Travels and Growing Fame As Scholar
About 1469 Colon officiated as rabbi in Pieve de Sacco, in Venetian territory and continued on to Mestre, near Venice. Subsequently he was rabbi at Bologna and Mantua and, according to a report in Gedaliah Ibn Yahya's Shalshelet ha-Qabbalah, became embroiled in a quarrel with Rabbi Judah Messer Leon, both being banished by the authorities. Thereupon he relocated to Pavia. At the same time Colon's decisions in civil as well as religious questions were sought from far and wide—from German cities, such as Ulm and Nuremberg, as well as from Constantinople. He wrote a commentary on the Pentateuch, and novellæ on the Talmud and on the legal codex of Moses of Coucy, the Sefer Mitzvot Gadol. His major legacy were, however, his responsa. These were collected after his death by his son-in-law Rabbi Gershon Treves, and by one of his pupils, Hiyya Meïr ben David and were published in Venice in 1519 by Daniel Bomberg. They were subsequently republished many times. In 1984, E. D. Pines published fifty new responsa from manuscript. Many more of his responsa remain unpublished.
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Famous quotes containing the words travels, growing, fame and/or scholar:
“Evil counsel travels fast.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“He could walk, or rather turn about in his little garden, and feel more solid happiness from the flourishing of a cabbage or the growing of a turnip than was ever received from the most ostentatious show the vanity of man could possibly invent. He could delight himself with thinking, “Here will I set such a root, because my Camilla likes it; here, such another, because it is my little David’s favorite.””
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“but as an Eagle
His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
So vertue giv’n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
Like that self-begott’n bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
From out her ashie womb now teem’d
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem’d,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)