שאול לוי מורטירא

Rav Shaul Levi Morteira (c. 5356/1596–5420/1660), whose name is also written Mortera, was a rav in Amsterdam and a leading figure among the exiled Portuguese Jews of that city. He was born in Venice and learned under Rav Yehuda Aryeh de Modena. From the age of thirteen he attended the physician Rav Eliyahu Montalto, going with him to Paris, where he worked as his secretary inside the Louvre until 5376/1616. On the passing of Montalto he brought the body from France to Amsterdam, where Jews were living openly and he could be buried among them. He stayed on there, and married an orphan girl whose dowry came from one of the tzedakah funds of the kehillah.

The Sephardic kehillah Beit Yaakov chose him as its chacham in place of Rav Moshe ben Aroyo. He founded the community’s school, Keter Torah, and taught Gemara and machshavah in its highest shiur. When the three kehillot of Amsterdam joined into one in 5399/1639 he was the senior rav of the united congregation, ranking above Rav Menasheh ben Yisrael, at six hundred guilders a year. Among his talmidim were Rav Moshe Zacuto and Rav Avraham Cohen Pimentel. He was troubled by members of the kehillah who set aside halachah and denied the authority of the chachamim, and he pressed the matter of those who cast doubt on the Torah’s divine origin; he sat on the maamad which in 5416/1656 issued the cherem against Baruch Spinoza, who had learned under him.

His talmidim gathered fifty of his derashot on the Chumash and published them as Givat Shaul in Amsterdam in 5405/1645, chosen out of some five hundred he had written. In Spanish he composed the Tratado de la Verdad de la Ley, a defense of the Torah against the claims of the Church, which Rav Yitzchak Gomez de Gosa rendered into Hebrew in sixty-six chapters under the name Torat Moshe. His Hebrew derashot on that subject were printed; his writings on the immortality of the soul and on revelation, and his Portuguese compositions, remained in manuscript.