יצחק למפרונטי

Rav Yitzchak Chizkiyah Lampronti (21 Shevat 5439/1679–Kislev 5517/1756) was rav and rosh yeshiva of Ferrara, a practicing physician, and the author of the Pachad Yitzchak — the first great encyclopedia of halachah. Orphaned of his father at six, he learned under the chachamim of Ferrara and in Lugo under Rav Manoach Provenzal, then studied medicine at the university of Padua while learning in the city’s yeshiva; his teachers in Torah included Rav Yehuda Briel of Mantua, the head of Italian rabbanut in that generation. He received semichah at thirty-one, and in 5503/1743 became rosh yeshiva and chief rav of his native Ferrara.

He was a teacher before all else: for decades he taught the youth of Ferrara — when the Spanish talmud torah closed, its children came to him as well — opened a beit medrash for working men who learned after hours, and founded for his best talmidim a journal of halachic essays, Bikkurei Katzir, whose contributors became the next generation of Italian rabbanim. All the while he practiced medicine for Jew and gentile alike, visiting patients at first light, and wove his medical knowledge through his halachic writing.

The Pachad Yitzchak is an alphabetical encyclopedia of the concepts of the Talmud, the poskim and the responsa literature — gathering rulings of the rabbanim of his era that existed only in manuscript — a work of a scope no one had attempted before him. He printed the first volumes in Venice in his last years; his son Rav Shlomo continued the printing, and the final portions waited more than a century for the press. He was niftar in Kislev 5517; a papal decree issued months earlier had forbidden Jewish tombstones in Ferrara, and so the resting place of the city’s great rav is unknown — but his sefer is his matzeivah.