 Gersonides left few letters and does not talk about himself in his writings; nor is his life discussed at great length by his contemporaries. Hence, what is known of his biography is sketchy at best. Levi ben Gerson was born in 1288 in Provence and may have lived for a time in Bagnol sur-Ceze. It is probable that his father was Gershom ben Salomon de Beziers, a notable mentioned in medieval histories. With the decline of Spanish Judaism in the thirteenth century, Provence quickly became the cultural center for Jewish intellectual activity. The popes in Avignon had a lenient policy toward the Jews, whose creative life flourished, particularly in philosophy and theology. Jewish philosophers did not have direct access to the works of Aristotle, but Provençal Jews learned of Aristotle through the commentaries of Averroes, the twelfth-century Spanish Muslim philosopher. By the end of the thirteenth century these commentaries had been translated from Arabic into Hebrew, and Averroes’ thought, as well as that of Aristotle, was being integrated into the mainstream of Jewish philosophy.