Mateh Dan
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David Nieto
David Nieto
1654 CE–1728 CE · Acharonim · Venice
Born in Venice in 1654 to a family of Portuguese Jewish descent, David Nieto trained in medicine at the University of Padua and worked as a physician, preacher, and religious judge in Livorno, where he also pursued astronomy and mathematics and issued a 1702 study of calendar reckoning. In 1701 he was called to London as Haham of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation at Bevis Marks, a post he held until his death in 1728. His best-known book, Mateh Dan (also titled Kuzari Sheni, 1714), was written in Hebrew with Spanish annotations as a dialogue modeled on Judah Halevi's Kuzari and defended the authority of the Oral Torah. In Eish Das (1715) he engaged the teachings of the Sabbatean writer Nehemiah Hayon. An earlier discourse on divine providence drew charges of heresy that were resolved in his favor by Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi.
About the Controversy
Rabbi David Nieto was a philosopher, scientist, and hakham of London's Spanish-Portuguese community. In the so-called “Nieto affair,” a sermon in which he identified God with Nature drew accusations of heresy; the Hakham Tzvi defended him in a famous responsum, clearing his name.
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Stop 1 of 41654Born
VeniceויניציאהItaly
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About Venice
# Venice In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Venice was the jewel of Mediterranean trade—a maritime republic whose merchant galleys connected Europe to the Ottoman Empire and beyond, ruled by an oligarchy of patrician families whose power rested on commerce and naval supremacy. The city rose from its lagoon like a dream of marble and water, its canals lined with warehouses bulging with spices, silks, and precious goods, while the great Basilica of San Marco dominated the skyline as a symbol of Venetian pride and wealth. Jews had been permitted to settle in Venice for centuries, drawn by its role as a crossroads of Christian and Muslim worlds; by the fifteenth century, the community was small but prosperous, composed largely of merchants, physicians, and moneylenders who lived under carefully negotiated restrictions and periodic renewals of their charter. Though forbidden from owning property in most of the city, Venetian Jews occupied a precarious but culturally fertile space, their status as trusted intermediaries in international trade granting them a unique visibility and protection. The Jewish scholars who gathered in Venice during these decades found in the city not only safety but access to the vast networks of information and texts flowing through its ports—a place where Hebrew learning could flourish alongside the hum of commerce, and where a Jewish sage might sit in study while the bells of San Marco rang across the water.
In Venice at the same time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with David Nieto’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with David Nieto’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works(2)
Eish Das
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