Sefer Asaf: Early Medieval Jewish Theory and Practice from the Middle East to Byzantine Italy

Abstract The origins of Sefer Asaf can be reconstructed as follows. In the mid-eighth century a group of Jews learned medicine from dyophysite Christian monks in Western Iran. They paraphrased a few short Syriac texts in Hebrew and used them as reference books. During the ninth century, some of these Jewish healers migrated to Southern Italy, where they learned Greek and studied Greek medical literature. They paraphrased some works of Hippocrates and a Greek uroscopic compendium in Hebrew. They added these new texts to the earlier corpus translated from Syriac, and at some point before the eleventh century they called this compendium Sefer Asaf .