Abraham Portaleone

Abraham Portaleone, who died on July 29, 1612, was an Italian-Jewish physician in Mantua and a pupil of Jacob Fano. He served the Dukes Guglielmo and Vincenzo of Mantua, who granted him privileges in 1577 and 1587, and Pope Gregory XIV gave him a dispensation that enabled him to attend Christian patients. At the request of Duke Guglielmo he wrote two medical treatises in Latin, Consilia Medica and Dialogi Tres de Auro, the latter published in 1584. His Hebrew work Shilte ha-Gibborim, printed in 1612, was an encyclopedic book relating the arts and sciences to the Temple, and it included techniques of warfare. One scholar notes it as the first Hebrew book to adopt European punctuation and considers it typical of Renaissance thought in its integration of science and religion.