Kaftor VaPerachכפתור ופרח
Toledo (Castile) · 1230
Geographical and historical description of the land of Israel and its sacred sites, incorporating talmudic and midrashic sources.
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Kaftor VaFerach
Kaftor VaFerach
1280 CE–1355 CE · Rishonim · Provence
Rabbi Ishtori HaParchi (1280–1355) was the first systematic geographer of the Land of Israel. Born in Provence and exiled with French Jewry in 1306, he wandered through Spain and Egypt before settling in Beit She'an, where he worked as a physician. There, in 1322, he completed Kaftor VaFerach — a pioneering Hebrew study that identified and described some 180 biblical and Talmudic sites from firsthand travel, weaving together topography, the agricultural laws that depend on the Land, and rabbinic tradition. It remains the foundational work of the sacred geography of Eretz Yisrael.
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Stop 1 of 31280–1306Born
ProvenceפרובנסSouthern France
What they did here
Born in Provence around 1280; exiled in 1306 with the expulsion of the Jews from France.
About Provence
Provence (the Languedoc region of southern France) was the cradle of Kabbalah as a written tradition; R. Yitzchak Sagi Nahor (Isaac the Blind, c. 1160-1235) of Posquières/Lunel/Narbonne was the founding figure.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Kaftor VaFerach’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.