Rabbi Isaac Lampronti רבי יצחק חזקיה למפרונטי
physician and rabbi of Ferrara, who compiled the first alphabetical halakhic encyclopedia
Born at Ferrara on 3 February 1679 and died there on 16 November 1756. His father died when he was six. He studied philosophy and medicine at Padua and returned to Ferrara at twenty-two. His teachers were Manoah Provençal, Judah Briel of Mantua and Isaac Hayyim Cantarini of Padua.
His life is dated year by year: from 1704 preacher of the Sephardi synagogue of Ferrara; from 1709 teacher at the Italian Talmud Torah at twelve scudi a month, teaching Hebrew grammar, Italian and arithmetic; from 1717 preacher of the Italian synagogue; ordained in 1718 and admitted to the rabbinical council; from 1738 rabbi of the Sephardi synagogue; from 1749 head of the Ferrara yeshiva. And a practising physician throughout.
Pahad Yitzhak is an alphabetically arranged halakhic encyclopedia. What matters is not its size but its design: it deliberately issues no rulings. A mass of references from the Talmud to his own contemporaries — and an invitation to the reader to weigh the opinions and decide. That is what makes it a work of reference in the modern sense. He printed inside it the responsa of his contemporaries and opponents, including material written against himself — which has no real precedent in halakhic literature.
A correction on the dates: "Pahad Yitzhak, Venice 1750" is the first volume only. A partial second came in 1753; volumes two and three at Reggio in 1796; the fourth in 1813, the fifth in 1840, and the remaining letters from the Mekitzei Nirdamim society in 1864–1887. The work took a hundred and thirty-one years after the author's death to print. The autograph manuscript, in a hundred and twenty volumes, has been in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris since 1845; the "hundred and twenty volumes" of the reference books describe it, not any printed edition.
And "the first talmudic encyclopedia" needs qualifying. Jeffrey Woolf shows the book standing in an older Italian lexicographic line running back to the Arukh of R. Nathan of Rome. More exactly: the first alphabetically arranged halakhic encyclopedia.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Pahad Yitzhak, Venice 1750 and onward to 1887 — the first alphabetical halakhic encyclopedia — and its long printing
Documents of the period
- The 120-volume autograph manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France — acquired in 1845; the source of the "hundred and twenty volumes"
Scholarship
- J. Woolf, R. Isaac Lampronti's Pahad Yizhaq: Medieval or Modern? — the book in the Italian line running back to the Arukh
Basis: documents and evidence.