Samuel David Luzzatto (, ; 22 August 1800 – 30 September 1865), also known by the Hebrew
acronym
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...
Shadal (), was an Italian-Austrian Jewish scholar, poet, and a member of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
Early life
Luzzatto was born in
Trieste
Trieste ( , ; ) is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is the capital and largest city of the Regions of Italy#Autonomous regions with special statute, autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as well as of the Province of Trieste, ...
Elul
Elul (Hebrew language, Hebrew: , Hebrew language#Modern Hebrew, Standard , Tiberian vocalization, Tiberian ) is the twelfth month of the civil year and the sixth month of the Jewish religious year, religious year in the Hebrew calendar. It is a m ...
, 5560), and died at
Padua
Padua ( ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) in Veneto, northern Italy, and the capital of the province of Padua. The city lies on the banks of the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice and southeast of Vicenza, and has a population of 20 ...
on 30 September 1865 ( Yom Kippur, 10 Tishrei 5626). While still a boy, he entered the Talmud Torah of his native city, where besides
Talmud
The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...
Hebrew language
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language unti ...
also at home, with his father, who, though a turner by trade, was an eminent Talmudist.
Luzzatto manifested extraordinary ability from his very childhood, such that while reading the Book of Job at school, he formed the intention to write a commentary thereon, considering the existing commentaries to be deficient. In 1811 he received, as a prize, Montesquieu's '' Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence'', which contributed much to the development of his critical faculties. Indeed, his literary activity began in that very year, for it was then that he undertook to write a
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
grammar in Italian; translated into Hebrew the life of
Aesop
Aesop ( ; , ; c. 620–564 BCE; formerly rendered as Æsop) was a Greeks, Greek wikt:fabulist, fabulist and Oral storytelling, storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as ''Aesop's Fables''. Although his existence re ...
; and wrote exegetical notes on the Pentateuch. The discovery of an error in the published editions of the Targum of Onkelos induced him to study
Aramaic
Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...
.
At the age of thirteen Luzzatto was withdrawn from school, attending only the Talmud lectures of Abraham Eliezer ha-Levi. While reading the Ein Yaakov he came to the conclusion that vowels and accents did not exist in the time of the Talmudists and that the Zohar, speaking as it does of vowels and accents, must necessarily be of later composition. He propounded this theory in a pamphlet which was the origin of his later work ''Vikkuach 'al ha-Kabbalah''.
In 1814 there began a most trying time for Luzzatto. As his mother died in that year, he had to do the housework, including cooking, and to help his father in his work as a turner. Nevertheless, by the end of 1815 he had composed thirty-seven poems, which form a part of his "Kinnor Na'im," and in 1817 had finished his ''Ma'amar ha-Niqqud'', a treatise on the vowels. In 1818 he began to write his ''Torah Nidreshet'', a philosophico-theological work of which he composed only twenty-four chapters, the first twelve being published in the ' (vols. 16–17, 21–24, 26), and the remainder translated into the Italian language by M. Coen-Porto and published in ''Mosé'' (i–ii). In 1879 Coen-Porto published a translation of the whole work in book form. In spite of his father's desire that he should learn a trade, Luzzatto had no inclination for one, and to earn his livelihood he was obliged to give private lessons, finding pupils with great difficulty on account of his timidity. From 1824, in which year his father died, he had to depend entirely upon himself. Until 1829 he earned a livelihood by giving lessons and by writing for the '' Bikkure ha-Ittim''; in that year he was appointed professor at the rabbinical college of Padua.
Critical treatment of the Bible
At Padua, Luzzatto had a much larger scope for his literary activity, as he was able to devote all his time to literary work. Besides, while explaining certain parts of the Bible to his pupils he wrote down all his observations. Luzzatto was the first Jewish scholar to turn his attention to Syriac, considering a knowledge of this language of significant importance for the understanding of the Targum. His letter published in Kirchheim's ''Karme Shomeron'' shows his thorough acquaintance with
Samaritan Hebrew
Samaritan Hebrew () is a reading tradition used liturgically by the Samaritans for reading the Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Hebrew language of the Samaritan Pentateuch.
For the Samaritans, Ancient Hebrew ceased to be a spoken everyday language. It ...
.
He was also one of the first Jews who permitted themselves to amend the text of the
Hebrew Bible
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach" . '' Samson Cohen Modon and Manassa of Ilya); many of his emendations met with the approval of critical scholars of the day. Through a careful examination of the Book of Ecclesiastes, Luzzatto came to the conclusion that its author was not
Solomon
Solomon (), also called Jedidiah, was the fourth monarch of the Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy), Kingdom of Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible. The successor of his father David, he is described as having been the penultimate ...
, but someone who lived several centuries later and whose name was "Kohelet". The author, Luzzatto thinks, ascribed his work to Solomon, but his contemporaries, having discovered the forgery, substituted the correct name "Kohelet" for "Solomon" wherever the latter occurred in the book. While the notion of the non-Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes is today accepted by secular scholars, most modern scholars do not ascribe the work to an actual individual named "Kohelet", but rather regard the term as a label or designation of some kind, akin to the
Septuagint
The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...
's translation of "Preacher."
As to the Book of Isaiah, despite the prevalent opinion that chapters 40–66 were written after the
Babylonian captivity
The Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile was the period in Jewish history during which a large number of Judeans from the ancient Kingdom of Judah were forcibly relocated to Babylonia by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The deportations occurred ...
, Luzzatto maintained that the whole book was written by Isaiah. He felt that one of the factors that pushed scholars to post-date the latter portion of the book stemmed from a denial of the possibility of prophetic prediction of distant future events, and therefore was a heretical position. Difference of opinion on this point was one of the causes why Luzzatto, after having maintained a friendly correspondence with Rapoport, turned against the latter. Another reason for the interruption of his relations with the chief rabbi of
Prague
Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...
was that Luzzatto, though otherwise on good terms with Jost, could not endure the latter's extreme rationalism. He consequently requested Rapoport to cease his relations with Jost; but Rapoport, not knowing Luzzatto personally, ascribed the request to arrogance.
Views on philosophy
Luzzatto was a warm defender of Biblical and Talmudical Judaism, and his strong opposition to philosophical Judaism (or "atticism" as he terms it) brought him many opponents among his contemporaries. However, his antagonism to philosophy was not the result of fanaticism nor of lack of understanding. He claimed to have read during twenty-four years all the ancient philosophers, and that the more he read them the more he found them deviating from the truth. What one approves the other disproves; and so the philosophers themselves go astray and mislead students. Another of Luzzatto's main criticisms of philosophy is its inability to engender compassion towards other humans, which is the focus of traditional Judaism (or, as Luzzatto terms it, "Abrahamism").
For this reason, while praising
Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (, ) and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam (), was a Sephardic rabbi and Jewish philosophy, philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah schola ...
as the author of the Mishneh Torah, Luzzatto blames him severely for being a follower of the Aristotelian philosophy, which (Luzzatto says) brought no good to himself while causing much evil to other Jews. Luzzatto also attacked Abraham ibn Ezra, declaring that Ibn Ezra's works were not the products of a scientific mind and that, as he needed to secure a livelihood to write a book in every town in which he sojourned, the number of his books corresponded with the number of towns he visited. Ibn Ezra's material, he declared, was always the same, the form being changed sometimes slightly, and at other times entirely.''Kerem Ḥemed'', iv. 131 et seq. Luzzatto's pessimistic opinion of philosophy made him naturally the adversary of Spinoza, whom he attacked on more than one occasion.
Luzzatto's works
During his literary career of more than fifty years, Luzzatto wrote a great number of works and scholarly correspondences in Hebrew, Italian, German and French. Besides, he contributed to most of the Hebrew and Jewish periodicals of his time. His correspondence with his contemporaries is both voluminous and instructive; there being hardly any subject in connection with Judaism on which he did not write.
Isaiah Luzzatto published (Padua, 1881), under the respective Hebrew and Italian titles ''Reshimat Ma'amarei SHeDaL'' and ''Catalogo Ragionato degli Scritti Sparsi di S. D. Luzzatto'', an index of all the articles which Luzzatto had written in various periodicals.
The ''Penine Shedal'' ('The Pearls of Samuel David Luzzatto'), published by Luzzatto's sons, is a collection of 89 of the more interesting of Luzzatto's letters. These letters are really scientific treatises, which are divided in this book into different categories as follows: bibliographical (numbers 1–22), containing letters on Ibn Ezra's ''Yesod Mora'' and ''Yesod Mispar''; liturgical-bibliographical and various other subjects (23–31); Biblical-exegetical (32–52), containing among others a commentary on Ecclesiastes and a letter on Samaritan writing; other exegetical letters (53–62); grammatical (63–70); historical (71–77), in which the antiquity of the Book of Job is discussed; philosophical (78–82), including letters on dreams and on the Aristotelian philosophy; theological (83–89), in the last letter of which Luzzatto proves that Ibn Gabirol's ideas were very different from those of Spinoza, and declares that every honest man should rise against the Spinozists.
In Hebrew
* 2. Padua. 1879. Collection of poems.
* Elegy on the death of Abraham Eliezer ha-Levi.
* Guide to the understanding of Targum Onkelus, with notes and variants; accompanied by a short Syriac grammar and notes on and variants in the Targum of Psalms.
* 2. Vienna. 1859. By Isaiah Berlin, edited by Luzzatto, with notes of his own.
* Revised and edited with variants.
* Extracts from the diwan of Judah ha-Levi, edited with notes and an introduction.
* Seventy-six epitaphs from the cemetery of Toledo, followed by a commentary on Micah by Jacob Pardo, edited with notes.
* . 2. Przemysl. 1888. 3. Krakow. 1889. Collection of essays on the Hebrew language, exegetical and archaeological notes, collectanea, and ancient poetry.
* Scholia to the Pentateuch.
* Dialogues on
Kabbalah
Kabbalah or Qabalah ( ; , ; ) is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. It forms the foundation of Mysticism, mystical religious interpretations within Judaism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal ...
and on the antiquity of punctuation.
* The Book of Isaiah edited with an Italian translation and a Hebrew commentary.
* A historical and critical introduction to the Maḥzor.
* Eighty-six religious poems of Judah ha-Levi corrected, vocalized, and edited, with a commentary and introduction.
* A catalogue of the Library of Joseph Almanzi.
* A treatise on Hebrew grammar.
* A poem of Abraham Bedersi, published for the first time with a preface and a commentary at the beginning of Bedersi's ''Hotam Tokhnit''.
* Commentary on the Pentateuch. Padua. 1871.
* commentary on Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Proverbs, and Job.
* In two parts; the first containing a list of the Geonim and Rabbis, and the second one of the payyetanim and their piyyutim.
* A treatise on Jewish dogma.
* A collection of eighty-one unpublished piyyutim, amended.
* 301 letters, published by Isaiah Luzzatto and prefaced by David Kaufmann.
*
In Italian
* (Annotated English edition by A. D. Rubin, 2005.
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* Italian translation of Job. Padua. 1853
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* Italian translation of the Pentateuch and Hafṭarot. Triest, 1858–60
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* Translated into German by Krüger, Breslau, 1873; into English by Goldammer, New York, 1876; and the part on the Talmudic dialect, into Hebrew by Hayyim Tzvi Lerner, St. Petersburg, 1880.
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* (first published by Luzzatto himself in "Mosé," i–vi.).