Judah Peretz

Judah ben Joseph Peretz was a Sephardic scholar and preacher, whose family had migrated from Spain to North Africa in the sixteenth century, settling in the High Atlas region south of Marrakesh. Judah Peretz’s father moved the family again from Tunis to Italy, and Peretz seems to have been raised in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) before moving to Venice early in the 1700s. In the following years he published several Hebrew works of liturgy in Venice, and his collection of sermons, Peraḥ Levanon (Blossoms of Lebanon), in Berlin; he served also as a companion of the controversial Sabbatean kabbalist Nehemiah ḥiya ḥayun. After living in Prague and Cologne, Peretz migrated to Amsterdam, where he published a Spanish catechism (1729) and a Judeo-Arabic translation of the Ten Commandments (1737). In this excerpt from his introduction to Peraḥ Levanon, Peretz emphasizes his Spanish family lineage while also detailing his own escape from the Inquisition in Spanish-occupied Naples.