Bibliographical Notes on Islamic Astronomy, The Results of a Study of the Exact Sciences Among the Jews of Yemen

Extract

The people of Yemen as a whole, and the Jews of that country in particular, possess a very rich cultural heritage, including achievements in the field of astronomy. The medieval astronomical sources were the subject of an exhaustive study by David A. King (Mathematical Astronomy in Medieval Yemen, Malibu 1983). Some material concerning Jewish interest in the subject was collected by Bernard R. Goldstein (The Survival of Arabic Astronomy in Hebrew, J. for the Hist, of Arabic Science 3, 1979, 31-39, note 2c.) The author of this paper has recently completed a monograph on the exact sciences among the Jews of Yemen. In this paper we present some discrete items of mainly bibliographic interest which emerged from that study. Note that our sources are all Arabic manuscripts, written in Hebrew characters.