Rabbi Judah Aryeh of Modena — Leone Modena רבי יהודה אריה ממודינה

Born in Venice on 23 April 1571, died there on 24 March 1648. He was made *haver* at nineteen, but full ordination waited until 1609: the lay governing board of the Venetian community raised the minimum age first to thirty-five, then to forty. Hence his famous list of twenty-six occupations: press-corrector, notary, bookseller, teacher, matchmaker, amulet-writer, translator for the Venetian government. He was a gambler, wrote a dialogue against gambling as a youth, and in 1631 got a communal excommunication of gamblers overturned.

Historia de' riti hebraici is the first description of Judaism written by a Jew in a vernacular for a non-Jewish readership. It was commissioned about 1615 by an English nobleman for King James I. Eight Italian printings, and translations into Dutch, English (three separate ones), French, German and Latin.

Ari Nohem (1639) is the strictest pre-modern argument that the Zohar is not ancient: bar Yohai could not have written it in a cave with "no paper, nor ink, nor pen"; it contains customs that arose centuries later; and there is Isaac of Acre's testimony that Moses de León's widow said her husband wrote it himself and ascribed it to the ancients "to increase its value."

Hayyei Yehudah is the first full Jewish autobiography, and startlingly candid: bankruptcy, gambling, his son Zebulun murdered in a brawl, his son Mordecai dead at twenty-six after alchemical experiments, his son Isaac's emigration to Brazil, his wife's collapse.

Four corrections. He did not publish the Riti at Paris: Jacques Gaffarel printed the manuscript in 1637 without his knowledge, and Modena, alarmed at the Inquisition, took the text to the Venetian Holy Office himself, revised it and reissued it at Venice in 1638 — so the Paris and Venice texts are two different books. Ari Nohem was not printed in his lifetime at all: it circulated in manuscript for two centuries and appeared only in 1840; Dweck shows this was the author's own choice, not suppression. He was not chief rabbi of Venice — he was one member of the rabbinate and poor all his life. And the authorship of the anti-rabbinic Kol Sakhal is genuinely open: Talya Fishman argues for him, others dissent; the oddity being that on that thesis he also wrote the refutation, Sha'agat Aryeh of 1622.