Rabbi Obadiah Sforno רבי עובדיה ספורנו

Born at Cesena about 1470–75, died at Bologna in 1550. Until about 1525 he lived in Rome: studying medicine, philology and mathematics, practising as a physician, answering halakhic questions. In 1498–1500, on Cardinal Grimani's recommendation, he taught Hebrew to Johann Reuchlin — standing thereby at the origin of German Christian Hebraism, out of which came both the Rudimenta hebraica and the defence of Hebrew books in the Pfefferkorn affair. About 1525 he left Rome and opened at Bologna a bet midrash which he directed until his death.

His own book is Or Ammim (Bologna, 1537): not a commentary but a treatise, taking Aristotelian positions — the eternity of the world, the denial of individual providence — as incompatible with Torah. Eleven years later he translated it into Latin himself, as Lumen Gentium: a Jewish philosopher addressing Latin Christendom in its own language and in his own version. Oxford work on him is built precisely on the divergences between the two — he spoke differently to two different readerships.

The Torah commentary he is known by is programmatic *peshat*: argument from the plain sense, philosophy and science admitted, kabbalistic reading consistently refused — and this in the 1530s and 1540s, exactly when Kabbalah was becoming the chief language of learning in Italy. His theological signature is a universal reading of *tzelem Elohim*: the dignity of the human being as such, not of Israel alone.

Two corrections. He was not "rabbi of Bologna": both the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Encyclopaedia Judaica speak of a bet midrash, a medical practice and communal standing; the office of chief rabbi is a retrojection of later arrangements. And he did not publish his commentary: it appeared at Venice in 1567, seventeen years after his death, through the labour and money of his brother Hananel Sforno, himself a Bologna talmudist.