The Caption on the Portrait

For the title page of Melekhet Machshevet, Rav Moshe had his portrait engraved, and beneath it he set a Hebrew caption describing himself as a man of forty-six years.

The sages of Italy warned him against printing that line, because words of this kind are not to be treated lightly. He did not heed them, and the book went to press as he had planned.

In a later edition the printer left out the quotation marks. The caption now read as though the author was a hundred years old, and readers took it to mean that he had lived to a hundred.

It is told that this episode was linked to his passing, and that he did not live out the year after it.