Background
He was born in Granada, to a prominent and cultured family. His father held an honored position, his three brothers were noted scholars.
He was born in Granada, to a prominent and cultured family. His father held an honored position, his three brothers were noted scholars.
He himself received a sound Jewish and Arabic education.
In 1090 Granada came under the rule of the fanatic Moslem Almoravids and the Jewish community was destroyed. Moses managed to reach Christian Spain, but never returned to Granada, to which he was deeply attached. For most of his life, he was a wanderer in Spain, not succeeding in settling in a permanent home and often having difficulties in finding patrons to support his literary activities.
The best-known of his secular works is his "Sefer ft ha-Anak" (“Necklace”), which contains 1,210 verse couplets; the lines in each end in homonyms. He also wrote a work in Arabic on rhetoric and poetics, which is a valuable source on the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain and discusses a variety of other subjects, such as whether it is possible to ft compose poetry in a dream and whether the poetic gift of the Arabs was due to the climate of Arabia.
As an individual he is contrite, seeking forgiveness from God, if not for evil deeds, then for wrongful thoughts. He expresses the sadness of the Jewish people in exile, calling on man to examine his ways, j and recognize the emptiness of life and its pleasures. Many of these poems found their way into the Sephardic prayer book. He also wrote, a poetic paraphrase of the book of Jonah, which was incorporated in the prayer rite of the Jews of Avignon.