Rabbi Benjamin Zeev ben Mattathias of Arta רבי בנימין זאב בן מתתיהו מארטה

Little is known of his life: neither the year of his birth nor that of his death. It is known where he judged, in Arta, Larissa, Corfu and Venice, and that by 1538 he had returned to Arta, a town where separate congregations of people from Corfu, Sicily, Calabria and Apulia each kept their own custom. To judge in such a town meant deciding every time whose custom was the stronger.

He gathered his rulings into a book, four hundred and fifty answers finished in Venice in 1534 and printed there five years later. The dispute over them began before the printing. The hardest question was that of the abandoned wife: the husband is gone, there are no witnesses to his death, and the woman may not marry to the end of her days. Rabbi Benjamin Zeev looked for a way out in such cases more often than others. He was opposed in Salonika and in Italy alike; around 1530 the matter came before the Italian rabbis, and some demanded that he be removed from the rabbinate. By 1532 the quarrel had died down, and the office stayed with him.

The book was read warily afterwards as well: Rabbi Solomon Luria warned that only one who had checked all its passages against the sources himself had the right to rely on it. Yet it is from that very book that historians take nearly everything they know of Jewish life in the Greece and Turkey of that century: weddings, inheritances, debts and the quarrels of congregations.