OLMO, JACOB DANIEL BEN ABRAHAM

OLMO, JACOB DANIEL BEN ABRAHAM (c. 1690–1757), Italian rabbi and poet. Born in Ancona, his family moved to Ferrara, where he became a student of Isaac *Lampronti. He served as a teacher and later as head of the yeshivah of Ferrara and as rabbi of the Ashkenazi synagogue there. A student of the Kabbalah, he founded a society of Shomerim la-Boker ("Morning Watchers") to pray for the return to Zion. With the death of Lampronti, he became head of the local rabbinical court.

Some of Olmo's legal decisions are included in Lampronti's Paḥad Yiẓḥak. A collection of his decisions, entitled Pi Ẓaddik, is still in manuscript. His Eden Arukh is a poetic drama of 274 stanzas which both in form and content is a continuation and imitation of Moses *Zacuto's Tofteh Arukh; the two works were published in one volume (Venice, 1743). Eden Arukh is based on talmudic, midrashic, and kabbalistic literature. It was translated into German and into Italian by Cesare Foa (1904). He compiled a work on the sages of the Ashkenazi synagogue of Ferrara and wrote occasional poems and hymns included in various Italian liturgical works. One of his poems, in honor of the wedding of a pupil, consisted of 35 stanzas in Hebrew with Italian words echoing the last Hebrew word at the end of each stanza.

bibliography:

C. Roth, in: Melilah, 3–4 (1951), 204–23; U. Cassuto, in: Eshkol-Enẓiklopedyah Yisre'elit, 1 (1929), 890–1; F. Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der juedischen Poesie… (1836), 73, S.V. Ulamo; Rhine, in: jqr, 2 (1911/12), 39–42.

[Yonah David]