one be heedless when so many agents of destruction are suspended over his head; when the stars that roll above him and survey his fate bring about, in their rapid courses, unforeseen but inevitable events, that the decree of the Eternal has attached to their movement.
[2]Bedersi concludes his poem by expressing his admiration for Maimonides: Finally, turn neither to the left nor to the right from all that the wise men believed, the chief of whom was the distinguished master Maimonides, of blessed memory, with whom no one can be compared from among the wise men who have lived since the close of the Talmud; then I shall be sure that thou, enriched with all the knowledge of religion and philosophy, wilt fear the Lord thy God.
Levy, Joseph Hirschfeld, and (in verse) by Stern, preceded by an interesting Hebrew introduction by Weiss; into French by Philippe Aquinas and Michel Beer; into Italian in Antologia Israelitica, 1880,pp.
[2] Bedersi also wrote a large number of treatises on philosophy, several of which are quoted by Moses ibn Ḥabib in the introduction to his commentary on the Beḥinat ha-'Olam.