In 1624, Joseph ben Judah Hamiz successfully completed his doctorate in philosophy and medicine at the University of Padua1. Besides the joy of Hamiz and his immediate family must have felt at this achievement, the event itself hardly seemed to merit any real significance either for Padua or for its Jewish community. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a constant trickle of Jews were among the hundreds of students annually graduating from Padua's renowned medical school2. Nevertheless, Hamiz's graduation appears to have elicited an unusual outpouring of favorable, even elated, response from some of the most important luminaries of Italian Jewish culture of this era.