Rabbi Simone (Simchah) Luzzatto רבי שמחה לוצאטו

Born at Venice, probably in 1583 — specialists write the date with a question mark — and died there in 1663. Ordained in 1606, he was a rabbi of Venice for fifty-seven years, and after Leone Modena's death in 1648 headed the *yeshivah kelalit*, the city's general rabbinic council. He came of a well-to-do family of German origin — unlike Modena, he could afford to study.

Discorso circa il stato de gl'Hebrei (Venice, 1638) sets out eighteen *considerazioni* on the economic and civic utility of the Jews, then answers the standard accusations and describes the faith. It is written in Italian and addressed to the Doge and Senate. The circumstances: in 1636 a receiving-stolen-goods scandal implicating Jews and bribed officials broke, and expulsion threatened. Luzzatto's argument is direct and uncomfortable: the Jews are ideal subjects precisely because they are politically powerless and wholly dependent on the state.

The consequences are out of proportion to its size: the Discorso fed straight into Menasseh ben Israel's petition for the return of the Jews to England and into John Toland's Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews of 1714. It is a load-bearing text in the prehistory of emancipation.

Socrate, overo dell'humano sapere (Venice, 1651) is another thing entirely: a sustained sceptical treatise on the impotence of unaided reason and its need for revelation, with almost no specifically Jewish content. Giuseppe Veltri has read the whole of Luzzatto from it as a Jewish sceptic in the European philosophical sense.

A correction: the common claim that the Discorso persuaded the Doge against expulsion is undocumented. The community was not expelled, but the pamphlet cannot be made the cause. And he is constantly confused with the Ramchal and with Shadal: three different men, three centuries, one family name.