Azariah dei Rossi עזריה מן האדומים

Born at Mantua about 1511, died there in 1578. A physician and man of letters, not a communal rabbi: he lived at Ferrara, Ancona, Bologna and Sabbioneta, and was back in Ferrara by 1570.

On 17 November 1570 the Ferrara earthquake struck; his house was partly destroyed. Living in a village during the aftershocks, he was asked by a Christian scholar whether a Hebrew version of the Letter of Aristeas existed. There was none — so he made one, in twenty days. Out of this grew Me'or Einayim (Mantua, 1573–75), in three parts: Kol Elohim on the earthquake, Hadrat Zekenim — the Letter of Aristeas — and Imrei Binah in sixty chapters.

What he did first: he brought external testimony into Jewish historical argument — Greeks, Romans, Church Fathers, Christian chronographers, humanist antiquarians — not apologetically but as evidence. He restored Philo to Jewish literature, naming him Yedidyah the Alexandrian — and at once criticised him for allegorising narrative and for never citing the received interpretation. He showed that aggadah need not be read literally; the view itself is not new, but no one before had backed it with outside documents.

What he was struck for was the chronology of the fourth part of Imrei Binah. Legal instruments were dated by the era from creation, and calculations of the End rested on it — which is why the quarrel over it came out halakhic rather than academic.

But the book was never burned and never placed under a general ban. R. Joseph Karo in Safed instructed R. Elisha Gallico to draw up a decree ordering every copy burned — and died on 13 Nisan 1575 without signing it; the decree was never issued. One measure took effect: the rabbis of Mantua forbade reading the book without written permission, and under the age of twenty-five at all. Venice and other Italian rabbinates imposed similar restrictions. The Maharal of Prague answered it in Be'er ha-Golah — but in 1598, twenty years after the author's death.