AÇAN, MOSES DE ZARAGUA (or ḤAZAN):

By: Meyer Kayserling

Native of Catalonia, who flourished in the fourteenth century. He wrote a rimed treatise on chess in the Catalonian dialect, which he begins by referring to the creation of the world, and exhorts his fellow man to glorify the Creator by the practise of virtue. Favoring chess, he opposed all games of chance, particularly card-playing, which, he declared, would ruin all addicted to it. This treatise, a manuscript of which is preserved in the Escurial, was translated into Spanish in 1350, probably by a Castilian Jew.

M. K.