קהילת יהודי פרארה

Isaac Hezekiah Ben Samuel Lampronti (1679-1756) Rabbi, scholar and physician.

Born in Ferrara, Italy, he was a pupil of some of the great rabbinical authorities of his time and also studied philosophy and medicine in the university of Padua. In 1701, he began to teach in the Ferrara school of the Italian Jewish community and later also in the Sephardi school. He insisted that the humanities be taught alongside traditional Jewish subjects. In 1718, Lampronti was ordained rabbi and from 1743 was senior rabbi and head of the Ferrara yeshiva. All this time, he practiced medicine with an outstanding reputation, and did not charge those who could not afford it. He is famous for his Pahad Yitzhak, an extensive halakhic encyclopedia - so comprehensive that one edition consisted of 120 volumes. Each article is an exhaustive dissertation on its subject.

Vittore Colorni (1912-2005), historian and jurist, born in New York, USA. He graduated in law at the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1933. Colorni was descended from a family originally from Colorno near Parma, Italy. One of his ancestors, Simone de Maya (Meyer), was living in Colorno in 1477. The family subsequently moved to Mantua in the sixteenth century.

Colorni was a lecturer on the history of Italian law at the University of Ferrara and in 1956 he was awarded a professorship. Between 1969 and 1971 he was dean of the Faculty of Law. His speciality was the study of the history of medieval law. In 1945 he published his major work Legge ebraica e legge locali ["Jewish law and Local Law"]. In it he traced the special status of the Jews and how far Jewish law was recognized in Italy, describing the history of Jewish courts in the medieval Italian states.

He wrote many articles on the history of the Jewish community of Mantua, and in particular its methods of self-government and the judiciary. As a result of this research Colorni developed a theory about the expansion of small Jewish communities in the north and Po valley of Italy. There were two migrations, one originating from the city of Rome in order to seek out new markets for the activity of money lenders and traders, and a second stream of immigration of German-born Ashkenazi Jews who were often trying to escape the frequent and periodic persecution of the Jews in Central Europe.

Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), author, born in Bologna, Italy. He was brought up in Ferrara where most of his fiction is set. He got his degree in Italian literature at the university of Bologna, but the antisemitic Fascist laws cut him off from general Italian society and he taught at the Jewish school in Ferrara and participated in anti-Fascist activities for which he was arrested and only released after the fall of Mussolini. He then moved to Rome. He wrote poems, stories and novels, many of them set in the Jewish community. His best-known works are The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.

Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, known as Abrahamus Peritsol in Latin (c.1451-1525/28), geographer, scribe, and polemicist, best known as the first author to describe the newly discovered American continent in Hebrew, born in Avignon, France (then part of the Papal state). Working as a scribe, he moved to Mantova in Italy in 1468 where he was employed by Rabbi Judah ben Jehiel aka Judah Messer Leon (c.1420/25-c.1498), and then to Ferrara in 1478, where he also served as a cantor. Farrisol is a typical example of a Jewish scholar who managed to combine traditional Jewish knowledge with the new world of Renaissance culture. His Iggeret Orḥot Olam (“Epistle of the Paths of the World”, 1524, later translated into Latin as Tractatus Itinerum Mundi), a geographical and cosmographic work, is the first Hebrew work that refers to the European geographical discoveries at the end of the 15th century and early 16th century, including the sea route to India pioneered by the Portuguese and the American continent. Farissol presents in one work details about native American populations along with reports about the situation of Jewish communities in various parts of the world as well as calculations about the probable location of the Garden of Eden and the Ten Lost Tribes. As a scribe he copied numerous manuscripts, but also composed Magen Avraham (also known as Vikkuaḥ ha-Dat), a polemical work against Christianity and Islam, Pirḥei Shoshannim, a short Torah commentary, commentaries to the Book of Job and the Ecclesiastes, and published two prayer books for Jewish women in which he inserted the blessing "Blessed are You Lord our God, Master of the Universe, for You made me a woman and not a man" (בָּאַ״יֶ אֶמֶ״הָ שְׁעַשִׂיתַנִי אִשָׁה וְלֹא אִישׁ‎). As a translator, Farrisol translated into Hebrew the Logic of Aristotle and various texts by Porphyry of Tyre, a 3rd century Greek philosopher.