Abraham Zacuto

Born in Salamanca, Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto was an astronomer in late fifteenth-century Spain. Leaving Spain in 1492 after the Edict of Expulsion, he fled to Portugal, where he served John II as an astronomer until the latter’s death in 1495. With the forced conversion of the Jews in Portugal in 1497, he fled again, this time to Tunis. He spent the last years of his life in Jerusalem. Zacuto had begun working on Sefer yuḥasin (Book of Genealogies) in the 1480s in Salamanca and completed it around 1505 in Tunis. It was first published in Constantinople. The book recalls the history of the Jews from the creation of the world until the author’s lifetime.