Eliezer ben Elijah Ashkenazi

Who was Eliezer ben Elijah Ashkenazi?

Eliezer ben Elijah Ashkenazi was a Talmudist, rabbi, physician, and many-sided scholar. Though of a German family, he was probably born in the Levant, and received his Talmudic education under Joseph Taitazak in Salonica. Ashkenazi first became rabbi in Egypt 1538-60, probably at Fostat, where, by his learning and wealth, he became widely known. Compelled by circumstances—doubtless of a political nature—to leave Egypt, he went to Cyprus, remaining there for two years as rabbi at Famagusta.

A desire to visit foreign lands and to observe foreign peoples impelled him to give up this position and to travel. He went first to Venice, but a disagreement with the rabbis Meïr Padua and his son Judah Katzenellenbogen caused him to leave the city and in the same year to take up his residence at Prague. Here—either because he was a rabbi, or, at all events, because he was a leading authority—his was the first signature appended to the constitution of the burial society of the congregation. After leaving Bohemia and proceeding eastward as far as the Crimea, Ashkenazi returned to Italy, not before 1570. While rabbi of Cremona he published there his work, Yosef Lekah, dedicated to Joseph Nasi, duke of Naxos, which was several times reprinted. Four years later he was again in eastern Europe, as rabbi of Posen. In 1584 he left that city to take up his abode in Cracow, where he died on December 13, 1585.