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Porta-Leone

Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

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(מַשִּׁעִר אִרְיֵה ), ABRAHAM, also called Arje Abraham, a Jewish savant, was born in the year 1542. He belonged to a family which excelled in medical science to such a degree that one of the members of the family was employed as physician in the service of king Ferdinand I of Naples and duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Mailand. Abraham received an excellent education, and attended the lectures at the University of Pavia, where he especially betook himself to the study of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galenus, and the Arabic writers. In the year 1563 he received the doctorate and became a member of the medical college at Mantua. He died in the year 1612. Porta-Leone takes a prominent place in Jewish literature, as he is the author of the שַׁלְטֵי הִגַּבּוֹרַים, an extensive work on Jewish antiquities, in which he minutely treats on the Temple and its structure-the holy of holies, the altar, candlestick, table, music, etc. The whole is divided into ninety sections, to which is appended a list of ninety-eight works, which he perused for his work, and an essay on the use of the Hebrew language, etc. This excellent work, which is now very scarce, was first published in the year 1612. A Latin translation, which Wagenseil pronounced a "librum optimum," "antiquitates Judaicas solide explicantem," "librum aurelum," and Menasseh ben-Israel as an "ingeniosum opus," was published by Ugolino in his Thesatrus antiquitatuma sacrarum (vol. 9, 11, 13, 32). Iken used Leone's work in his antiquities to a great extent, and he promised a translation of the whole, which never appeared. See Fiirst, Bibl. Judaica, 3, 114 sq.; De Rossi, Dizionario storico degli Autori Ebrei (German transl.), p. 268 sq.; Wolf, Bibl. Hebr. 1, 3, 4:63; Jahrbuch fü r Geschichte der Judens u. des Judenthums, 2, 345 sq.; Wolf, Studien zur Jube feier der Wiener Universitat (Wien, 1865), p. 172; Delitzsch and Zuniz, Addit. ad Cod. Bibl. Senat. (Lips.), 27. (B. P.)