Lelio Della Torre

Lelio Della Torre (Hillel) was an Italian rabbi, teacher, and scholar. Born in Cuneo in Piedmont, he taught at the Collegio Colonna e Finzi in Turin from 1823 to 1829, serving as assistant rabbi from 1827. Two years later, with the opening of the Padua Rabbinical College (which trained the majority of Italian rabbis), he was made professor of Talmud. He gained renown for his teaching of homiletics and for his own preaching. Aside from his volumes of Hebrew poetry, Tal Yaldut and Eglei Tal, and numerous sermons, he published a commentary on the Pentateuch, translated and annotated the Psalms, and rendered the prayers according to Ashkenazi custom in Italian. His works on scholarly and current subjects, nearly 300 in Jewish publications alone, were published in the periodicals Bikkurei ha-Ittim ha-Hadashim, Kerem Hemed, Kokhevei Yizhak, and Avnei Nezer, as well as in Italian, German, and French periodicals. Della Torre was honored by secular learned societies in Padua and Venice; his two-volume Scritti Sparsi appeared in 1908.

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