Bassan, Abraham Hezekiah ben Jacob
BASSAN, ABRAHAM HEZEKIAH BEN JACOB
BASSAN, ABRAHAM HEZEKIAH BEN JACOB (18th century), proofreader and poet. Abraham's father, jacob, was the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese community of Hamburg. From 1735 to 1756 Jacob lived in Amsterdam and in 1755 published an order of service for the fast day proclaimed on the occasion of the great earthquake in Lisbon.
Abraham Hezekiah was proofreader for the Hebrew press in Amsterdam. He is mentioned as the proofreader of Benjamin Raphael Dias Brandon's Orot ha-Mitzvot (1753) to which his father wrote an approbation, and to which Abraham contributed an introduction and poem consisting of 13 stanzas. Other poems by Abraham were published in works by various authors: in the Gemul Atalyah (1770) of David *Franco-Mendes, in the Se'ah Solet (1757) of Raphael b. Gabriel Norzi, and in the Maskiyyot Kesef (1760) of Mordecai b. Isaac Tamah. In about 1773 he moved to Hamburg where he succeeded his father as rabbi of the local Spanish and Portuguese community. He was the author of a book of eulogies, Sermões Funebres (Amsterdam, 1753), written in Spanish. It is doubtful that he is the author of the Yashresh Ya'akov (Nuremberg, 1768), a work on grammar and the text of the prayer book, as has been conjectured (see Benjacob, Oẓar, 234 no. 503).
bibliography:
Ghirondi-Neppi, 10 no. 40; Kayserling, Bibl, 26.
[Yehoshua Horowitz]