Israel Zamosz

Israel ben Moses ha-Levi Zamosz, born around 1700 in Buberki and died on 20 April 1772 in Brody, was an eighteenth-century Talmudist, mathematician and poet. He studied and taught at a yeshiva in Zamosc while pursuing the secular sciences, above all mathematics, and wrote notes on the Yesod Olam of Isaac Israeli ben Joseph and on the Elim of Joseph Delmedigo. In Zamosc he also wrote Arubbot ha-Shamayim, a work on descriptive geometry and astronomy. He became known with the Nezah Yisrael of 1741, a traditional Talmudic text that reads many passages from a mathematical and astronomical viewpoint. About 1742 he settled in Berlin, living in poverty, where he taught mathematics and logic to Aaron Solomon Gumperz and Moses Mendelssohn, and where Lessing valued his scholarship. Several of his works, including a poetical prose piece on the human desire for luxury, appeared only after his death.