Isaac Chayyim Cantarini, also known as Isaacus Viva, (2 February 1644 – 8 June 1723) was an Italian poet, writer, physician, rabbi and preacher.
Cantarini had an extensive medical practice, especially among the patricians outside Padua, but at the end of his life, having lost his property through others, he was in straitened circumstances.
In his poetical writings Cantarini based his language almost exclusively on that of the Bible; his sentences containing, in addition to innumerable conceits, allusions to Biblical expressions.
The most important of his Hebrew works is Pachad Yitzchaq (The Fear of Isaac), a description of the attack on the ghetto at Padua by the Christian populace on 20 August 1684, published at Amsterdam in 1685.
The following poems were published by Cantarini; they are nearly all occasional: Pi Sefarim (Mouth of Books), festal songs written when the teachers of the yeshivah decided to include the study of the treatise of Chullin (Venice, 1669).
A poem in the form of a psalm, on the delivery of the community from the hands of the populace August 20, 1684, is printed in the Pachad Yitzchaq (p. 51b), which was formerly read every year in the synagogue on the anniversary of the attack (10 Elul).
Cantarini's Hebrew letters, addressed to the Christian scholar Unger of Silesia, are interesting as containing notices on the Jewish writers of Italy.
In Latin Cantarini wrote the Vindex Sanguinis, a reply to the work on blood accusation of Jacob Geuze (Amsterdam, 1681).
Three Latin letters by him have also been published; one of them dealing with natural history, is addressed to his teacher Bernardo de Laurentius (Padua, 1856, ed.