Moses Botarel was a Spanish scholar who lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He was a pupil of Jacob Sefardi (the Spaniard), who instructed him in the Kabbala. Moses studied medicine and philosophy; the latter, he regarded as a divine science which teaches the same doctrines as the Cabala, using a different language and different terms to designate the same objects. He extolled Aristotle as a sage, applying to him the Talmudic sentence, "A wise man is better than a prophet," and he censured his contemporaries for keeping aloof from the divine teachings of philosophy. He believed in the efficacy of amulets and cameos, and declared that he was able to combine the names of God for magical purposes, so that he was generally considered a sorcerer. He stated that by means of fasting,