Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta
Moroccan writer and physician
Joseph ben Judah ben Shimeon (Hebrew: יוסף בן יהודה Yosef ben Yehuda; Arabic: يوسف بن شِمعون Yusuf Ben Shimeon) of Ceuta (c. 1160–1226) was a Jewish physician and poet, and disciple of Maimonides. Maimonides wrote his work, The Guide for the Perplexed, for Joseph.
According to Al-Qifti, he authored the maqama The Tale of Toviyah ben Tsidkiyah (נאום טוביה בן צדקיה) in Alexandria and sent it to Fustat to make the acquaintance of Maimonides. According to Matti Huss, the maqama is derived from Hadith Bayad wa Riyad.
Life
For the first 25 years of his life ben Judah lived with his father, who was an artisan at Ceuta then part of the Almohad Caliphate.
He left the Maghreb when he was about twenty-five years old, and was already engaged in the practice of medicine. When not occupied with professional work he wrote Hebrew poems, which were known to Yehuda Alharizi, who speaks highly of them in his "Taḥkemoni". Maimonides, to whom Joseph sent his poems together with other compositions from Alexandria, was not so lavish with his praise. He appreciated only the great longing for higher studies which found expression in Joseph's poems.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta” as moroccan writer and physician. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as moroccan writer and physician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3810290. VIAF identifies the subject as 97166703. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1160 and 1226.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.