Hakham Tzvi—Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi החכם צבי — רבי צבי הירש אשכנזי

Born in Moravia in 1656—the Jewish Encyclopedia gives 1658, and the question is unsettled. His childhood was spent with his grandfather Rabbi Ephraim ha-Kohen, rabbi of Alt-Ofen. He studied at Salonica under Rabbi Elijah Kovo and at Constantinople, where he acquired the Sephardi title hakham. In 1686, during the Austrian storming of Buda, a cannon shot killed his first wife and daughter. Then Sarajevo; from 1690 Altona, with a celebrated kloyz on a nominal salary; from 1707 rabbi of the three communities Altona–Hamburg–Wandsbek.

On 10 January 1710 he was elected chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community of Amsterdam at two thousand five hundred guilders a year—an exceptional salary. In early 1714 he fled the city. He died at Lemberg on 2 May 1718, four months after taking office there.

His responsa (Hakham Tzvi, Amsterdam, 1712) are famous for two rulings. Section 93 is the first sustained halakhic treatment of the golem: may a golem made by his ancestor Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm be counted in a minyan? He rules that it may not, and from that section descends nearly all later Jewish golem literature. Section 74 is the heartless hen: a slaughtered fowl was brought to him in which no heart was found, and he ruled it kosher, reasoning that no animal can live without a heart, so the organ must have been lost in handling. His opponents insisted that the codes declare such an animal tereifah regardless of anatomy. The affair cost him the rabbinate of the three communities—and so left him free for Amsterdam.

In 1705 he was consulted about Rabbi David Nieto, hakham of London, accused of "Spinozism" for a sermon identifying God with nature. Hakham Tzvi exonerated him.

The Hayyun affair: on 23 July 1713 he and Rabbi Moses Hagiz pronounced a herem on the crypto-Sabbatean Nehemiah Hayyun without waiting for the Portuguese commission's verdict. On 7 August the Portuguese ma'amad publicly declared Hayyun guiltless of heresy and censured them both for excommunicating a man outside their jurisdiction. Hakham Tzvi was attacked in the street and placed under communal censure, and left Amsterdam early in 1714.

Two corrections. "The Sephardim expelled him" is inexact: his own Ashkenazi parnassim turned against him too, having no appetite for war with the wealthy and well-connected Portuguese community; he resigned. And this was not a quarrel of Sephardim against Ashkenazim, still less of kabbalists against rationalists: Hakham Tzvi was himself Sephardi-trained and Kabbalah-friendly, his ally Hagiz was a Jerusalem Sephardi, and his opponent Ayllon was a Sephardi hakham defending a Sabbatean. The real axis is the power of a lay board against trans-communal rabbinic authority—the same axis as in Spinoza's herem sixty years earlier.