The Donnolo Family

To understand Donnolo, one must first understand the soil that gave him birth. Oria — the Hurya of Hebrew sources — was in the tenth century a small fortified city in Apulia, then integrated into the margins of the Byzantine Empire restored in southern Italy after the Leonine reconquest. This region, the thème of Longobardia, formed a disputed frontier zone between Byzantium, the Lombard principalities, and the Muslim emirates of Sicily and North Africa.

The Jewish community of Oria was ancient and renowned. It produced, beyond Donnolo himself, the scholarly lineage of the Ahima'ats, whose famous family chronicle (the Megillat Ahima'atz, composed in 1054) constitutes our principal narrative source on this Jewish world. These Hellenophone communities read Hebrew, prayed according to their own rite (the minhag known as "Romaniote" or Italian), and cultivated liturgical poetry, halakha, and the sciences. As the scholarship devoted to the Jews of the Byzantine Empire reminds us, these populations lived a history marked by alternations between imperial tolerance and waves of persecution, notably under those emperors who attempted forced conversions [Σαββίδης, 2001].

The very existence of scholars such as Donnolo confirms that Byzantine Italy was no Jewish intellectual desert. Donnolo is one of the oldest Jewish authors to treat medicine, and one of the rare Jewish scholars of southern Italy from this remote period. This rarity is not a sign of isolation but of a pivotal position: Oria received currents from the Greek East, the Muslim African world, and the Latin West, and recast them into an original synthesis — of which Donnolo's work is the most fully realized monument.

Donnolo's biography is known to us through an exceptional document for the period: an autobiographical sketch he himself inserted into the preamble of his great work. The known details of his life come from an autobiographical notice placed in the preface of his work. This documentary rarity makes him one of the first medieval Jews of the West to leave us a self-narrative.

The founding event of his existence was a collective trauma. When he was twelve years old (July 4, 925), he was taken prisoner by the Arabs under the command of the Fatimid emir Abu Ahmad Ja'far ibn 'Ubaid, but was ransomed by his parents in Otrante, while the rest of his family was taken to Palermo and North Africa. This raid on Oria — one of the recurring episodes of the corsair warfare that ravaged the Byzantine coasts — scattered his kin and marked him durably. The redemption of captives (pidyon shevuyim), a cardinal obligation of Jewish solidarity, restored his freedom; but the exile of his loved ones into the Islamic world illustrates how deeply these communities lived under permanent threat.

From this ordeal, the young Shabbetaï drew a vocation. He turned to medicine and astrology to earn his living. He thereafter devoted his life to the acquisition of cosmopolitan knowledge, learning from masters of various traditions and patiently compiling the medical and astronomical knowledge accessible in the crucible that was southern Italy. His long existence — nearly seven decades — came to an end around 982, leaving behind a body of work whose influence extended far beyond the borders of his native city.

Donnolo's most tangible and best-documented contribution belongs to the history of medicine. His treatise, known as Sefer ha-Yaqar ("The Precious Book"), holds an inaugural position. Donnolo drew on Greco-Latin sources to write what is known today as the Sefer ha-Yaḳar (The Precious Book) or the Sefer HaMirkachot (The Book of Remedies), which contains an antidotarium — that is, a description of more than a hundred remedies and the methods for preparing them from medicinal plants.

The originality of the undertaking lies in its language and its sources. Donnolo's medical science is grounded in Greco-Latin sources; only a single Arabic plant name appears within it. This Western orientation sets him clearly apart from the great contemporary Jewish physicians of the Islamic world, who drew upon Arabic translations of Galen and Hippocrates. Donnolo, by contrast, worked from the Greek and Latin material available in Byzantine Italy.

The manuscript that preserved this text is itself a precious object for historians. What survives of his medical work, the Sefer ha-Yaḳar (Precious Book), was published by Moritz Steinschneider in the nineteenth century. The reference copy, held at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, contains precisely this antidotary — a collection of practical directives for the preparation of medicinal roots. It should nonetheless be noted that modern scholarship has exercised caution regarding attribution: the Donnolian authorship of two other writings (the Pratica and the Baraita de-mazzalot) is highly uncertain, and even more so that of the purported Antidotarium mentioned in the Sefer hamirqahot — a mention that is itself doubtful and the product of interpolations. This chapter therefore rests on established history as regards the core of the treatise, while leaving open the question of the peripheral works.

If the Sefer ha-Yaqar establishes Donnolo as a pioneer of Hebrew medicine, the Sefer Hakhmoni ("The Book of the Sage") is his true opus magnum, the work in which the full breadth of his thought unfolds. It is a commentary on the Sefer Yetsirah ("Book of Creation"), one of the founding texts of Jewish cosmological and mystical speculation.

The structure of the work reflects a carefully considered scholarly architecture. The Sefer Hakhmoni is composed of three main sections: first, a complete autobiographical sketch accompanied by a rhymed poem and an ephemeris table — one of the earliest produced in Hebrew, "photographing" the sky as it appeared from a latitude in southern Italy (most likely the region of Rossano Calabro); the second part is a commentary on Genesis 1:26 ("Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"); while the third and final part provides a commentary on the Sefer Yetsirah.

The author precisely dated his astronomical observations therein. Scholarly tradition records that Donnolo sets out the position of the celestial bodies in the month of Elul 946. This precision makes the Hakhmoni a rare document in the history of medieval Jewish astronomy. The guiding thread of the work is the doctrine of correspondence between the microcosm — man — and the macrocosm — the universe, a central theme that scholarship has illuminated through the study of blood as a link between these two orders in Donnolo's commentary [Lacerenza, via Cairn]. Commenting on the verse describing the creation of man "in the image of God," Donnolo saw in it the key to a cosmic anthropology in which the human body reflects the order of the spheres.

The Sefer Hakhmoni was edited and studied over a long period by modern scholarship, notably in works published in Florence under the title Il commento di Sabbatai Donnolo sul Libro della creazione, and then, more recently, in the annotated critical Italian edition prepared by Piergabriele Mancuso [Segol, 2012].

The patronym itself is a key to interpretation. The name Donnolo is of Greek origin, yet it is widespread among Jews in its Arabic form "Dunash." This onomastic detail encapsulates the condition of its bearer: a Greek-speaking Jew whose name echoes the Arab world, living in Byzantine territory and writing in Hebrew. Few figures illustrate so well the intrinsically plural nature of medieval Jewish culture, that "symbiosis" between worlds which scholarship has analyzed for the Islamic sphere and of which Byzantine Italy offers a counterpart [Wasserstrom, 1995].

On the linguistic level, Donnolo's contribution to Hebrew was considerable. Philological tradition holds that a great number of Hebrew words appear for the first time in his writings. Compelled to express in Hebrew medical, astronomical, and cosmological realities that the sacred language had never before been called upon to convey, he forged a new technical vocabulary — the work of a language creator as much as a scholar.

His thought, finally, proceeds from an avowed confrontation of heritages. He underwent the influences of Greco-Byzantine astrology and the Arab-Babylonian tradition, and sought to reconcile them with the cosmological tradition of the Talmud. This enterprise of synthesis brings him close to Neoplatonic currents while keeping him firmly within rabbinic orthodoxy. Kabbalistic posterity has moreover recognized his place: Gershom Scholem, in his study of the origins of Kabbalah, counted Donnolo among the earliest commentators on the Sefer Yetsirah, whose interpretation was distinguished from that of Saadia Gaon [Segol, 2012]. This chapter falls under the heading of intersection, for here the transmitted tradition — the image of the conciliatory sage — is both confirmed and nuanced by philological and historical analysis.

The Memory of Donnolo has known contrasting fortunes. Long reduced to a footnote in histories of medicine, he was rediscovered by nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship, particularly through the work of Moritz Steinschneider, who edited his medical treatise and restored him to the history of Jewish sciences. The twentieth century, with Andrew Sharf's studies on the world of Donnolo, followed by the Italian research of Giancarlo Lacerenza and Piergabriele Mancuso, restored the full complexity of the figure.

His native city has made him an emblem of local identity. Contemporary cultural events in Oria regularly celebrate his figure, as attested by accounts of Italian Jewish life reporting the tributes paid to the scholar during study days devoted to the new critical edition of the Sefer Hakhmoni. The transmission of his legacy thus belongs as much to learned History as to the living Memory of a place.

On the genealogical front, honesty is required: the sources do not allow us to trace a lineage bearing the name "Donnolo" across the centuries. The name belongs rather to the Mediterranean onomastic nebula — the Dunash, Dana, Donati — whose ramifications, from the Byzantine world to the Sephardic and Italian diasporas of the Renaissance and then the Ottoman Empire, remain the subject of ongoing inquiry [Bonfil, 1994]. The Memory of the name Donnolo is therefore above all that of a body of work and a man-at-the-crossroads, more than that of a continuous biological lineage — a distinction this Great Book claims as a principle of historical honesty.

At the close of this journey, the figure of Shabbetaï Donnolo emerges with remarkable clarity for a man of the tenth century. A child ransomed in the aftermath of a raid, he transformed catastrophe into a vocation; a scholar from a small city in Puglia, he became the first preserved medical author in the Hebrew language and one of the oldest commentators on the Sefer Yetsirah. His work — the Sefer ha-Yaqar in medicine, the Sefer Hakhmoni in cosmology — bears witness to an intelligence capable of weaving together Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Talmudic threads into an original fabric.

The name of Donnolo is therefore not that of a dynasty in the strict sense, but that of a moment and a place: the instant when Byzantine Jewry in southern Italy, at the borderland of three civilizations, produced a complete scholar. His legacy rests less in direct descent than in intellectual lineage — that of the creators of language, the physician-philosophers, and the exegetes of the cosmos. In this, the Great Book of Donnolo is that of an inheritance of thought, transmitted from manuscript to manuscript down to the critical editions of today, and still living in the Memory of the city of Oria.