CASTELNUOVO, MENAHEM AZARIAH MEIR (Menahem Ḥayyim) BEN ELIJAH

CASTELNUOVO, MENAHEM AZARIAH MEIR (Menahem Ḥayyim) BEN ELIJAH (1760 or 1772–1847), rabbi and author. Castelnuovo, the son of a merchant, was born in Siena. Besides his rabbinical and general knowledge, he was familiar with the Kabbalah. After serving as a rabbi in Siena and Padua until about 1828, he went to Leghorn, where he was dayyan until 1840, first in the bet din of Raphael Ergas and later in that of Joseph Franco. His published works include Misgeret ha-Shulḥan, glosses and novellae to the Shulḥan Arukh (1840); Emek ha-Melekh, a responsa collection edited by his grandson, Jedidiah (Leghorn 1868), and Petaḥ ha-Teva. His two treatises Seder ha-Get and Seder ha-Ḥaliẓah were never printed and Minhagei Kehillatenu ha-Kedoshah, on the customs practiced in Leghorn, and collections of his sermons and correspondence (the latter in Hebrew and Italian) have also remained in manuscript. Some of his letters were included in Kevuẓat Kesef, Ghirondi's manuscript collection of correspondence. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: I. Costa, Sefer Tehillim – I Salmi (1866), pref.; Benjacob, Oẓar, S.V. Misgeret ha-Shulḥan; H. Hirschfeld, Descriptive Catalogue… (1904), 46, no. 161; 50, no. 185; L. Loewenstein, Index Approbationum (1923), 40, nos. 642, 643. (Heinrich Haim Brody)