Ya'akov Lattes - "Rabbi Moshe Zacut: his Life and his
Works"
MA Thesis,
(Excerpts translated
from Hebrew by
Introduction
One of the central and most exemplary
figures in Jewish life in
The
The only certain detail about his birth
is the city where he was born -
Most follow Berliner who determined the
Remez was born in 1625, though he did not come forward with any proof.
This date however, was already
contradicted by Appelbaum who wrote: "This [date] is completely
impossible, since in his book "Kol
Ha-Remez" he mentions the Maharasha twice with the addition "May he
live a long life", showing that the Maharasha was still alive. Since we
know that the Maharasha died in the year 1632, if the Remez were born in 1625,
he would have been under 6 or 7 years old when he wrote this very detailed
book, that shows great wisdom and wide knowledge fitting a man of adulthood.
Therefore we have to place his date of birth earlier, approximately to the year
1612, so that at the time he wrote this book he would have been 20 at
least."
Melkman came to the same conclusion,
though by a different calculation.
He proves that "Rabbi Moshe Zacut
was born shortly after the year 1610, apparently in
From all this we have to conclude that
the more likely date of birth of the Remez is around 1610.
About his family we almost don't know
anything. He always signed as "Moshe ben Mordechai", and from this we know his father's name.
The family was of Portuguese origin and
apparently the Remez was a descendant of Rabbi Abraham Zacut who wrote the
"Sefer Ha-Yohassin".
In
The relations between the Remez and Rabbi
HaLevi Mortira stayed strong until the latter's
death. The Remeze continued to write to him from
When Rabbi Mortira died in the year 1660,
the Remez wrote from
Gertz assumed that the Remez was a fellow student with
Spinoza, since both studied with Rabbi Mortira. This mistake apparently stems
from the assumption that the Remez was born in 1630. After all Spinoza was born
in 1632, and since it is knows both were students of Rabbi Mortira, one might
easily be thought to believe they studied together.
However, this has been shown to be
impossible, as Appelbaum and Nahum Sokolov already
pointed out, since the Remez was born some twenty years before Spinoza.
No further details about his family are
known: did he have brothers, what was his mother's name, was his father a
Rabbi? It is interesting to notice that he hardly mentions his family at all,
in all of his works.
In one letter from 1680, the Remez writes
his wife is ill and this is one of the reasons preventing him from making Aliya to the
Then again we hear that at his death in
1697 his widow is called Rachel, maybe a second wife, and she is allotted an
allowance from the community.
This period is quite vague in the Remez's
life and his movements between several cities in not clear. Therefore we have
to differentiate between the details that we know for certain and those that
are assumptions only.
The certain information is that before
coming to
Except for this it is very difficult to
reconstruct his movements between these cities and the rest is pure
speculations.
One possibility is that the father of the
Remez, who dealt in diamonds, attempted in the year 1617 to trade with the city
of
From there the family moved to
Another possibility is that the family
moved to
In any case we know that in the year 1642
Rabbi Moshe Zacut resided in
This was an important period in the
Remez's life, because of its influences on him and because these were the years
that shaped his personality.
In fact no
more than this is known about his life in
"Yesod Olam" with a forword in
German by Abraham Ben Zvi Berliner, Altuna 1874, Introdution page XXI
Melkman Joseph, "The Early Years of Rabbi Moshe Zacut", Sfunot 9 (1965), p. 129
Appelbaum Abba, "Moshe Zacut", Lavov
1926, page 5.
Gretz Zvi, "Sefer Divrei Yemei Israel",
Warshaw 1899, Vol. VIII, p. 199
Sokolov Nahum, "Baruch Spinoza and his Times",
Binyahu Meir, "Rabbi Moshe Zacut from leaving