ויהי בשנת ארבעת אלפים ותשע מאות ותשע עשרה שנה בחצי הלילה בליל השבת בארבעה עשר לחדש טּבת ואני אברהם
ספרדי אבן עזרא הייתי בעיר אחת מערי האי הנקרא קצה הארץ.
This work has been published in Prague in 1839, in a learned Hebrew
periodical, called כרם חמד _Kerem Chemed_. In the thirty-fifth volume of
the “Quarterly Review,” in an article headed Hurwitz’s Hebrew Tales,”
p. 113, the following passage is to be met with:――“It may astonish the
inquirer into the literary productions of our country, to be informed
that one of the earliest books written here after the Conquest, was by
one of the most eminent of the rabbies, Aben Ezra. In 1159, the sixth
year of Henry II., he wrote from London a letter on the proper time
of keeping the Sabbath, in verse; and in the same year his Jesod Mora
(the Foundation of Fear), a treatise in twelve sections, on the various
requisites for the study of Scripture and science, &c.... We are afraid
that there is not a copy of it in the British Museum, and yet it ought
to be there as a national curiosity. It would be amusing to speculate on
what were the opinions of the critical and scientific Jew on the state
of civilization and literature which he saw about him.”