Binyamin ben El`azar Cohen Vitale di Reggio and his Poetry in the Context of Devotional Brotherhoods

I would like to focus my lecture on Binyamin ben El`azar Cohen Vitale di Reggio (1651-1730), talmudist and poet, which was a pupil of Moshé Zacuto and a known representative of lurianic Kabbalah in Italy. Close friend of Abraham Rovigo, Binyamin Cohen shared with him a well documented interest for the sabbatean innovation that spread throughout the Jewish world at the time. I refer to his siddur עת הזמיר, a collection of cabalistic piyyutim dedicated to the days of the week and to the most important Jewish festivities, that was printed in Venice in 1707. These piyyutim were added in the second edition of Ayyelet ha-ṣaḥar, the hymnary of the brotherhood Šomerim la-boqer, printed in Mantova in 1724. By focusing on this character, active in Italian Jewry at the time of the ghettos, we can examine the historical and intellectual situation of Italian Jews at the time and compare it with the surrounding Catholic context. We can observe, in fact, a parallel development in brotherhoods inside and outside the ghettos. With the spread of cabalistic theories that originated in Eretz Israel, Jewish brotherhoods changed and started to devote themselves solely to religious practices and to the Tiqqun, with the aim of hasten the coming of the Messiah and the final redemption. This devotional development was probably influenced by the model of the Christians ones and their spiritual and ritual development which arose from the Counter-Reformation. Jews and Christians in fact, despite the Ghetto’s walls, were living the same spiritual renewal.