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ABSTRACT There are five copies of the Parisian Alfonsine Tables preserved in Hebrew, one from the fourteenth century and the others from the fifteenth century. By contrast, there are hundreds of extant copies in Latin, each with distinctive features. In one copy (now in Munich), Moses ben Abraham of Nîmes is specified as the translator of this text from Latin to Hebrew, and his work is dated AM 5220 (1459/60 CE). In the Munich copy, the canons (or instructions) as well as the tables are closely related to those in the editio princeps, published in 1483; indeed, no Latin manuscript dated prior to 1483 has been found that is as close to the printed edition as this Hebrew version is. A brief summary of the contents of the five copies is included here, but their relationship to one another has not been determined. Nevertheless, it is clear that they are not all copies of the same translation.
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Introduction
The Alfonsine Tables of Toledo were composed in Castilian by two Jewish astronomers, Isaac ben Sid and Judah ben Moses ha-Cohen, under the patronage of King Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252-1284). Only the canons to these tables are extant; no copy of the tables themselves has survived.1 These tables were conveyed to Paris, where they were recast into Latin in what are now called the Parisian Alfonsine Tables (henceforth PAT), which were widely diffused throughout Europe, beginning in the 1320s. The hundreds of copies of PAT differ from one another and there is no modern edition of them. So it is still useful to consult the editio princeps, edited by Erhard Ratdolt in 1483.2
The special characteristics of the standard version of these tables include the following: (1) the use of tropical coordinates instead of the sidereal coordinates used in the earlier Toledan Tables and derivatives of them; (2) the use of a combined model for precession with a periodic term for trepidation and a linear term for precession; (3) the use of sexagesimal days in the tables for mean motion, that is, multiples of the entry for 1 day from 1 to 60 (instead of dates in a calendar); (4) arcs measured in signs of 60° (instead of...
