Benedetto Frizzi (Benzion Raphael Kohen, 1756–1844), Italian physician and author from Ostia. He graduated from Pavia and practiced in Trieste. In 1790 he founded the first Italian medical journal and published six Dissertazioni (Pavia, 1787–90) on precepts of the Law, presenting them in a modern scientific manner. He also wrote apologetic and polemical works: Difesa contro gli attacchi fatti alia Nazione Ebrea (1784) and Dissertazione in cui si esaminano gli usi ed abusi degli Ebrei (1789), which intended to disprove the accusations by a contemporary Italian that Jews hated Christians and that their economic activities tended to impoverish the countries they lived in. He described Jewish theology, philosophy, and ethics and then analyzed in great detail and with many examples the economic role of Jews in Europe, particularly in Italy. He outlined the valuable functions they fulfilled historically and attributed their success as merchants to attention to details and to quality, setting of realistically low prices, avoidance of borrowing at interest, decision to trade in perennially useful products rather than luxury goods for which demand varies. Frizzi enumerated markets and services opened and developed by Jews and described their business methods at length. He wrote his Hebrew work, Petah Enayyim (Leghorn, 1815–25), to demonstrate that the rabbis' teachings were based on scientific knowledge. He hoped both to increase his contemporaries' respect for Torah and to attack traditionalists who saw Jewish law as untouchable and untouched by the modern spirit. A man of great learning and wide renown, Frizzi was considered one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.