Life
David ben Judah was educated at Naples in the school of his father, Judah Messer Leon, author of Libnat ha-Sappir, and received at the age of eighteen his rabbinical diploma from German and French Talmudic authorities. Soon afterward he went to Padua, where he studied under Judah Minz, who granted him a new rabbinical diploma. After further studies in Florence, he returned to Naples in 1492, where he practised as a physician and taught in his father's academy. However, in 1495 the city fell to the French under Charles VIII, and he fled east to the Ottoman Empire to escape the violent pogroms that ensued, spending time in Istanbul before moving sometime between 1498 and 1504 to teach Torah in Salonica, at that time in a state of intellectual vibrancy due to the settlement there of many Sephardi exiles forced to leave after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Sicily in 1493, and Portugal in 1496.
It was while he was at Salonica that he completed his most major work, the Ein ha-Kore (Eye of the Reader), a sympathetic commentary defending Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, criticizing the commentary of Isaac Abravanel. The reputation of the book spread, and he was called to the rabbinate of Avlona in 1510 at a salary of 70 florins a year. The community possessed three congregations of various nationalities, and Leon officiated successively in the three synagogues on every third Saturday. In the very first year of his rabbinate dissensions on account of a ritual question arose which caused the separation of the Portuguese and Catalonian Jews from the Castilians. Toward the end of his second year in Avlona a quarrel broke out among the Sephardim and the Portuguese. Leon, who sided with the Portuguese, had for antagonists Abraham Ḥarbon and Abraham de Collier. Excommunications were launched by both parties even on the Day of Atonement, before the Sephardim finally relented. Some time later R. David returned to Salonica, where he died whilst still writing his last book.
Read more about this topic: David Ben Judah Messer Leon
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim—objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past—the portrayals of family life on such television programs as “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best” and all the rest.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now’s an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)