Isaac Samuel Reggio

Reggio studied Hebrew and rabbinics under his father, Abraham Vita, later rabbi of Gorizia, acquiring at the same time in the gymnasium a knowledge of secular science and languages.

Besides Italian, his mother tongue, Reggio knew French, German, and Latin, and he studied several Semitic languages in addition to Hebrew.

He possessed a phenomenally clear, if not profound, intellect, and as mathematics offered the widest field for his analytical talent, it was at first his favorite study.

There he made a friend of Mordecai Isaac de Cologna, at whose death (1824) Reggio wrote a funeral oration in Italian.

Following the example of Mendelssohn, Reggio endeavored to extend the knowledge of Hebrew among the Jewish masses by translating the Bible into Italian and writing a commentary thereon.

Although he believed that in the main the text of the Bible has been well guarded against corruption, he admitted that involuntary scribal errors had slipped in and that it would be no sin to correct them.

Nevertheless, in 1846, after his father's death, the community of Göritz insisted upon his accepting the rabbinical office; he agreed, but declined to receive the salary attached to it.

It may be noticed that thirteen years previously Moses Kunitzer printed, in his Sefer ha-Meẓaref, Reggio's letter in defense of kabbalah.

He was also the editor of Bikkure 'Ittim ha-Ḥadashim, the Hebrew part of Busch's Jahrbücher (Vienna, 1845), and Meged Geresh Yeraḥim, a supplement to the Central-Organ für Jüdische Interessen (ib.

The first, a religious-philosophical essay in four sections ("ma'amarim"), was written as an answer to the rabbis of the old school who protested against the establishment of the rabbinical college at Padua.

Analyzing the text carefully, Reggio maintains that Mordecai was by no means such a great man as the Rabbis declare him to have been, but that, on the contrary, he was an ordinary Jew; for he not only gave no religious education to his adopted daughter Esther, but he even commanded her to deny her race and religion.

[7] The Beḥinat ha-Ḳabbalah is an edition of Leon of Modena's two pamphlets Ḳol Sakal and Sha'agat Aryeh; these Reggio provided with a preface, and with one hundred critical notes forming the second part of the work.

Reggio's theory has been refuted by Simon Stern in the preface to his German translation of Modena's works published under the title Der Kampf des Rabbiners Gegen den Talmud im XVII.