Schwab: Is he gambling with other Jews? Is he gambling with everybody?
Yael: Everybody, everybody’s gambling. The Venetian Gentiles, the Venetian Jews, obviously the Jews were limited in the types of professions that they could have and one could understand that that would lead people to gambling because getting rich quick is enticing.
Yael: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: and I’m Jonathan Schwab. And Yael, I looked at the title of today’s episode and I have no idea who this is and what we’re talking about today.
Yael: That is fair. He is not nearly as well known globally as some of the past few people that we’ve talked about, particularly that I’ve talked about, like Leon Trotsky and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But I’m not sure that that’s fair, that he is not as well known because he might be one of the most prolific individuals in world history.
Schwab: Whoa, okay.
Yael: And usually I use the word prolific to talk about someone’s written output and his written output is enormous, spectacular, fascinating, unique. But he was also a jack of most trades. He, in addition to being a rabbi and writer, cantor, scholar, he wrote rhyming poems.
Schwab: Okay.
Yael: And he was a dancer and a dance teacher even at a particular point in time in his life. And notably, I haven’t even told you who this is yet, but notably something we’ll talk about significantly as part of this episode, a gambler and what one would likely call today a gambling addict.
Schwab: okay.
Yeah, we have to tell our listeners what’s the name of this mystery man?
Yael: The individual that we’re going to be talking about is Rabbi Leoné de Modena. Born in the year 1571 and died in the year 1648. So if he isWas not dabbling in prediction markets, but probably would have been if he were alive, and I think beyond his real contribution to the academic.
Schwab: okay.
So it was not online gambling. wasn’t dabbling in prediction markets.
Schwab: Mm.
Yael: And halachic world is really relevant to us today given the, you know, omnipresence of online gambling in on Earth today. I know you watch sports from time to time, as do I, and you cannot escape the commercials for these online gambling platforms. And it’s not only sports. now have these other
Schwab: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
It’s, yeah.
Yael: Platforms like Polymarket and Cal-She where you can bet on whether or not it’s going to rain tomorrow or you know whether or not Melania is going to be wearing a pantsuit at her next press conference. It’s absolutely everywhere and potentially very very dangerous mostly to young people and I think
Schwab: Everything. Yeah.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Rabbi Leon de Modena serves very much as a cautionary tale.
Schwab: I’m very curious. imagine we’ll get to this, you said rabbi, you said contribution to like halachic works and also gambling addicts that’s not like a common pairing.
Yael: No. And it is fascinating. One of the major contributions, written contributions that Rabbi Leonid Zamalotena made was that he wrote what we believe to be the first Hebrew full length autobiography of a major figure, the Chaye Yehuda. Leon was Yehuda in Hebrew. And his autobiography is actually studied.
Schwab: Interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Yael: tremendously by scholars and academics because of what it teaches about the origins of autobiography in the Jewish world. And I did not focus so much on that because I wasn’t sure that the historiography of autobiographies was gonna be super interesting to our listeners.
Schwab: Yeah, I will say that that’s does sound very if that was if that was the title of a course in a second historiography of autobiographies. But that’s a course that would have five students in it.
Yael: Well, well, we know that you packed away all of your belongings for your future biographer, and it could be you.
Schwab: This is correct. This recently came up because my parents are looking to get rid of clutter in their house and they want me to take that box back.
Yael: Mm-hmm. It’s only one bar?
Schwab: It’s a very large box.
Yael: Okay, so one of his major contributions was this autobiography, which I did read. Henry, our education lead, Henry Abramson, characterized it as a must read and he was right.
Yael: he was writing his life story over the course of several years
Schwab: interesting, like as things are happening and as I imagine differen stages or different like ways of looking at the world.
Yael: And I think that’s probably why it is academically interesting to scholars of the autobiography, but that being said, within his autobiographyhe talks about falling prey to
Schwab: Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yael: the allure of gambling and losing significant sums and putting himself and his family in dire straits economically because he keeps getting pulled back in to the gambling lifestyle.
Schwab: Hmm, interesting. So it’s not like this is something that happens just when he’s young and then he reforms from it. He’s relapsing into this. Wow.
Yael: It’s a lifelong battle.
Schwab: What are people gambling on in in the 16th century?
Yael: To my recollectionI don’t remember, like, a specific call out to Roulette or Baccarat or any of these or craps. But gambling was. You know, pretty widespread.
Yael: in Venice at the time. I don’t even think I mentioned that he lived in Venice. Let’s take a step back., Modena, his surname, De Modena, which is really a, I think they’re called demonyms when your name is based on the place that you’re from. He, his family at one time lived in Modena. He did not. He was born in Venice and he…
Schwab: Yeah, I just I think I just assumed Italy, but yeah.
Yael: Almost as much as he was pulled to gambling, he was really drawn to Venice and couldn’t stay away from Venice. So he was born in Venice.
lived in Ferrara as a child and in many other places in Italy over the course of his life, particularly when he was in need of funds, which he often would make money. He made a lot of money from some of his prolific output, but then would lose the money and need to travel around Italy, often working as a tutor. Both of…
Yael: Jewish studies and sometimes of non-Jewish studies and sometimes teaching Judaism to Jewish students and interestingly, and we’ll get to this later, teaching about Judaism to Christian students. And that’s how he made money over the course of his life. One of his other very important written works was something, and I apologize if I’m going to mispronounce this, called the Riti Ibraica, which is basically the rites of the Jews.
Schwab: Interesting. OK.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yael: rights R-I-T-E-S. And what that was pretty much commissioned by what I believe was the English ambassador to Venice, who was someone that he was close with. He was a real character and a real man about town. So he had a lot of relationships outside of the Jewish community as well.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: And so this book, the Ritibreika was commissioned and he wrote this book in Italian. It was the first book about Jewish practice to be aimed at a non-Jewish audience. It was aimed at a Christian audience. And that is…
Schwab: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. That was going to be one of my other questions. Like during his lifetime, like broadly, like what’s the place of Jews in Italy? There’s a very famous ghetto in Venice, but it sounds like he also is able to circulate in, in Italian or Venetian society.
Yael: So.
Yael: I’m glad you mentioned the ghetto because I characteristically have jumped really far ahead in this story. And the Venetian ghetto is pretty much agreed to be the first ghetto in Europe, if not the entire world.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: It’s an Italian word, right?
Yael: The word ghetto comes from the word in Italian that means to pour or to cast and that means to pour or to cast metals. The first ghetto in Venice was an island. Have you been to Venice?
Schwab: I have been to Venice and of course, like we’ve joked about many times, because on my travels, when I went to Venice, I also of course visited the ghetto in Venice. Because when you go touring, as Jews, when you tour Europe, you find out where the ghetto was, where the mass grave is near this village.
Yael: Right, because where else would you go?
Yael: Thankfully, I don’t think we are aware of any mass graves near the Venetian ghetto, though there was a population of Venetian Jews that were unfortunately murdered in the Holocaust.
Venice is a city of canals and there are a lot of pieces of land that I guess we would call islands.
Schwab: mass graves in Venice. Yeah.
Yael: that are only connected to the other pieces of land,around them by bridges. And people get around Venice by, you know, riding gondolas through these canals or walking over bridges. So when the Jews of Venice were separated from the larger population by, you know, a municipal edict, they were told to go live on this island where foundries used to be located. And that’s why the word ghetto was used because it came from a word associated with these foundries. That was G-E-T-T-O when more Germanic Jews, or as they were called in Venice, the Ashkenazim came into the picture, the word
Schwab: Hmm.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: became G-H-E-T-T-O, which is what we use today, and that is believed to be a Germanic accent onto the word ghetto. And we know that the word ghetto became widespread and was not just what the people in Venice were calling this enclosed area where Jews lived.
So the fact that it was called a ghetto means that that word now is not only associated with a foundry.
Schwab: Right, like now, right. Now it no longer has anything to do with what it originally meant and now means something totally different. Yeah.
Yael: Exactly. So the Venetian ghetto was founded in 1516. Leona de Modena was born in the Venetian ghetto in 1571. But the ghettoization of Jews in Venice was unlike the ghettoization of many Jews later on. We’ve talked about the Warsaw ghetto many times on this podcast, and that was a very bad place to be very limited, very restrictive. It wasn’t just about the fact that the
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Jews had to be together in a small space. There was limitation on food. They were not allowed out of the ghetto. It was a prison.
Schwab: Right. Like it’s a it’s an imprisonment, right. But but like early ghettos that it there is like a positive side to it of like it means there was a place for them in the city. Right. Like they had like a right to be somewhere.
Yael: Yes.
In Venice, the ghetto gates were open during the day and the Jews could come and go in the ghetto. And I think we talked about this in the context of Sarah Kopia Sulem. I don’t remember. She was a woman who ran a very famous literary salon out of the ghetto that appealed to both Jews and non-Jews.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it’s way back a while ago, but it’s an interesting person.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Leone de Modena actually dedicated one of his plays to her. So they
Schwab: cool. Did we talk about that in the Seracu Pius Ulam episode?
Yael: I’m not sure that we did.
Schwab: Because we spent so much time talking about like the monk who was in love with her and had like a slept with a picture of her. Yeah.
Yael: Yeah, she was in love with him, and we talked about the manifesto that she wrote about the immortality of the soul. And Leon de Modena also writes significantly about the immortality of the soul.
Schwab: about the immortality of the soul, which was, I guess, is like a really big topic in Venice in the 1600s.
Yael: In particular, he writes about the immortality of the soul to counter a polemic written by Uriel da Costa. Do you remember Uriel da Costa?
Schwab: whoa, That’s way back. Yeah.
Yael: In our episode about Ariel da Costa, we talk about him sending his writing to a great rabbi in Venice. And that is Rabbi Leoné de Modena because he was such an important figure.
Schwab: right, yeah.
Schwab: this is the guy. Wow. Four seasons later, we’re finally getting to him.
Yael: In Venetian Judaism.
Schwab: Hmm interesting, okay, so he was like a big deal
Yael: He was a big deal and the fact that he was constantly forced to wander the Italian countryside to make up for the fact that he had serious debts was really truly tragic. He was, by all accounts, a prodigy. He claims that he was chanting the Haftorah by the age two and a half.
Yael: which seems advanced by…
Very impressive.
By the time he was an adolescent, he was writing significant poetry. He wrote something called a macaronic poem, a famous macaronic poem. I had never heard of it. I had never heard of this term.
Schwab: The most famous macaronic poem for students of macaronic poetry. I have no idea what it is. I’m joking.
Yael: I had never heard, a macanonic poem is a poem that
I guess I don’t want to say homophonically, but aurally, AURALLY like through the sense of sound of hearing, works in two languages simultaneously.
Schwab: Whoa.
Yael: So he wrote this poem called Kina Shmore. It was an octet, it was eight lines, and it was an homage to a Rabbi Moses who was a teacher of his who had passed away. And in those eight lines, whether or not you are processing them in Hebrew or Italian, you take away the same meaning.
Schwab: Wow, okay, First of all, you have to obviously be prodigious in two languages, but you have to be pretty, pretty bright to be able to compose something like that.
Yael: It’s cool. I can’t even give you an example of it because I cannot conceive of an example of it. And it’s so that was something that he was particularly known for. Another thing that in his adolescence around the age of Bar Mitzvah, he became really famous for in an irony of ironies was a piece of writing called Sor Me Ra.
Sor Me R is a phrase from Psalms and it means keep yourself far from evil. And it was a polemic against gambling.
Schwab Of course, yeah, because, okay. Because who better, yeah, who better to write something like that, yeah.
Yael: So psychologically fascinating. It was written as a dialogue between Eldad and Medad and it was about the dangers of gambling. And then this person succumbs. I really need to know what was going through his head when he wrote this because gambling was a very big thing in Venice. So it’s not crazy that he wrote it.
Schwab: Hmm. And then he, yeah, me, because he was, because this, yeah.
Yael: And this was like a defense mechanism. He was trying really hard not to fall prey. I just don’t know. But it’s a really powerful piece of writing. He wrote it at an extremely young age. It’s very impressive. And then he, you know, ends up living the life of a gambling addict.
Schwab: Interesting, yeah.
Schwab: And gambling, we haven’t said this, but gambling obviously is a problem because of the debts that it can create and the stress. from, from a Jewish law perspective, like even very, very early Jewish law is pretty clear that gambling disqualifies you from being a witness or a certain type of gambling. Like it’s, it’s not great.
Yael: And then much later on in his life. So, so I love, I love that you pointed that out because one of the things that I remember very clearly from my Talmud classes in high school is a phrase, mesachik b’kubya pasul edut. Someone who plays with dice, kubiot are dice, right? They’re like squares. Yeah, someone who plays with dice is,
Schwab: Mm-hmm. That’s exactly what I was thinking of,
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Some form of Dacia.
disqualified.
Yael: disqualified from being a witness in a halachic proceeding. And for some reason, that is something that has stayed with me.
Schwab:Mm-hmm.
I’ve learned this recently with my kids, And there are different theories or interpretations. Why is it that it’s disqualified? Is it because somebody who gambles accumulates debts and therefore could be susceptible to bribery? Is it because, yeah.
Yael: So yes, it does. Right. And they need the money so they are much more susceptible to lying if the lying can help dig them out of whatever hole has been created.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. This was, as you mentioned before, but like gambling being being like a modern topic. There was an article in a Jewish newspaper a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago about like pointing this out and saying, like, do would we extend extend this idea to say that somebody who gambles on sports cannot be a witness and would they then not be able to witness a wedding, which is like a something often that like young men might do at their friend’s wedding or something like I think it was a rabbi trying to make a compelling case like this this the target population who this is a problem for this might be disqualifying for something that you actually really want to do or be honored with. Okay.
Yael: I saw that as well and I think it is because high school and college educators and parents are becoming really, really worried about the pull that online gambling has on their children, particularly teenage boys, because it is so easy to access.
Schwab: Yes.
Schwab: I work in a Jewish college and we have two events this semester talking about like like large event talking about this topic and and how seriously we have to take it from from a helachic perspective from a mental health perspective like
Yael: And I think because of the youth of a lot of people who are getting involved in this, they can so severely handicap their own futures before their adult lives even get started, God forbid, by losing tremendous amounts of money, which maybe is probably not even their money. It could be their family’s money. And there is so much risk.
Definitely one message I want to take away from this, but I’m glad that you brought up the Halachic issue because obviously, Rabelion Adem Odena did think that this was a moral issue at some point in his life at a young age. And he may have continued to believe that for the rest of his life, but just psychologically was not been able to pull himself out of it as we know addiction.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Okay, so it’s not like he, I don’t know, writes a response and says like, this is the permissible way to do it, like this is something that he knew, oh. Ooh.
Yael: Well, later on in his life, I believe it’s the year 1630, so he’s already about 60, he writes a piece that says,
Schwab: 60 right yeah
Yael: The lay leadership of Venice, came out with an edict forbidding gambling in the community and threatening expulsion from the community for anyone who was a gambler. And Rabbi Leone de Modena, whether or not he was trying to keep his rabbinical standing or keep…
Schwab: Hmm.
Yeah.
Yael: His ability to gamble wrote something contrary to that. Basically saying A, as lay leaders you do not have the power to do this and B, there is actually no halakhic issue with gambling.
Schwab: interesting. Wow. Okay, that is it. Because I thought we were going to say like, this is something that he fell prey to, but like knew was wrong his entire life.
Yael: not to get too Talmudic, I think one could make the argument that just because halachically gambling disqualifies you from being a witness does not necessarily mean it’s forbidden or a sin, right.
Schwab: Yeah, when this, like comes up, people are like, do you know what’s in the Talmud? And I’m like, do you actually know what’s in the Talmud? A lot of things that we’re not allowed to do.
SchwabL In terms of restrictions on Jews, is he gambling with other Jews? Is he gambling with everybody?
Yael: Everybody, everybody’s gambling. The Venetian Gentiles, the Venetian Jews, obviously the Jews were limited in the types of professions that they could have and one could understand that that would lead people to gambling because getting rich quick is enticing.
Schwab: but they could also be the bookies.
Yael: I didn’t read about that, but definitely true. The gambling was happening both within the ghetto and outside the ghetto. There was definitely an intermingling.
Yael: One thing that was particularly of his time that he was interested in was alchemy. And it was alchemy was a huge pursuit then for everyone, not just Jews and not just this particular person in Venice. But it’s interesting that it was he was drawn to it because.
Schwab: Okay. And now for something completely different.
Yael: He was trying to turn something worthless into something valuable. I think he claims to have had some success turning one small piece of silver into some larger pieces of silver, but it’s a little unclear as to how that possibly could have been. He ultimately obviously fails at alchemy, as many people do.
Yael: But unfortunately the real toll
Schwab: As many- wait, sorry, as many people do? Is it, do you know something I don’t know?
Yael: Yes, as all people do. But he really takes a personal loss from alchemy in that one of his sons is an alchemist. don’t know what it means to be an alchemist considering what we just said that alchemy never works. But.
Schwab: Okay. All alchemists are by nature unsuccessful. But yes.
Yael: But his son actually died from chemical exposure from his multiple alchemical experiments. his attempts, Rabbi Leon de Modena’s attempts to turn straw into gold, if you want to put it in Rumpelstiltskin terms, you know took a toll. mean, he needed to do it. I think he needed to try it because he was so often in these economically dire straits, but it really cost him.
Yael: I want to eventually get to what made him unique and what made life in Venice unique for Jews at the time that he lived. But I just want to get through some of his written works first so I don’t forget about them.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: At a certain point in his life, he claims to have received an anonymous piece of writing called kol sakhal, which literally means voice of a fool. And which is interesting because the word seh-hal means wisdom, but the word sakhal means fool. And kol sakhal was a, I believe, a defense of Kabbalah. Kabbalah was becoming very…popular at that time. And then he wrote a refutation of this called Sha’a Gat Arye, which is like the roar of the lion.
Schwab: That is a book I have heard of. That was in 10th grade. I think we had to choose between like a class in that and, class on, I want to say the book of Esther. I obviously like in retrospect, like I’ve always been like this, like I took the book of Esther class, but I heard my friends talking about this all the time.
Yael: I always learned that the shagat ariye or the shagas ariye in more yeshivish terms was like a person.
But the reason I bring up this piece of writing that he wrote called the Sha’at Arie, this refutation, is because a scholar named Isaac Reggio posits that the Kul Sahal was a straw man and that Leone de Modena wrote both of these pieces of writing. Whether or not it was just to have fun or, you know, be able to like strengthen the second argument or
Schwab: Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Right. think it’s an interesting literary approach to something.
Yael: Yeah, but here is another theory that he wrote both of them And then there’s an entire other camp, who truly don’t think he wrote the Kol Sachal.
Schwab: Ooh, interesting. And then it’s like…
Wow.
Yael: There are a lot of people who study him and who study his writings.
Does he have a following? Is he like a like a Shabtai Tzvi type figure where like a lot of people are interested and compelled by him?
Yael: He is not a messianist, but he does have a quote unquote following, which is good. This segues me into what I wanted to talk about about life in Venice. He is extremely, extremely popular as a preacher. He draws huge crowds and his crowds are not only Jews. Christians come to hear him speak, including clergymen. And they really admire him and that says a lot about the life that Jews were living in Venice at that time. Yes, they were in a ghetto, but there was a free flow of information and people were coming to the ghetto to these synagogues to hear him speak. One thing that I know my dad would really particularly like about him is that he really believed in his speeches being short.
Schwab: Okay, very cool.
Yael: He said, if my congregation is expecting a 30 minute speech, I speak for 20 minutes. And he said that that keeps your audience satisfied and happy. His speeches would bring people in from all over. And one thing, this gets back to the singing and the dancing. He was a talented musician. He worked with the composer Salomon A. Rossi. Not sure if you’re familiar with him.
Schwab: I’m not, no.
Yael: I sang a Salomoni Rasi composition in high school, Shira L’Amalot. He wrote a lot of instrumentation for Psalms and other holy writings. He’s a very famous Jewish composer. Leona de Modena was asked about bringing singing and choral music into the synagogue.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: Because some of the Ashkenazim, which meant really more the Germanic Jews who had made their way to Italy, because there was a very diverse group of Jews living in the ghetto. You had the Spanish, the Levantine, the Germanic, which really meant more Central Eastern European Jews, like what we think of now as the Ashkenazi.
Yael: Jewish population and then, the like, they’re the new sack. How would you translate the word new sack style liturgical style.
Schwab: Yeah,there for sure is a great word for this but but it’s also like it’s not just like, I don’t know the tunes you use but like the text can differ right the actual the actual liturgy can write Italy has its own or Rome has its own one that’s like separate. Yeah.
Yael: Yes, Italchi, the Italian style or new south. My parents were in Rome this past summer and they went to the great synagogue on Friday night. And my dad was like, what is happening? It did not sound familiar to him at all. I was in Venice this past summer. I love Venice. So I really feel a kinship to Rabbi Leone de Modena, not.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Thankfully not to his addictive traits, he couldn’t stay away from Venice and I also just love, love, love Venice. I was fortunate enough to go to Friday night services in the Spanish synagogue in the Venetian ghetto, which is still standing. A bunch of the synagogues are still standing and the local community uses different synagogues at different parts of the year based on the weather because these buildings are so old. Like this is a building from the 1500s. And I think it has the most windows and it’s so hot in Venice in the summer. And obviously this building has not been retrofitted for air conditioning.
Schwab: How old is that synagogue? Like, is that a synagogue that now you’re like, Leon de Modena was probably there at some point. Wow.
Yael: It was from the 1500s. He definitely was there. Some of his speeches, as I mentioned, brought Christian clergy in. And one notable speech was the Sephorno or Rabbi Solomoni Sephorno, who I think is the Sephorno had passed away and.
Schwab: Interesting.
Yael: Rabbi Leona de Modena spoke, gave a sermon at which some Christian clergy were present and asked the community to donate funds for the dowry for Rabbi Sforno’s daughter. And a huge amount of money was raised incredibly quickly. think 500 ducats, which I think is a huge amount of money. And sometime later.
Rabbi Leon de Modena was in a church listening to a sermon by a Christian clergy member. And he was pointed out to the community as being this powerful preacher who had this amazing talent to raise money for the poor almost instantaneously with his speeches. And you, as you mentioned, that’s really interesting. Henry also mentions that that’s fascinating that he was there, but.
Schwab: Interesting. Wow.
Mmm. He was in a church listening to, yeah.
Yael: In a church listening to a speech, I don’t know if it was part of a service or not because generally, rabbis would say we don’t go into a church for a service. Some rabbis say you don’t go into a church at all. But he was there and I think it speaks to the quality of life in Venice and the mutual respect among the Jews and the Gentiles. mean, Jews, granted, they had to live on this tiny piece of land.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: There weren’t that many of them, so it wasn’t super crowded. And every time the community got bigger, they did get another one of these little islands, boundary islands. So yes, there were restrictions on Jews, and there were restrictions on the professions that Jews could have. Most of the Jews…
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah. But speaking of, you know what I just thought, I was like, what we’re talking about Venice around this time, the merchant of Venice is like a representation of Jews in, although there’s a lot of stuff around it of like Shakespeare was in England, did he really understand what Jews were like and how they operated and what Venetian society even looks like, right? But this is not that far off from, wow.
Yael: Yes.
This is contemporaneous to the writing of the Merchant of Venice. That being said, money lending was still a really important profession for the Jews. However, the Christian restriction on money lending was slowly being lifted. So the Christians were starting to lend money to each other. So money lending became less important as a profession for Jews. But Jews were still limited.
And I think some of the professions were open to some types of Jews and not others. there was a group of Jews who were only permitted to sell items secondhand. Like that was the only thing they were allowed to do, which was a completely artificial economy. The Modenas had made their money in the pawn shop business.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Because that was one of the only things.
Schwab: Because that was allowed because that’s a because it’s also a type of like usury. okay. Interesting. Yeah.
Yael: Well, it’s secondhand selling and also user. Yeah, I guess it’s money lending and secondhand selling.
Yael: Okay, so we’ve been going for a while
I’ve jumped around so much, I apologize that the narrative flow here is not my best because there is so much to say about him. But when he wrote… the Riti Breika, the first book devoted to…
Schwab: The Judaism for dummies, right? Like that’s what it would be now. Now dummies is offensive, no, no, no, but I, sorry. I meant it in like, you know, the series of yellow books and like, that’s like what you would, yeah. For everyone, yeah.
Yael: I would say Judaism for non-Jews. We’re not this. I understand what you’re saying. I yes, you meant it. Judaism for for the layman, for everyone. Judaism for the uninitiated. And when he wrote it, it had been commissioned by an English diplomat. And it was making its way around Europe and it was becoming well known, but it was not officially published. And then he heard that it was published in Paris without his consent. And he was very worried because he realized that there were certain things he wrote about the church that could be viewed as negative. And so he actually voluntarily submitted it to the Catholic authorities in Venice to be read because he said, I just want you to know this was not meant to be insulting to you. And I wasn’t planning on publishing this widely. I was just explaining the differences in certain practices that we have. And he was worried about two specific sections, one of which was, of course, about
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: immortality of the soul. And then he found out that his publisher in France had actually preemptively taken out those sections. So he was saved. He was worried what the Inquisition was going to think because the Inquisition was still a thing. There was still an Inquisitor. Even though the Jews and the Gentiles seemed to be getting along great in Italy at that time.
Schwab: taken out those parts.
And that’s you mentioned the tutoring also. he he tutors. That’s part of the thing that he tutors people about, not just not not sure. He’s not just like a Hebrew teacher, but he’s also teaching people about Judaism. Which also, I assume, says something of like there’s a level of interest in, you know, that’s.
Yael: Yeah, not just Jews, he also teaches about like, this is what Jews are, this is what we do. He was asked.
Yael: Yes, very much so.
He is the one who says that you can bring the choral music into the synagogues. And there was some opposition to that by some of the Ashkenazim in the community. But he says something in the response, like, if we can use our voices to enhance the prayer, should we not do that? And if one man’s voice can enhance the prayer, then all the more so voices together can enhance the prayer then
Yael: He says something like, would it be better to bray like an ass? Like, is it better if our prayers sound bad? He’s like, why wouldn’t we want to enhance them in this way? He also very interestingly wrote responsa about whether or not you can play tennis on the Sabbath, whether or not you can ride a boat, ride in a boat on the Sabbath, and whether or not you can go bareheaded. And this was particularly…
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Interesting.
Yael: controversial. There is a sketch of him in his autobiography in which he is bareheaded and he writes that it is very much time and place dependent. He said in Italy, in Venice at this time, where out of respect the Gentiles remove their caps, remove their hats inside as a a signal of respect to those that they are with.
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: It is in fact a signal of respect for Jews to do so as well because they are not doing it as an affront to Judaism. They are doing it as a means of kindness and gentility to those around them. So that too was quite controversial.
Schwab: Hmm.
Interesting. It sounds like as, as a degenerate sports gambler, maybe degenerate isn’t the right, as an inveterate, is that the right? Like as somebody who sports gambled a lot. And this question, maybe he would have something to say about this question. When you go to a baseball game or something, they say, please remove your caps for our national anthem. Like what should you, what should you as a, as a good Jewish man do?
Yael: I can say with almost complete certainty he would say that you should remove your cap. Especially when he was countering Ariel da Costa and some other people, he was very faithful to Halachic Judaism, but he also…
Schwab: say you should remove your cap.
Yael: felt, and he included this in his Rite Ibraica, that the edicts of the rabbis are often time and place dependent. And that is not a weakness in Judaism to him. That is a strength, a feature, not a bug. And he often says something like bringing singing into the synagogue and other things that may be taken from outside culture.
Schwab: Mm-hmm, that’s like a feature, Mm-hmm.
Yael: He said, us taking things from outside culture isn’t actually bad.. He’s like, it’s not that they are rubbing off on us badly. It’s that we are rubbing off on them well.
Schwab: interesting. Okay.
Interesting, very interesting. But that that sounds like a very, I don’t know, like, like a pretty modern idea of like, to openly say, to what extent do we incorporate features of the outside culture or the best positive features to, know, like that, that to me sounds like a 20th century America, like modern orthodox, you know, articulation of things.
Yael: So that is a great point and it brings us, think, to the enduring question about his legacy. To many in history, Rabbi Leone de Modena is the first modern rabbi. And to others, he is the last medieval rabbi. He is often claimed by the reform movement as
Schwab: Hmm.
Schwab: Ooh, interesting.
Yael: someone they can look to for support in changing practice because he seems to be open to that in certain respects, and particularly bareheadedness. But at the same time, he is a very vocal defender of traditional Judaism. It’s just that he views halacha as a little bit of a living process. And it is at that contradictory junction that he exists. And so…
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: Like you said, modern orthodoxy can claim him. The reforms sometimes say they claim him. Certainly the synagogue singers claim him. And unfortunately, I’m sure that there are gamblers who claim him as well because he did go out there and say it is not logically a problem, but it did cause a tremendous
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Interesting, Mm-hmm. And was gambling and still was a major authority and held in great respect and…
Yael: Right? That being said, gambling brought a lot of negativity to his life. It brought a lot of instability in his life. He was constantly having to go on the road into the Italian countryside for 18 months at a time, years at a time away from his family to tutor and to preach and to do all these things. And part of his prolific output is that he had to keep writing because he needed the money.
Yeah.
Schwab: Yeah, I was about to say that, which is like, obviously that’s very tragic and this is real problem, but it sounds like it sort of shapes a lot of like who he is and what his legacy is because he wasn’t just, I don’t know, sitting at home in Venice and like writing and giving speeches, but like needed to be out there more, needed to be like traveling more and probably like was exposed to a much wider range of things as a result of this.
Yael: Like, he wrote-
He wrote books of magic tricks.He was commissioned by people to write rhyming poems. I think about like those like bar mitzvah candle lighting ceremonies where kids like read these poems And, you know, our time together is really great. I call upon Uncle Moishi to light candle number eight. Like it sounds like he he wrote these things for money because he needed the money. Mm-hmm.
Yael: So yeah, he was a jack of many, many, many, many trades, some better than others, and both an inspirational figure and a tragic figure. I think who gets to claim his legacy is really the big takeaway, the big question.
Schwab: But it also, I don’t like, I’m fascinated by, know, obviously a big question we talk about all the time is like the permeability between Jewish culture and our surrounding cultures and to what extent, like as we look at history, Jews affect the society around them and Jews are affected by the society around them, not just how that shapes them as people, but like how we see the legacy of that, like how has Judaism adapted and changed and how have practices been influenced by the surroundings. So it’s really interesting to think about like here’s a very complex case of it because it’s not just, okay, he was in Venice and he was, you know, corresponding with like Christian leadership and clergy at the time, but also it sounds like he’s also connected with like gamblers who I assume are drawn from all strata of society. Yeah.
Yael: walks of life. This is Italy at the end of the Renaissance and he is a Renaissance rabbi.
Credits
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.