Ramaz — Rabbi Moses Zacuto הרמ"ז — רבי משה זכות

Born at Amsterdam into a family of Portuguese anusim — the year is disputed: "1610?", "c. 1620" and "c. 1625" in the three standard authorities — and died at Mantua on 1 October 1697. He studied under R. Saul Levi Morteira and knew Latin; as a young man he went to Poland for Talmud; he learned Kabbalah from R. Elhanan and from R. Benjamin ha-Levi, a pupil of R. Hayyim Vital of Safed. From 1645 to 1673 he was in Venice, first preacher under R. Azariah Figo, then rabbi; from 1649 to 1670 he worked as a corrector in the Venetian presses, on kabbalistic books. From 1673 until his death he was at Mantua, at three hundred ducats a year.

What he did: he gathered the Safed manuscripts of Cordovero and Vital, annotated Luria and Vital under abbreviated sigla, edited the Zohar Hadash (Venice, 1658) and spent two decades correcting other men's kabbalistic printing. And he held a substantive position: Cordovero and Luria were not to be fused — against the syncretism then current.

He was also a poet. Yesod Olam is the oldest Hebrew biblical drama, on Abraham, probably written before 1640; its philosophy is rationalist-Maimonidean rather than kabbalistic, and it observes the classical three unities. Tofteh Arukh is a Hebrew answer to Dante's Inferno: a hundred and eighty-five five-line stanzas on a soul's passage through the seven compartments of hell.

Toward Sabbateanism he was first cautious and then hostile: he resisted the abolition of the midnight tikkun and after Sabbatai Zevi's apostasy in 1666 rejected the movement entirely — while his two chief students, Benjamin ha-Kohen Vitale of Reggio and Abraham Rovigo, remained believers.

Two corrections. The story that he studied alongside Spinoza under Morteira comes from the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 and is chronologically all but impossible: Spinoza was born in 1632, and Zacuto had been in Venice since 1645 after a spell in Poland. And nearly everything he wrote appeared posthumously: Tofteh Arukh in 1715, Kol ha-Ramaz in 1719, Iggerot ha-Ramaz in 1760, Yesod Olam at Berlin in 1874, almost two centuries on.