Isaac Lampronti
Isaac Lampronti (February 3, 1679 – November 16, 1756) was an Italian rabbi and physician, best known as author of the rabbinic encyclopedia Paħad Yitzħak.
In his fourteenth year he went to Lugo, to the school of R. Manoah Provençal; thence he went to Padua to study medicine, attending at the same time lectures on philosophy.
Shortly afterward he went to Mantua to complete his rabbinical studies under R. Judah Brial and R. Joseph Cases, who also was a physician.
When Mantua was threatened with war, in 1701, Lampronti, following the wishes of his family, returned to Ferrara, where he established himself as physician and teacher, delivering lectures for adults in his house both on week-days and on the Sabbath.
Lampronti gave his pupils his own homilies on the weekly sections, composed in Italian, for practise in translating into Hebrew.
The directors of the community, who thought this interfered with his duties as teacher, forbade him, in October, 1725, to keep the material for his work in the schoolhouse.
In addition to his duties as teacher he filled the position of preacher, from 1704, in the Sephardic community, and, beginning with 1717, in the Italian synagogue.
His funeral oration ("Darke Shalom") on Samson Morpurgo he mentions in his approbation to the latter's responsa "Shemesh Ẓedaḳah."
His signature as the latest member, following those of Mordecai Zahalon, Shabbethai Elhanan Recanati, and Samuel Baruch Borghi, is found in a responsum of the yeshibah of Ferrara of the year 1727, which he quotes (letter ב, p. 20d).
In 1738 he was elected rabbi of the Spanish synagogue in place of his former teacher, Recanati; and after the death of Mordecai Zahalon he became president of the yeshibah (1749).
He had then reached the age of seventy, and for the next eight years until his death, he taught continuously, although he had to be taken to the school by his pupils on account of an ailment of his feet.
No stone was erected on his grave, for half a year before his death the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery of Ferrara had been destroyed at the instigation of the clergy (Ferrara belonged to the Papal States), and the Jews were at the same time forbidden to place stones on the graves of their dead.
More than a century later, Ferrara publicly honored the memory of Lampronti; on April 19, 1872, a stone tablet, for which Jews and Christians had contributed, was placed on the house in which he had lived; it bears the following inscription: "Abitò in questa casa Isacco Lampronti, nato nel MDCLXXIX., morto nel MDCCLVI.
When he decided in his old age to publish this great work, he traveled together with his pupil Jacob Raphael Saraval, as the latter says in the preface of the correctors (Saraval and Simchah Calimani), through the Italian cities in order to secure the approbations (haskamot) of the rabbinical authorities of Italy for the work.
The collection of these approbations, which were given in 1749 and 1750, is a curious monument of the Jewish scholars of northern Italy in the eighteenth century; it includes sonnets and poems in other forms in honor of Lampronti.
The following cities are represented by their yeshibahs or rabbis: Venice, Leghorn, Reggio, Verona, Ancona, Padua, Mantua, Casale Monferrato, Modena, Turin, Florence, Alessandria della Paglia, Pesaro, Finale, Lugo, Rovigo.
In the second volume are added the approbations of R. Malachi ben Jacob Kohn of Livorno, author of the "Yad Mal'achi," and of three Palestinian scholars stopping at Ferrara.
The work was planned to fill six volumes, as recorded in the printing permit of the Jewish communal directorate of Venice.
This last-named volume contains additions to the text by Abraham Baruch Piperno, under the title "Zechor le-Abraham."
In 1845 the autograph manuscript of the entire work was acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, in 120 volumes, 68 of which corresponded with the parts that had so far appeared.
The society Mekitze Nirdamim, on its foundation, took as one of its first tasks the publication of those portions of Lampronti's work which had not yet been printed.
As a matter of fact Lampronti's encyclopedia deals chiefly with the Halachah, the material for the articles being taken from the entire halachic literature down to the latest responsa, which he had, in part, in manuscript.
He devotes much space to discussing questions of ritual law, as found in the responsa of contemporary Italian rabbis.
766) Lampronti refers to a work in Italian, the title of which he quotes in carefully punctuated Hebrew transcription: "Demostrazioni della Essenza di Dio dalle Opere della sua Creazione; da Guglielmo Deram [], Firenze, 1719."
