Rabbi Avrohom ben Meir Ibn Ezra (usually called simply "Ibn Ezra"), a true giant of the spirit surpassed all his contemporaries, and his influence upon learning and writing in Italy, Southern France and England was greater than that of any other Jewish figure.
His adventurous, almost legendary life began in Tudela, Spain, where he was born about the year 4852 (1092). He was a man of so many excellent gifts, and such a wealth of universal knowledge, that one is at a loss to judge his mastery of learning, poetry, philisophy, Jewish grammar, astronomy or mathematics. He spent the first half of his life in the various cities of the Arabic part of Spain, always in financial difficulties and dire need. In one of his poems he makes fun of his ill fortune and complains that "if he were to sell candles, the sun would never set; if he should deal in shrouds, no one would ever die." Life was made somewhat easier by the generosity of his admirers, who appreciated the elegance and stylishness of his poetry and other writings.
Rabbi Avrohom Ibn Ezra spent the second half of his life travelling from country to country, studying peoples and countries, languages and cultures. About the same time as his great contemporary, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, he set out for-the Orient, together with his son Yitzchok. He visited Africa, Egypt, and the Holy Land, where he learned Kabbalah, the deepest and most mysterious part of Torah study, from the sages in Safed and Tiberias. Then he traveled to Babylon and Persia, where the Caliph of Baghdad had permitted the Jews to have their own prince. Finally he returned to Italy where he lived in Rome, Salerno, Lucca and Mantua. There he wrote most of his great commentaries to the Torah, and his books on Jewish grammar and philosophy. He wrote poems in honor of his friends and spent much of his time teaching a great number of disciples who gathered about him.
Ibn Ezra did not stay in Italy. He moved to Provence, in Southern France, where he was received with much honor and respect. For it was there that the two great lines of Jewish tradition, the Sephardic in Spain, and the Ashkenazic from Northern France and Germany, met. After three years of quiet study, in Beziers, Rabbi Avrohom Ibn Ezra again took up the wanderer's staff and went across the channel to London, where at that time a rich colony of enthusiastic Jews were eager to have this great representative of Jewish learning and art in their midst. Yet before his death Rabbi Avrohom wanted to return to his old home. At the age of about 75 years he died in Calahora, between Navarra and Castilia.
