Three Judeo-Arabic Marginalia on new materia medica from the New World and China

A manuscript recently acquired by the University of Pennsylvania contains a large section of a treatise on materia medica, Arabic in Hebrew characters, with many notes in the margins. One set of marginalia, all in the same hand, displays passages culled from the writings of Da'ūd al-Antākī (d. 1599) and Ibn Sallūm (d. 1670), two important medical writers who were born in Aleppo. Some of the passages are translations from Turkish into Judeo-Arabic. The three selected for publication here describe new medical substances, unknown to the ancients; one, China root, originating in the East; and the other two, sassafras and quinaquina, from the Americas. These are among the first descriptions of these substances in Arabic and seem to be the very first accounts in Jewish sources.