שמואל צבי מרגליות

Rav Shmuel Tzvi Margulies (5618/1858–5682/1922), known in Italy as Samuel Hirsch Margulies, was rav of Florence for thirty-two years and the man who rebuilt the rabbinic training of Italian Jewry. He was born in Berezhany in Galicia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule, to Yonah and Chaya Margulies, his father a merchant. He learned in Buchach under Rav Shmuel Yissachar Shtark, received semichah from the rabbinical seminary in Breslau, and took a doctorate in philosophy and Semitic languages at Leipzig and Breslau. He married Recha Sarah, daughter of Rav Ferdinand Rosenthal.

From 1885 to 1887 he served the Sephardic kehillah of Neveh Shalom in Altona, and from 1887 to 1890 as district rav of Weilburg in Hesse-Nassau. In 1890 he came to Florence as its rav, a position he held until his passing. In 1899 he brought the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano — Italy’s only rabbinical seminary, founded by Shmuel David Luzzatto in Padua and later moved to Rome — to Florence, and stood at its head. There he set the learning of Gemara and poskim on the pattern of the yeshivot of eastern Europe, and the young rabbanim who came out of it carried a revival through the Italian kehillot, so that Florence became the center of Jewish life in the country until the Second World War. He founded and edited Rivista Israelitica, the seminary’s journal, and published Rav Saadiah Gaon’s Arabic translation of Tehillim. Among his talmidim was Rav Umberto Cassuto, who later headed Bible studies at the Hebrew University in Yerushalayim.

He was among the heads of the Italian Zionist Federation, and in 1904 arranged the meeting between Theodor Herzl and King Vittorio Emanuele III, having first gone in himself to explain to the king what the movement sought. Ethiopian Jewry drew his particular care: with Dr. Yaakov Faitlovitch he founded a committee for the Falashas and brought a group of young Ethiopian Jews to Italy, where they lived with Italian families and learned in the Jewish school of Florence, taking to their new surroundings quickly. Illness broke the undertaking, and of that group only Taamrat Emanuel, who learned in the seminary, survived.

In 5672/1912 he wrote to Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, then rav of Yafo, asking his help in finding a teacher from Eretz Yisrael for a school planned in Eritrea. Rav Kook, unable to find a suitable man among his own, turned to his colleague Rav Ben-Zion Meir Chai Uziel — calling Rav Margulies in that letter one of the great rabbanim outside the Land — and set out what the position required: a man of holy feeling who could set alight the hearts of those scattered sheep and bind them to the love of Torah. Their correspondence went on into Rav Kook’s years in Switzerland.