Hakham Tzvi — Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi החכם צבי — רבי צבי הירש אשכנזי

Born in Moravia in 1656 — the Jewish Encyclopedia gives 1658, and the question is unsettled. His childhood was spent with his grandfather R. Ephraim ha-Kohen, rabbi of Alt-Ofen. He studied at Salonica under R. Elijah Kovo and at Constantinople, where he acquired the Sephardi title *hakham*. In 1686, during the Austrian storming of Buda, a cannon shot killed his first wife and daughter. Then Sarajevo; from 1690 Altona, with a celebrated kloyz on a nominal salary; from 1707 rabbi of the three communities Altona–Hamburg–Wandsbek.

On 10 January 1710 he was elected chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community of Amsterdam at two thousand five hundred guilders a year — an exceptional salary. In early 1714 he fled the city. He died at Lemberg on 2 May 1718, four months after taking office there.

His responsa (Hakham Tzvi, Amsterdam, 1712) are famous for two rulings. Section 93 is the first sustained halakhic treatment of the golem: may a golem made by his ancestor R. Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm be counted in a minyan? He rules that it may not, and from that section descends nearly all later Jewish golem literature. Section 74 is the heartless hen: a slaughtered fowl was brought to him in which no heart was found, and he ruled it kosher, reasoning that no animal can live without a heart, so the organ must have been lost in handling. His opponents insisted that the codes declare such an animal *tereifah* regardless of anatomy. The affair cost him the rabbinate of the three communities — and so left him free for Amsterdam.

In 1705 he was consulted about R. David Nieto, hakham of London, accused of "Spinozism" for a sermon identifying God with nature. Hakham Tzvi exonerated him.

The Hayyun affair: on 23 July 1713 he and R. Moses Hagiz pronounced a herem on the crypto-Sabbatean Nehemiah Hayyun without waiting for the Portuguese commission's verdict. On 7 August the Portuguese ma'amad publicly declared Hayyun guiltless of heresy and censured them both for excommunicating a man outside their jurisdiction. Hakham Tzvi was attacked in the street and placed under communal censure, and left Amsterdam early in 1714.

Two corrections. "The Sephardim expelled him" is inexact: his own Ashkenazi parnassim turned against him too, having no appetite for war with the wealthy and well-connected Portuguese community; he resigned. And this was not a quarrel of Sephardim against Ashkenazim, still less of kabbalists against rationalists: Hakham Tzvi was himself Sephardi-trained and Kabbalah-friendly, his ally Hagiz was a Jerusalem Sephardi, and his opponent Ayllon was a Sephardi hakham defending a Sabbatean. The real axis is the power of a lay board against trans-communal rabbinic authority — the same axis as in Spinoza's herem sixty years earlier.