Aaron Berechiah of Modena
religious writer
Aaron Berechiah ben Moses ben Nehemiah of Modena (1549-1639) was an Italian kabbalist. He is the author of Ma'avar Yabboḳ, the primary source text for Jewish burial practices.
Biography
Aaron Berachiah was a pupil of Rabbi Hillel of Modena (surnamed Ḥasid we-Ḳaddosh, that is, "The Pious and Holy") and of the Italian Kabbalist Rabbi Menahem Azariah of Fano. He was a nephew of Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh de Modena and a student of Rabbi Israel Sarug who was a student of the Safed Kabbalist Isaac Luria. His brother-in-law was Rabbi Yosef Yedidya Krami, the author of Kanaf Renanim.
Persecution by the Church
He was arrested and imprisoned in 1636 for possessing forbidden books, namely, those singled out for censorship, expurgation or confiscation because of passages putatively critical of Christians. In his defense, he stated:
I have nothing else to say, but because the Holy Inquisition tolerates us in its States, consequently we are also allowed to own these books, which deal with our ceremonies, because it is impossible for us to live in these countries if we do not have books that teach us the principles of our faith, and although Your Lordship told us that Clemente VIII promulgated the bull that banned a number of books from the Jews, to my knowledge this bull has never been enforced, neither were the books confiscated from the Jews. Furthermore, even [Christian] preachers sometimes cite the Shulchan Aruch, Rav Alfassi, or similar books to convince the Jews [to convert] and they could not do this if we were prohibited to read or to own these books.
Books
His first work was the siddur Ashmoret haBoḳer (1624), containing liturgy compiled for Mei're HaShachar (a Lurianic early morning prayer group he founded), and therefore also published under this name.
His most well known work, Ma'avar Yabbok ("Crossing the Yabbok", 1626) was written at the request of the Chevra kadisha (burial society) of Mantua.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q301722. VIAF identifies the subject as 90404354. The Library of Congress control number is nr95004270. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1549, 1639, 1636 and 1624.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aaron Berechiah of Modena” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.