Shabbethai Donnolo

Shabbethai Donnolo (913 – c. 982, Hebrew: שבתי דונולו) was a Graeco-Italian[1] Jewish physician and writer on medicine and astrology.

When he was twelve years old (4 July 925), he was taken prisoner by Arabs under the leadership of the Fatimid amir Abu Ahmad Ja'far ibn 'Ubaid, but was ransomed by his relatives in Otranto, while the rest of his family was carried to Palermo and North Africa.

In addition, he wrote a commentary to the Sefer Yetzirah, dealing almost wholly with astrology, and called Ḥakhmoni (in one manuscript, Taḥkemoni; see Second Book of Samuel 23:8; I Chronicles 11:11).

The treatise published by Adolf Neubauer[3] is part of a religio-astrological commentary on the Book of Genesis 1:26 (written in 982), which probably formed a sort of introduction to the Ḥakhmoni, in which the idea that man is a microcosm is worked out.

He uses the acrostic freely, giving his own name not only in the poetic mosaic of passages from the Book of Proverbs in the Bodleian fragment, but also in the rimed prose introduction to the Ḥakemani.

Abraham Epstein has shown that extensive extracts from Donnolo are also to be found in Eleazar of Worms' Sefer Yetzirah commentary (ed.