יעקב בן חיים צמח

Rav Yaakov ben Chaim Tzemach, known in English sources as Jacob Zemah, was a Portuguese mekubal and physician. He received his training in medicine in his native land while living as a Marrano, and about 1619 he fled to Tzfat, where he gave himself to Gemara and the poskim until 1625. From there he went to Damascus, and for eighteen years learned kabbalah from the Zohar and from the writings of the Arizal and of Rav Chaim Vital. He settled at last in Yerushalayim and opened a yeshiva for the learning of the Zohar and the sifrei kabbalah; Rav David Conforte was for a time among his talmidim.

He wrote twenty works, both his own compositions and compilations of the writings of Rav Chaim Vital, of which only two were printed. The first is Kol BaRamah, his commentary on the Idra, begun in 5403/1643, for which he drew on Rav Chaim Vital’s commentary; it appeared in Korets in 5545/1785. In its introduction he wrote that the coming of Mashiach depends on teshuvah and on the learning of kabbalah from the Zohar and the writings of the Arizal, and that the delay came about because batei midrash for such learning had not been set up in every town. The second is Nagid u’Metzaveh (Amsterdam 5472/1712), on the inner and deeper meaning of the tefillot, an abridgment of a larger compendium of his.

Among the works that remained unprinted is Ronnu leYaakov, in which he calls himself the ger tzedek; it is built of notes he set down while learning before Rav Shmuel Vital, together with his own additions. In his gathering of Rav Chaim Vital’s writings he brought works of Vital that had not been known to Vital’s son Rav Shmuel. He was niftar in Yerushalayim in the second half of the seventeenth century.