The Livorno school: from Zacuto to Yad Malachi

Livorno stands apart: by the charters of the Tuscan grand dukes former anusim were not questioned about their past, and the town never had a ghetto. People there lived more freely than in Venice or Rome, and studied more freely too.

The chain can be read off the names. Rabbi Joseph Ergas was born at Livorno in 1685. He learned halakhah at the town's yeshiva from Rabbi Samuel de Paz—a man of whom almost nothing is known but this: no dates, no entry of his own in the reference works, and even the reading of the name differs, 'de Paz' or 'of Fez'. He learned kabbalah for seven weeks from Rabbi Benjamin ha-Kohen Vitale of Reggio—who was the leading student of Rabbi Moshe Zacuto. So Zacuto's kabbalah reached Livorno in two steps.

Ergas then moved to Pisa, founded the yeshiva Neveh Shalom there and two communal charities, returned to Livorno as head of the community and died there in 1730. His Shomer Emunim—the philosophical defence of kabbalah—appeared at Amsterdam posthumously.

His place was taken by his student, Rabbi Malachi ben Jacob ha-Kohen. He did what a student does: he published his teacher's responsa, Divrei Yosef, at Livorno in 1742. And in 1767 he printed there Yad Malachi—a compendium not of laws but of the rules by which laws are derived: the terms of the Talmud alphabetically, the codifiers in order, the rules of ruling. He is called the last of the great rabbis of Italy, and that is true in substance: after him Italian learning of that weight does not come again.