Isaac Samuel Reggio

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Born in 1784, the only son of di Abram Reggio and Regina Morpurgo, Isaac received an excellent education, on both a secular level (he studied at the local school and the Liceo at Gorizia), and on a religious level. He dedicated himself to Biblical exegesis and Jewish philosophy, signing his work with the acronym JaShaR. He had many interests, from painting to mathematics, music to mechanics. 

He was an admirer of Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely, and had a fundamental role in spreading the ideas of German Jewish illuminism in the Italian area of the Habsburg Empire, particularly in Gorizia. For this reason, he became known as the “Italian Mendelssohn”. As he wrote to the eminent Hebraist, ShaDaL (Samuel David Luzzatto) – with whom he had a rich epistolary exchange – following philosophy alone inevitably led people to become “non-believers”, while following religion alone turned people into “bigots”. 

This philosophical and critical method applied to religion is characteristic of the Rabbinical College in Padua, in whose inauguration he took an active part. 

He was Chief Rabbi of Gorizia from for about a decade from the 1840s, and he refused to accept payment for this role. 

He taught in a private school in Trieste and later in the Liceo in Gorizia during the French occupation. 

He died in 1855, aged 71 years, when a cholera epidemic hit Gorizia. 

SOURCES:

Miriam Davide and Pietro Ioly Zorattini (eds), Gli ebrei nella storia del Friuli Venezia Giulia. Una vicenda di lunga durata, Giuntina, Florence 2016

Alessandro Grazi, Il pensiero di Isacco Samuele Reggio tra Haskalah e Wissenschaft des Judentums, in “Filosofia italiana. Filosofia Ebraica in Italia (XV – XIX secolo)”, 2020

Marco Grusovin, Isacco Samuele Reggio rabbino e filosofo, in “Quaderni Giuliani di Storia”, 17, 2, 1996, pp. 7-29

Dante Lattes, Di alcuni dotti ebrei d’Italia del secolo passato, in “La Rassegna Mensile Di Israel”, vol. 30, no. 3, 1964

Giuliano Tamani, I. S. Reggio e l’Illuminismo ebraico, in P. C. Ioly Zorattini (ed.), Gli ebrei a Gorizia e a Trieste tra “ancien régime” ed emancipazione, Del Bianco, Udine 1984, pp. 29-40

Translation from Italian to English by Bethany Gaunt