Reviews for The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah

The average rating for The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of Judah based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-03-19 00:00:00 David King This book is no fancy 21st Century, writer's workshopped, novel-like memoir. It drops facts like heavy led, it kvetches like the worst old timer in your father's shul, it's slightly boastful, it hardly gives the whole picture but it's also a breathtaking marvel of quotes from all around Jewish literature. In the first section of the autobiography, the one Modena sat and wrote most intentionally, Modena hardly speaks in his own voice, every other line is a quote from a possuk, a mishnah, gemara, midrash; it's incredible. This book can also be read as the confession of a lifelong gambling addict. It's hard not to feel bad for him as he recounts, in progressively more bitter and self-loathing terms, his inability to control his gambling habit. He never specifically mentions how his wife feels about his financial losses at the gambling table, nor of his loss of focus, the damage to his honor, but when he talks about her beating him up "although he never did anything to her" and then in the very next paragraph he talks about how much she hated the house they were living in, which he himself referred to as "me'arat hamachpelah", one can only surmise how she felt about his decisions which led them there. Overall an excellent peek into 16th and 17th Century Italian Jewish life.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-01-17 00:00:00 Simon J Fisher I must say there is nothing special except of seeing parts of the life of some people who has been neglected and dehumanized over centuries. This book is about one of these people. It is the life of Leon Modena, even though he was actually born in Venice and therefore he refers to himself numerous times as Leon da Venezia in the manuscript which he wrote.