R. Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen, who seems to have sighed silently upon the death of his distinguished father, decided to open his mouth in wisdom before the Jews of Venice some seven years later upon the death (in 1572) of R. Moses Isserles in Krakow. The great Polish rabbi had been not only his relative and correspondent, but also an important ally to the Katzenellenbogen family some twenty years earlier. When the Giustiniani press in Venice released a “no-frills” edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, intended to undercut the lavish annotated edition Maharam had published there in 1550 (with the competing Bragadini press), Isserles responded by issuing a ban prohibiting all Jews, under pain of excommunication, from purchasing the cheaper edition of the work, a ban which seems to have been quite effective but which ultimately may have led to the tragic burning, some years later, of the Talmud in Italy.^[75]

This may explain why R. Samuel Judah did not bother to mention this particular debt of loyalty in his 1572 eulogy. He also made no mention there of the support he had received from the Polish rabbi in another delicate matter—that of imposing, in Venice, the Ashkenazic custom of having women go by night rather than (as according to “Italiani” practice) by day to prepare themselves for (monthly) ritual immersion, an issue which might have caused some members of his (presumably ethnically mixed) audience to bristle with resentment.^[76] R. Samuel Judah chose rather to focus on the remarkably wide readership that Isserles had reached through his halakhic writings and the many students he had acquired thereby, citing in this connection the words of Daniel (12:3) that those “who turn the many to righteousness” shall shine “like the stars for ever and ever.”

These writings also had an Ashkenazic agenda, however, in that they gave the opinions of medieval Franco-German authorities greater prominence than they had recently been given by R. Joseph Caro in his influential code, the Shulkhan Arukh. Katzenellenbogen, though, chose rather diplomatically to remain silent about this crucial aspect of Isserles’ oeuvre in the eulogy for him which he delivered in Venice—the city whose publishers (in marked contrast to those in Krakow) were effectively to boycott Isserles’ glosses to the Shulkhan Arukh in their editions of that work until as late as sixty years after his death.^[77] A preacher who had been at the helm little more than seven years could not afford to alienate even a small segment of his audience. On the other hand, Katzenellenbogen was evidently keenly aware of the fact that the late Polish rabbi was not likely to receive in Krakow the sort of stylized public sermon commemorating his death that he might be given in the Italian ghetto of Venice. His decision to eulogize him there publicly may thus be compared to Profiat Duran’s decision, some two centuries earlier, to compose a sermon on the death of R. Abraham Tamakh, whom, he feared, had not been eulogized in the grand manner he deserved. It appears then, somewhat paradoxically, that the sermon delivered in Venice upon the death of Isserles, the sermon in which Katzenellenbogen first emerged there as a public eulogist, had much to do with the Ashkenazic bonds between the two rabbis (although these were never mentioned explicitly), but was related also to the Italian standards acquired by Katzenellenbogen. When his father, the great Maharam, died in 1565, R. Samuel Judah knew that he could count on someone else in Italy (even someone, such as R. Abraham Sant’Angelo, who had not always agreed with his father’s views) to eulogize him properly. Upon the death of Isserles in 1572 this was considerably less clear.

Katzenellenbogen chose on that occasion to begin his sermon with a discussion of the famous but enigmatic verses at the end of Daniel (12:2–3): “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.…And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness [zohar] of the firmament; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” He offered one explanation which saw an era of abundant and shining wisdom as arriving with the advent of the messianic age and the resurrection of the dead, and another which understood the verse as claiming that the purified bodies of the wise and righteous would shine brightly upon their resurrection. Katzenellenbogen’s stated preference was for the second interpretation, which he saw as the plain meaning (peshuto) and which, he noted, agreed with the opinion of “Naḥmanides and all the kabbalists” (as opposed to that of Maimonides) that resurrection was indeed to be corporeal. In his view, those who had acquired wisdom would shine at that time like the firmament, but those who, like the departed, had also imparted their learning to others (“those who turn many to righteousness”) would shine upon their resurrection with the greater brightness of the stars.

One interpretation of the verse in Daniel that Katzenellenbogen pointedly ignored, however, was the one which R. Isaac de Lattes had quoted some years earlier in his controversial responsum concerning publication of the Zohar, a responsum which had been prominently featured in the famous first edition of Mantua, 1558. Lattes there cited the Zohar’s own view of the verse, especially in the opening sections of the Tikkunei Zohar, as referring quite literally to itself and as justifying, to some degree, an exoteric tendency in kabbalistic matters. He quoted, among others, the following passage: “ ‘And those who are wise’—these are Rabbi Simeon [b. Yoḥai] and his companions, ‘shall shine like the brightness [zohar] of the firmament’…when they created this work there was agreement from above, and it was called Sefer ha-Zohar.”^[78]

Katzenellenbogen, though he evinced in his eulogy for Isserles a marked sympathy for the views of the kabbalists, also shows signs of having been struggling there with the question of exotericism. Throughout the bulk of the sermon he seems to have avoided any overt mention of, or quotation from, the Zohar, though these were to figure prominently in some of his later eulogies (e.g. on R. Isaac Foa). At the very end, however, after mentioning another recent death—that, in Safed, of R. Joseph Sagis—there is a sudden turnaround and Katzenellenbogen quotes rather extensively from the same kabbalistic work he had previously excluded in the same sermon. In attempting to explain the deaths of the two rabbis he cites the view of the Zohar that the illness or misfortune with which the righteous are sometimes afflicted can atone for the entire world. “How do we learn this? From the organs of the body. When all the organs are afflicted with a grievous disease, one limb has to suffer in order that all the others may be healed. Which one is it? The arm. The arm is punished and blood is taken from it [by bloodletting], and then all the parts of the body are healed.”^[79] Katzenellenbogen goes on to cite from the Zohar the view that under conditions of severe disease, even two arms must suffer. What he skips over between the two passages, however, is the Zoharic proof text: “What proof have we? From the verse ‘He was wounded because of our transgressions, he was crushed because of our iniquities…and with his stripes we are healed’ [Isaiah 53:5]. ‘With his stripes’—this refers to bloodletting…‘we are healed’—healing comes to us, to all parts of the body.”^[80]

This last passage seems to have been deleted by Katzenellenbogen in his public sermon not because of its (less than considerable) kabbalistic content, but because of its unavoidable Christological associations for an Italian Jewish audience. It drew upon “the remarkable [biblical] chapter which,” as Driver and Neubauer noted over a century ago, “has for ages formed one of the principal battle-fields between Christians and their Jewish opponents.”^[81] Why the Zohar’s author would intentionally use such a verse is a question which need not concern us here.^[82] But it was clearly easier for a conservatively inclined rabbi such as Katzenellenbogen to quote liberally from that work in a public sermon than to cite some Christian-sounding passages based on Isaiah 53. Despite Katzenellenbogen’s own conservatism, however, he was careful to pepper his sermon on the death of Isserles with an eclectic range of references which, beyond the Zohar, included the medieval exegetes Ibn Ezra and David Kimḥi, as well as, for the philosophically inclined, Plato (on knowledge) and Maimonides (on resurrection). These learned and somewhat random references seem to have been intended to satisfy as wide an audience as possible,^[83] but even in a cosmopolitan Venetian synagogue it is unclear how many of those present would have been pleased to hear that the late R. Moses Isserles had been, like an earlier member (some believed) of his race, “wounded because of our transgressions” or “crushed because of our iniquities.” Although the words were from Isaiah, they had come to be associated in the minds of Italian Jews more with Christian preaching than with Jewish.

In 1597, however, a somewhat spunkier and certainly sprightlier rabbi of native Italian origin, Leon Modena (who was not yet thirty years old), was considerably less careful about avoiding such Christological motifs in the sermon which he delivered in Venice upon the death there of Katzenellenbogen. He was willing to go as far as to assert that the weakness which had begun to afflict the late rabbi since ascending to his position of leadership “was on account of our iniquities, the trembling that had taken hold of him was because of our transgressions, his illness was caused by our sins, and his death the result of our rebelliousness and contentiousness, for he, in his righteousness, would have continued living much longer.”^[84] Modena, who was later to compose a learned polemical work against Christianity, undoubtedly knew that he was playing with fire by implicitly comparing Katzenellenbogen with Christ, but perhaps pursued that paradox intentionally as a rhetorical device. He may also have been playfully nodding in the direction of the Christians who, he later claimed, would come to hear his sermons in the ghetto. In the same sermon Modena also compared the late rabbi, less controversially if more explicitly, to Alexander the Great, whose silencing (by death) was said to have paradoxically activated the lips of others.^[85]

Modena’s range of Jewish references was also quite wide and rather catholic. He did not fail, despite his avowed hostility to the kabbalah, to quote the Zohar in that same 1597 sermon (as in others), nor did he neglect, in the companion poetic elegy he composed on Katzenellenbogen’s death, to praise the Ashkenazic rabbi for being not only a great judge and able leader, but also beyond possible error in “hidden matters.” Modena’s playful, if perhaps for some contemporaries maddening, eclecticism, even in matters funereal, went considerably beyond that of his Ashkenazic predecessor in both style and substance. Moreover, his consciousness and cultivation of paradox, whether in the use of Christological motifs to explain the death of a pious rabbi, or in his reliance upon the Zohar despite questioning its antiquity, signify a wider shift towards the mannerist sensibility that ushered in the baroque era.^[86] There are indications, which I hope to discuss in a future study, that towards the end of his life Katzenellenbogen showed a new openness to the classicizing aesthetic values of the Italian Renaissance. Ironically, however, by that time the baroque, with its emphasis upon conflict rather than harmony, was taking its place in the cultural arena, as can be glimpsed from his younger colleague’s more mannered style of speaking of the dead.