Nathan ben Abraham I

Rabbi Nathan ben Abraham
President of the Academy
Position	Av Beit Din
Personal details
Birth name	נתן בן אברהם
Born	late 10th century CE Palestine
Died	circa 1051 CE Palestine
Buried	unknown
Residence	Ramleh
Father	Abraham
Profession	Rabbi

Nathan ben Abraham, known also by the epithet President of the Academy (Hebrew: רבינו נתן אב הישיבה‎) in the Land of Israel (died ca. 1045 – 1051), was an 11th-century rabbi and exegete of the Mishnah, a compendium of Jewish oral law, whose original Judeo-Arabic commentary of the Mishnah served as the basis for a later recension made by a 12th-century anonymous author and copyist, believed to be of Yemenite Jewish provenance. It is doubtful that his work would have survived, had it not been for the faithful copyist, whose innovation was to interweave in the existing text the divergent views held by several geonim and the explanations given by them for words and passages in the Mishnah. The author's introduction reads: "I found the commentaries of Rabbi Nathan, the President of the Academy, [which he made] for explicating the different language usages in the Mishnah, and I have seen fit to add thereto others besides, drawn from the commentaries of Israel's sages." Rabbi Nathan's work is one of the first known commentaries of the Mishnah, ranking with that of Rabbi Hai Gaon's commentary on Seder Taharot in the Mishnah (and is the oldest existing commentary encompassing the entire Six Orders of the Mishnah). Among commentaries, scholars have ascribed a unique place unto the commentary of Rabbi Nathan, saying that by virtue of its composition in the Land of Israel, the interpretations of R. Nathan Av ha-Yeshivah are believed to embody an unbroken Palestinian-Jewish tradition on the meanings of difficult words. The entire work was rendered into a Hebrew translation by Rabbi Yosef Qafih, with an abridged first edition being published between the years 1955 and 1958, and the second edition in 1965. Even so, the work has not seen widespread circulation.

The manuscript was retrieved in ca. 1927 by Rabbi Yihya al-Qafih, from the place used by the Jewish community in Sana'a to bury old and worn-out sacred literature (genizah), within the Jewish cemetery itself on the outskirts of the city. Three copies were made of the original manuscript, before it was sold to a certain Shelomo Halevi Busani (later of Tel-Aviv), who, in turn, sold the manuscript to the Schechter Library in New York. Today, the original manuscript is housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, under JTS Rab. 1492. One of the three remaining copies, copied in 1930 by Qafih's grandson, was acquired by the Hebrew University library, from which a comprehensive study was made of the text by Professor Simcha Assaf who published his findings in the periodical Kiryat Sefer, in 1933.

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