Leone Modena

Leone Modena (born April 23, 1571, Venice [Italy]—died March 21, 1648, Venice) was an Italian rabbi, preacher, poet, scholar, gambling addict, and polemicist who wrote an important attack on the Sefer ha-zohar (“Book of Splendor”), the chief text of Kabbala, the influential body of Jewish mystical teachings.

By the time Modena was 12, he could translate portions of the Five Books of Moses from Hebrew into Italian and the first book of the Italian epic poem Orlando furioso into Hebrew. In 1594 he became a rabbi and preacher in Venice. His life was marred, however, by personal instability and ill fortune. Not only was he in perennial difficulties because of gambling, he also lived to see three of his five children die and his wife become insane. Despite these tribulations, he was a prolific writer. His works include religious poems, biblical exegesis, a defense of traditional Judaism, an attack on traditional Judaism, a Hebrew-Italian dictionary, and one of the earliest autobiographies written in Hebrew. Leone’s major work was Ari nohem (1840; “The Lion Roars”), in which he attempted to demonstrate, with much erudition, that the Zohar, the major text of Kabbala, is not the work of antiquity that its proponents claimed.