Who was Moses Vita Cassuto?
Moses Vita Cassuto is a little-known member of the early eighteenth century of a distinguished Jewish Florentine family of which happily representatives are still with us.
Posterity should know him as one of the long list of Jewish travellers whose painstaking records of their often painful journeys did so much to guide their contemporaries and to enrich our
knowledge in later ages.

Moses Cassuto in his diary written for his wife discloses incidentally something of himself.
He was a merchant of reasonable means, a dealer in precious stones but an educated man of the world, accustomed to mix in the highest society; he was devoutly religious and devoted to his family, and we see him as a patient (if not always very precise) recorder of things seen and heard, and a careful scribe. In visiting places attributed Biblical or other pious associations, he is frankly credulous and uncritical. Perhaps be is not to be reckoned in the front rank of either diarists or travel writers, but in this restricted field he certainly by his sincerity holds his place and our interest, whether as Jews or historians.

page of the diary introducing the story of his first journey, signed “Moise Vita Cassuto,”15 April 1735.
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The diary
Moses’s diary is written in the Italian of the period, but bas occasional descriptive rubrics and quotations in Hebrew, usually concerning Hebrew communities.
It exists in three versions.
Of these, the first is acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1925. The manuscript is of 173 folios, elegantly written, including the Hebrew, evidently in the hand of the author himself.
It is in two parts, describing two journeys, bound in one leather volume.
The introduction to the first part is dated 15 April 1735, i.e., on the eve of Pesach a fortnight after his return from his first, i.e. Palestinian journey.
In this introduction, a flowery but charming composition, Cassuto offers this volume to his wife, explaining his reason for not publishing it and apologising for its defects; and asks her to neither sell it nor lend it except in exchange for a pledge.