Treatise on Optics

This is a rare Jewish work on the science of optics, a popular topic in the Greco-Arabic scientific tradition. This fragment, which survived in the Cairo Geniza, considers optics in the context of painting and the mechanics of vision. The approach to shading in this text is indebted to Ptolemy’s Optics, written in the second century and translated into Arabic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but other elements of this Judeo-Arabic text cannot be sourced and perhaps stem from the author’s own research. Unbracketed ellipses indicate lacunae in the manuscript.