Lengua e historia: reconstrucción de la vida de un médico sefardí a través de sus palabras

Abstract

In this article I want to explore the possibility that the analysis of the language of an anonymous text provides clues to the identity and history of the unknown author. The text in question is a medical work in Judeo-Spanish of which I only knew when I began that it was written in Istanbul in the mid-17th century, that it was preserved in a manuscript in the National Library of Israel and that it was presumed to contain the Spanish translation of Avicenna's Canon. In order to develop this possibility, an analysis is made, mainly at a lexical level, of the different languages that converge in the work: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Turkish and Hebrew. Throughout the work, the author's life story is revealed through the results of these analyses and the data extracted from the work itself.