Abraham ibn Ḥasdai ha-Levi

A Hebrew poet and translator working in Barcelona in the first half of the thirteenth century — an ally of Maimonides' defenders in the great controversy over philosophy, and the man who rendered into Hebrew, from an Arabic original, a moral romance about a prince who leaves his father's palace after learning of sickness, old age and death, and follows an ascetic into the wilderness. He called it Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir, The Prince and the Ascetic. It is the life of the Buddha. Ibn Ḥasdai did not know that; nobody in Europe knew it for another six hundred years. He was writing in Catalonia in exactly the decades when Gerona and Barcelona were producing the first Kabbalists — Nachmanides was his contemporary and his correspondent's world. The Buddha's biography was circulating in Hebrew, in the cradle of the Kabbalah, wearing a false name.