Gerrit Bos

Gerrit Bos (born 8 July 1948 in Apeldoorn) is professor emeritus of Jewish studies.

Gerrit Bos studied classical languages (1973–1974) and theology (1974–1975) at the Utrecht University, Semitic languages and literature at the University of Amsterdam (1976–1982), BA (1982), Yiddish with Leib Fuks (1980), Jewish and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1982–1985), the Talmud at the Center for Conservative Judaism (with Theodore Friedman, 1983) and Hebrew and Arabic Language and Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1985–1988), MA 1985, Master's thesis: Al-Farabi’s Al-Mahut ha-Nefesh (On the Essence of the Soul); Dr. phil.

From 1976 to 1988 he worked as a cataloguer of Hebraica, Judaica and Arabica for the Antiquariaat Spinoza in Amsterdam.

From 1988 to 1989 he was a trainee research assistant and from 1990 to 1992 researcher at the Institute of Semitic Languages at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

1989, dissertation: The Treatise of Qusta ibn Luqa on the Regimen During the Pilgrimage to Mecca, supervised by Hans Daiber.

From 1992 to 1995 he was a research fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (University College London).

From 1993 to 1996 he worked as a tutor for Jewish studies at Leo Baeck College.

From 1996 to 1997 he was active as a lecturer at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University College London.

From 1997 to 2013 he was professor for Jewish studies and chair of the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne.

His main fields of research are medieval Jewish-Islamic science, especially medicine, medieval Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic.

Furthermore, he is also the editor of Ibn al-Jazzar's 7-volume therapeutic compendium Zad al-musafir wa-qut al-hadir (Provision for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary), of which books 1–2, 6, and 7 have been published so far (1997–2022).

His research is focused on

He is the editor of the 17-volume critical new edition of the medical works of Moses Maimonides, The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides (2002–2021), which includes medieval Hebrew and Latin translations as well as a new English translation in addition to the first-time edition of the original Arabic texts.

a) the study of medieval Hebrew medical terminology, in particular those terms that do not appear in the common dictionaries. These terms have been compiled in six volumes under the title Novel Medical and General Hebrew Terminology (2011–2023), documented in detail and summarized in a dictionary (A Concise Dictionary of Novel Medical and General Hebrew Terminology from the Middle Ages, 2019);

b) medico-botanical terms from medieval synonym lists in Hebrew characters in Hebrew, Arabic, Romance (especially Old Occitan), and German (in cooperation with Klaus-Dietrich Fischer). In cooperation with Guido Mensching (Romance studies, University of Göttingen), several of these lists containing Romance terms have been edited. As a result of these studies, a project aiming at constructing an ontology-based information system for Old Occitan medico-botanical terminology, the online dictionary DiTMAO (Dictionnaire des termes médico-botaniques de l'ancien occitan), is in progress (in collaboration with Guido Mensching, Emiliano Giovannetti, Andrea Bozzi and Maria Sofia Corridini);

c) the edition of works by medieval Christian, Muslim and Jewish physicians, such as Qusta ibn Luqa, Abu Bakr al-Razi, Ibn al-Jazzar, Marwan ibn Janah, Moses Maimonides, Nathan ben Jo'el Falaquera and Moses of Narbonne, and translators into Hebrew, such as Do'eg ha-Edomi, Moses ibn Tibbon, Shem Tov Ben Isaac of Tortosa, Nathan ha-Me'ati and Zerahiah Ḥen;

d) the medieval tradition of the reception of Galen in the works of, among others, Maimonides, Hunayn ibn Ishaq or Sergius of Reshaina (in cooperation with, inter alia, Y. Tzvi Langermann);

e) various topics of medieval Jewish-Islamic popular science, such as astrological medicine, weather forecasting; magic (ornithomancy, scapulimancy); stone lore.

Editions:

a) Maimonides

b) Ibn al-Jazzar

c) Others

Research:

a) Medieval Hebrew medical terminology

b) Medieval medico-botanical synonym lists

c) Jewish physicians and translators of the Middle Ages

d) Reception of Galen in the Middle Ages

e) Sefer ha-Zohar: Book of Splendor

f) Various topics of medieval Jewish-Islamic popular science