  Samuel Ibn Tibbon (c. 1165–1232) was a translator, philosopher, and philosophical commentator on the Bible. He is most famous for his translation of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed from Arabic into Hebrew, but he translated other works by Maimonides, and produced the first Hebrew versions of Aristotle and Averroes. In addition to his work as translator, Ibn Tibbon was an original author in his own right. He wrote the first full Aristotelian/Maimonidean explication of the biblical book Ecclesiastes, a philosophical-exegetical monograph entitled Ma’amar Yiqqawu ha-Mayim, and several smaller philosophical-exegetical treatises and epistles. His work was especially important in his native southern France (“Provence”), but he had significant influence also on Jewish philosophy and exegesis in Italy, Byzantium, and Spain, through the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. He is rightfully considered the founder of Maimonideanism, a philosophical-exegetical movement in medieval Judaism.