Rabbi Ishmael ha-Kohen of Modena רבי ישמעאל הכהן ממודינה

Born in 1723, died in 1811, rabbi of Modena. His responsa Zera Emet appeared in three parts — Livorno 1786 and 1796, the third at Reggio; the set is usually cited as "Livorno and Reggio, 1786–1811."

The Encyclopaedia Judaica puts the essential thing plainly: he is the last Italian rabbi accepted throughout the rabbinic world as a halakhic authority. After him Italian learning remains respected but ceases to be transregional.

In 1806, aged eighty-three, he was invited to Napoleon's Assembly of Jewish Notables in Paris. His method is described as realistic and moderate: to narrow the gap between the times and the tradition without yielding on observance — an internal, halakhic answer to modernity, distinct both from reform and from the Central European ultra-traditionalism then forming. He supported secular subjects in Jewish education and wrote secular verse himself, while keeping his distance from the maskilim as a party.

Two corrections. The Assembly of Notables of 1806 and the Grand Sanhedrin of 1807 are different bodies and are constantly conflated; of his actual attendance, as against the invitation, there is no reliable evidence. And he cannot be called a proto-maskil: his support for secular studies descends from an Italian rabbinic norm going back to Sforno and Lampronti, not from the Haskalah.