Isaac Israeli

Physician of Kairouan and the first Jewish Neoplatonist whose work survives — a doctor by trade who wrote on fevers and urine and also on how the world proceeds from a first cause. He lived, by most accounts, past a hundred, and he is the earliest named Jewish station on the channel.

The moment the Greek current first speaks Hebrew philosophy. Everything downstream — Gabirol, Gerona, the Bahir — has this as its first Jewish footing.