Jonah Ibn Ganah's Medical Dictionary, the Kitab al-Talhis: Lost and Found

According to the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Da?ud, countless Jews, often the first victims in troubled times, leftfor Saragossa or Toledo.5 In the preface to his Mustal?iq, Ibn Gana? tells of the "forced exile and continuous wanderings" that had distracted him from his studies,6 while in his Luma? he specifically declares that the "Divine decree willed us to emigrate from Cordoba to Saragossa on account of the disturbances (al-fitan) that had broken out. "16 It was only in 1979 that Fuat Sezgin, in his survey of the history of Arabic medical literature, drew attention to the existence and authorship of the Istanbul manuscript, of which he gave a brief description.17 Even this identification went entirely unnoticed by the scholarly community until, more recently, Fabian Käs gave the first account of the work, its sources, and impact in the historical introduction to his concordance of the minerals in Arabic pharmacognosy.\n by name.97 Lastly, a student of Ibn Bay.ar's, Ibrahim b. Mu.ammad Ibn al-Suwaydi, who was a physician in Damascus where he died in 1292, quotes Ibn G¡ ana. fifteen times in his unpublished Tad_kira al-mufida, preserved in a Paris manuscript.98 By virtue of his intimate knowledge of the Paris collection, Salomon Munk long ago drew attention to the Ibn G¡ ana. quotes in this "anonymous" manuscript, before it was identified as an autograph of Ibn al-Suwaydi.99 As for the use of the Talhis. by later Jewish authors, Gerrit Bos has claimed that Shem Tov of Tortosa drew from it in his Sefer ha-Simmus (composed 1254), and Sa.adya Ibn Danan (active ca. 1450) in his Sefer ha-Sorasim, a bilingual dictionary of biblical Hebrew.