Talk:Plato Tiburtinus

Christian? Jewish
According to the Israeli (Jew) Shai Eshel, on the blog of the National Library of Israel, "Plato of Tivoli" learned all his information by moving to Avraham Bar Hiyya's city Barcelona in Catalonia, now (in 2023, still, I think,) part of Spain, and that he did not know Hebrew or Arabic, only Latin, learning both languages from Avraham, by collaborating with him over several years working on translations of Avraham's books into Latin.

They claim that Plato did not know Arabic and that he learned Hebrew from Avraham working together on translations. I wonder where this information that he was Christian and did not know Arabic comes from. I also wonder where the information about their collaboration comes from.

From all that is written, it is possible (in my eyes) that he was Jewish, knew Hebrew and Latin, and worked on translating into Latin Avraham's translations (which were from Arabic to Hebrew, the Arabic being earlier translations from Greek and Latin to Arabic, with many of the original texts lost, at least at that time.)

Currently, the Wikipedia article reads that Plato Tiburtinus independently and directly translated Claudius Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos from an Arabic translation.

In the Hebrew talk page of Avraham bar-Hiyya, I wrote down and linked to all the sources of the Jewish Encyclopedia, and found that Geiger already wrote about him. It seems that most of what we know is from SHIR (Rapoport)'s prefix to bar-Hiyya's book. פשוט pashute ♫ (talk) 14:33, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Soon I'll also bring them here, for scholars to try and work out what actually happened, who these two individuals were, and how they interacted so that we get a true or at least better understanding of the history of science and math in Europe. פשוט pashute ♫ (talk) 23:33, 22 July 2023 (UTC)