Cracovia, Jacob Menachem. Tzurath ha-Chidon [Epithalamium, or Wedding Riddle]. Composed for the marriage of Isaac, son of Jacob Picchiotto and Chana Beila, daughter of Jacob Chaim Vivante

(ITALY)

Livorno

mid-18th century

Single folio leaf. Text in Hebrew. Large woodcut showing a man with walking stick in hand standing on the cubes of a puzzle

Riddles in the form of poems became popular among Italian Jews in the mid-seventeenth century and remained an important literary genre through the mid-nineteenth century. Such riddles seem to have been a peculiarly Jewish invention, though they owed a debt to Italian and Spanish literature. These canny riddles were also composed for weddings to amuse the bride and groom. They were distributed to guests prior, in order to prepare a solution. At the wedding celebration, the guests would present their solutions, the winner being rewarded with a prize. See Vivian B. Mann, Gardens and Ghettos (1989), pp. 281-2. Jacob Cracovia of Venice was one of the Italian rabbis who served as delegates to the Assembly of Jewish Notables that Napoleon convened in Paris in 1806. See C. Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (1946), pp.442-3