hello fellow students of jewish history i hope you're doing well today is a very
important day in my personal calendar this is the york site of my father of blessed memory
this is the the death anniversary and i try to do something special every year to mark this date
for the last several years i've been actually rewriting a particular book this is it here
maimonides on teshuva maimonides on the ways of repentance and i'll i'd
like to talk a little bit more at the end of this video about that and about my father
but what i'd like to focus on in this video is specifically a fascinating individual named rabbi
leona da modena who was especially associated with the city of venice in the 17th century
it's a fascinating individual that was extremely brilliant extremely talented
but challenged with an ongoing addiction to gambling which he wrote about significantly
in his rather unusual autobiography in which he describes his ongoing difficulties with this
personal issue so let's talk a little bit about his life and then focus in a bit on
his problem with gambling and try to understand what that has to do with jewish history overall
his biographical stats are he was born in the year 1571 and he passed away in 1648 his name
as it implies suggests that his family originally came from modena but leona himself was especially
associated with venice he was born there he spent almost his entire life there although he did
wander around the po river valley and went down to ferrara and so on now fascinatingly he was a
child prodigy from his even as a toddler he was already translating from hebrew into italian and
he was noted for his scholastic skills as a child in fact one of the texts that will
eventually come to haunt him the very first thing that he wrote that was later published
and actually republished a few times was an interesting little treatise called sur mera
which means turn from evil it's a quote of a verse from psalms which was specifically
attacking the evils of you guessed it gambling that is when he was a 12 or 13 year old boy he
already wrote this book surme rao which is a dialogue between eldad and maydad you know
figures in the bible who discuss the dangers of gambling and uh that's his where he stakes
his position this would you know later be so ironic but let's get to that shortly
uh perhaps his most famous book however is this one here the history of hebrew rights which is
essentially kind of like a an introduction to judaism which was sort of published without his
knowledge and and nearly got him into trouble he wrote this book and it was circulated
in western europe particularly in france and in england where it was extremely popular
and then someone went and published it without his knowledge in paris when he heard that this was
actually published that his manuscript was turned into you know something that was circulating much
more widely he was very afraid because he had spoken quite openly about uh his attitude towards
the catholic church and some of its attitudes towards jews in particular and he was deeply
concerned that perhaps the inquisition would get a hold of this and then he would be in a great
amount of trouble so he he went right away to the sensor and then tried to preempt any problems
by suggesting you know telling them the story but then when the book actually appeared
it appeared that his french editor had actually uh had the foresight to remove a lot of the
offending passages from the uh from the original manuscript and so it was actually even published
in venice in 1638. have a look by the way at his picture here you can see that he's uh shown here
clearly a bear-headed which is fascinating uh you know you can assume this was published in
his lifetime so you would think that that would be more or less a faithful reproduction of his visage
i wonder if it was if he was portrayed as bare headed because he he chose to appear that way
or perhaps it was more of a suggestion of the the author or the title page the artist himself
i don't know so what about his talents he was a brilliant scholar writing many important works
that have survived and have been republished many times to this day he was a very very
talented orator i'll talk a little bit more about this in a second and he was a respected
if not necessarily enthusiastic teacher towards the end of his life he was bouncing around from
one teaching position to another and not especially satisfied with the uh the job
as a whole in fact he recorded at one point 23 different occupations that he had in his lifetime
you have to imagine in 17th century venice the gift of speaking was especially valuable
in fact his speeches were frequently attended by foreign dignitaries even churchmen who would come
to the ghetto specifically to hear this famous rabbi speak one particular incident stands out
in 1616 rabbi solomone soforno passed away he was a friend of rabbi leona dayahuda and so the rabbi
made a eulogy of his friend and in particular made an appeal for support for rabbi soforno's
unmarried daughter within a very short period of time 500 ducats were raised that's really quite an
impressive amount later on leone happened to overhear a speech by a priest in the church of
san geramia that's also kind of interesting like what is robert leone doing in a church listening
to a public speech it's part of the you know kind of environment of venice in the 17th century this
is an extremely um you know it's not it's a little late for the renaissance but it's
sort of like a period of tremendous overlapping and experimentation in many ways of uh jewish
practices and sensibilities which caused not a little amount of stress but that's not for this
particular video and after all if the church men are coming to hear the rabbi speak in synagogue
it only stands to reason that you would have the rabbis come to the church to listen to the priest
we'll talk more about that in a second at any rate when rabbi leona del modena went to this
church and heard the priest speak the priest was talking about how amazing it is that the jews are
so charitable that they can have one speaker get up a very talented speaker and can raise
500 ducats within a short period of time and in fact the priest noticed the rabbi sitting in the
audience and pointed him out with praise so this just gives you some sense of how skilled he was
as an orator now so here we have this brilliant rabbi great scholar great speaker uh you know
teaching all over the place what about this gambling problem so we know about it principally
from his own testimony from an autobiography he wrote called kaye yehuda here you can see
the actual manuscript the cover page in uh robert leone's own hand this is arguably the very first
autobiography written at least in modern times by a rabbi it predates rabbi yaakov emdin's
remarkable autobiography as well but in many ways it's just as spicy the dominant theme of
this autobiography are the struggles that rabbi leone has to go through specifically because
of his problem with gambling we should recall that the ghetto has a highly artificial economy
according to the charters that were issued the condote in venice jews were only allowed
to engage in money lending or in second-hand sales meaning second-hand clothing second-hand furniture
second-hand mattresses whatever you can name that's what they would have to sell second hand
uh and there were also a couple of small carve outs like for example for jewish doctors or
jewish proofreaders copy editors for the printing industry and so on so that meant that there was a
lot of underground economic activity happening that maybe we'll talk about in another video
uh rabelione because of his challenge with gambling which was rife in venice and northern
italy at this time in general he frequently had this kind of like hills and valleys of personal
financial stress he would write a new book made a ton of money and then within a period of months he
would lose it all to gambling sometimes he would actually make a profit with gambling but then in
a very short period of time as he describes it in his autobiography he would lose that as
well he engaged in all kinds of various get rich quick schemes including alchemy right where he
where it was still quite active in the 17th century to try and create precious metals out
of dross or out of like poor metals base metals uh he apparently had initially some success where
he created 10 units of silver out of one but he could not repeat this particular feat and in fact
it's very tragic i won't go into his personal life but he lost one of his sons to apparent chemical
poisoning as a result of being involved with these uh you know strange experiments that all
involve mercury and other kind of toxic chemicals so he would go from like having lots of money and
then losing it and gambling and then getting involved in something else to make a lot more
money quickly and then back again and this was basically the course of his entire life
uh perhaps the low point was when in 1630 and by the way his wages were even garnished
to pay for the losses that he had suffered but in 1630 this was definitely the low point
uh the community leaders the jewish community leaders in venice made a blanket ban against
gambling because this was not only his problem it was one that was rife in society at that time
and he they placed a ban that anyone who engaged in gambling would be excommunicated and leone
actually went and led the charge against the ban he argued for example that the leadership of the
community since it was based on a certain amount of property holding that gave people the right to
elect members of the leadership it was not sufficiently democratic in order to pass a ban on
the entire community he argued as well there was no specific ban in the torah that would justify
excommunicating anyone who engaged in gambling it was all for naught he was not able to convince the
leadership to change their position what a shame that this person who had railed against it in his
youth later was so deeply enmeshed in gambling that he ended up really disgracing himself with
this last-ditch effort to try and protect his personal addiction there's one other fascinating
passage in his autobiography that was the source of some scandal afterwards as well uh rabbi leone
describes how in the year 1622 an anonymous learned acquaintance gave him a copy of a book
attacking the oral law the tor shabba alpa which was called kol sakhal the voice
of a fool the word interestingly in hebrew sachal fool can also mean secret intelligence this is
a strange phenomenon of the hebrew language that sometimes you can have dav or
a word that means one thing and means something entirely the opposite in a different context so
rabbi leone reading this book which was an attack on traditional judaism wrote a response called
are nohem the lion roars which was essentially a point-by-point devastation of the argument of kol
sakhal this anonymous pamphlet that that attacked the traditional judaism uh that's all kind of like
fascinating and not that out of keeping with 17th century writings but centuries later in 1852 rabbi
izako reggio published a study analyzing both of those works and arguing that this anonymous book
called sachal was actually authored by rabbi leone himself i.e it was set up as kind of a straw man
that then rabbi leone could argue against in his named pamphlet that had his you know
he claimed the authorship of it ari no him so you know that's totally bizarre now there are other
theories of course there's a theory that kol sakha was actually authored by none other than uriel da
costa someone we've spoken about on multiple occasions uh and that the uh ahri know him by
robert leone was actually a legitimate response to someone something written by another person but
the debate continues if rabbi leone had actually written this called sakhal you have to wonder
like why is it possible that he did it because he had his own hidden doubts we know he had
challenges with gambling did he have challenges with faith as well that certainly makes sense
i guess in the very cosmopolitan environment of venice and there were in fact many jews who chose
christianity at this time and a smaller number of christians who chose judaism as a result of the
intermixing of the cultures we know for example that he was really very conversant with
christianity and christian doctrines and so on something which he admits himself in arinohem he
writes i have studied day and night the books of the heretics and unbelievers and of the exponents
of other religions in order to refute the heretics in other words he he engages in this study so you
don't have to um is it possible that he wrote both of these pamphlets as a kind of get-rich-quick
scheme like he frequently would dedicate his books to wealthy individuals including churchmen in the
hopes that as a result of seeing their names in the dedication page they would then return the
favor by giving a large amount of money to the author entirely possible but beyond the scope of
this short video at any rate he's a fascinating individual a brilliant scholar who left behind
a tremendous literary legacy now i want to bring this back with your permission to talk a little
bit about my father and about maimonides in this particular context because it is my father's yort
site my father you know it's been many years since he passed away but i continue to think about him
pretty much daily and and especially during this time of the year as i come up to the york site
i used to think that my father was unusually interested in failure
my father would often you know like to read newspaper stories about
businesses that failed and and he was you know when i would come home with academic awards
from school and things like that he was never particularly impressed but he loved it when i got
into trouble he he used to talk about how he once went into the school for some errand or another
in primary school and he found me sitting outside the principal's office because i had done
something wrong and he was so happy to see that i would get in trouble so i used to think my father
was really interested in failure for reasons that he didn't totally understand but you know with the
fullness of time i begin to meditate or not and i think what my father was really interested in was
resilience my my father really recognized the value of resilience and one can only demonstrate
resilience after failure my father was extremely dedicated to the proposition of giving people
second chances you know he had a clothing store a menswear store and we used to uh hire he used to
hire in particular you know ex-convicts there was a small jail nearby in monteith ontario and and
people would get out of jail and and they could go to my father who would give them some job
you know stocking the shelves or or being a salesperson on the sales floor things like that
he also would hire women who had children out of wedlock which was quite a bit more scandalous
in the 1960s and 70s when i was growing up and they would be able to get jobs you know
working in the store in in various ways my father was really big into that also he had
a couple of like rental properties in town this is a really small town in northern ontario and
he would give people extremely reduced rate never enough rent to pay even the
utilities and the mortgage um and sometimes he didn't even charge rent at all because
he it really meant a lot to him to give people more chances in life and so to that end i feel
especially attached to this project that's kind of weird i do this every year uh i read maimonides
book on repentance uh we are coming up to the season of repentance rosh hashanah and yom kippur
and so i re-read maimonides and i i wrote this translation and then later a commentary and then
because this is a self-published book it's really easy for me to simply update it every year and so
i get to spend a few months every year going over this again going over what i thought last year and
reevaluating it and sometimes regretting it and deleting it and sometimes adding more things and
you know i think that's a project that my father would have understood and approved
of so i hope that this short video which talks a little bit about a particularly brilliant rabbi
and his ongoing struggles with gambling and my reflections on my own father and how much
i am indebted to him for forming my personality and teaching me the values that that i hold dear
because i also value resilience tremendously and i hope that uh this short video is as they say in
hebrew melee it's your share a uh go to gabeta and yiddish a um how would we say this in english a
uh a positive emissary for the spirit of my father and i hope that you should all have a
successful season of repentance as well thank you very much for watching