The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena's Life of JudahLeon (Judah Aryeh) Modena was a major intellectual figure of the early modern Italian Jewish community a complex and intriguing personality who was famous among contemporary European Christians as well as Jews. Modena (1571 1648) produced an autobiography that documents in poignant detail the turbulent life of his family in the Jewish ghetto of Venice. The text of this work is well known to Jewish scholars but has never before been translated from the