About the Translator:
Jacob Haberman earned his doctorate from Columbia University where he specialized in the Philosophy of Religion and Middle East Languages and Cultures, and received his rabbinical ordination (Semichah) from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary afflicted with Yeshiva University. He also obtained a J. D. degree from New York Law and is active in the real estate and construction business. Dr. Haberman has contributed essays to the Jewish Quarterly Review, the Journal of Jewish Studies, Judaism, Tradition, Bitzaron, and other learned periodicals and is the author of more than fifty articles in the sixteen-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica. His previous publications include Maimonides and Aquinas: A Contemporary Appraisal.

The twelfth-century Microcosm of Joseph Ibn Saddiq is the first presentation in Jewish literature of a scheme embracing the totality of human knowledge. As such, it is naturally set out in bold strokes of the brush, and, as being addressed to a fairly wide readership possessed of what we would term secondary education, perhaps did not even aim at the intellectual refinement of such works as Ibn Gabirol's Fount of Life and Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed --the latter addressed to one outstandingp pupil, and composed for a small coterie capable of disciplined philosophical thinking. It is thus the more representative of the intellectual climate of contemporary Spanish Jewry. The Microcosm is nevertheless remarkable for the purity of its God-concept and for the absence of any trace of superstition in the ideas that it espouses.