Hagiz, Jacob ben Samuel

Alvise Bragadin

Venice

1704

Halachoth Ketanoth [Responsa. Highlights of the work are discussions of the Laws of the Nazirite and shemoth-gittin (a list of proper names as they are to be written in a bill of divorce]. ff. (4), 71, (9).Title torn and taped. Minor stains. [Vinograd, Venice 1545]. * Bound with: Moses Galante. Korban Chagigah [Halachic novellae pertaining to the Three Festivals and particularly to the festive sacrifice offered in the Temple] ff. 55, (1). Title taped and stained. f. 40 has torn corner that does not affect text.Title within historiated border. On verso, attractive tailpiece containing vignettes of Elijah and Isaiah. [Vinograd, Venice 1550]

Vinograd, Venice 1545

Both works were issued by R. Moses Hagiz (who was wont to sign himself MeNIaH, initials of Moses son of Jacob Hagiz). The two books are by his father Jacob, and maternal grandfather Moses Galante (MaGeN), respectively. Moses Hagiz is famous today for his dogged pursuit of crypto-Sabbatians (believers in the pseudo-Messiah Shabbetai Zevi). His father Jacob was head of the yeshivah in Jerusalem where Nathan of Gaza, prophet of Shabbetai Zevi, studied as a young man. In fact, in the prolonged absence of Nathan’s father, Elisha Aschkenazi, a fundraiser for Eretz Israel whose travels took him to faraway Morocco, young Nathan was raised in Jacob Hagiz’s home. When later Nathan became “prophet” of the nascent messianic movement, R. Jacob Hagiz repudiated his former student, to no avail. Hagiz’s son Moses inherited his father’s deep-seated animosity to all forms of Sabbatianism. Moses’ maternal grandfather, also a Jerusalemite, was a very different sort of individual, who for a time at least, was swept up by the hullaballoo of the Sabbatian movement. In early 1666, we find in Aleppo among the leading Sabbatian “prophets”. See A. Yaari, Sheluchei Eretz Yisrael (1977), pp. 290-291; Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi (Princeton, 1973), 201-202, 246-248; Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York,1990). A facsimile of the title page of Korban Chagigah appears in Giora Pozielov, Hachmeihen shel Arba ‘Arei ha-Kodesh (Jerusalem, 2001), p.75