הרב עמנואל הרומי

Immanuel of Rome — Rav Immanuel ben Shlomo ben Yekutiel, Immanuel HaRomi, called in Italian sources Manoello Giudeo (5021/1261–c. 5092/1332) — was a Hebrew poet and commentator of the Papal States, best known for the Machberot Immanuel. He was born in Rome to the Tzifroni family; his cousin Rav Yehudah ben Moshe Romano was an author and translator in the service of Robert of Anjou, King of Naples. Immanuel served as head of correspondence for the kehillah of Rome and likely held another prominent post as well. In 5081/1321 he left Rome, perhaps because of a papal edict of that year ordering the Jews expelled from the city, and afterward he moved about Italy, possibly settling for a time in Gubbio.

The Machberot Immanuel is a collection of twenty-eight machbarot (notebookes), chapters of rhymed prose interwoven with metered verse in the maqama form (laced with rhetoric too), that had flourished among the Jews of Spain; in his introduction Immanuel points to the Tachkemoni of Rav Yehudah al-Charizi. Thirty-eight sonnets are set among its chapters, in a meter that joins the quantitative meter of Hebrew Spain with the syllabic meter of Italian verse, and he is counted the first poet to write a sonnet in any language other than Italian. Among its best-known sections is the Machberet HaTofet VehaEden, an account of Gehinnom and Gan Eden as shown to the author by a guide named Daniel, the one chapter written entirely in rhymed prose. The work was widely read: it was among the early Hebrew sefarim printed after the rise of the press in Italy, and the Shulchan Aruch, in the sixteenth century, names it among the writings not to be read on Shabbat.

Beside the Machberot (notebooks) he wrote commentaries on Tanach, a work on the methods of interpretation, a treatise on the hidden meanings of the letters of the alef-beit that has not survived, and five poems in Italian — four sonnets and the Bisbidis, which was taken into the poetic anthologies of his day; he is the only Jewish author of the period whose Italian verse survives. He was niftar in Fermo.