Joseph ben Jacob ibn Zaddik, like other Jewish philosophers of a Neoplatonic cast, such as Yehuda Halevi and Abraham ibn Ezra, was a poet as well as a philosopher and legist. Very few of his poems survive, and although he was highly praised as a Talmudist and served for the last eleven years of his life (1138–1149) as judge (dayyan) of the Jewish community of Córdoba, he does not seem to have written any systematic legal work. His philosophic work, on which his chief reputation rests, was originally written in Arabic, but the original no longer survives; a Hebrew translation, under the title Olam Katon (The Microcosm), was circulated in manuscript during the Middle Ages but was not printed until the mid-nineteenth century.

The general thesis of Joseph ibn Zaddik's work is that since man's nature duplicates in...