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Ḥayyim ben David Abulafia (Abū ʾl-ʿĀfiya) was born around 1700. Known as “the Baḥur” (Heb. Young Man), he was a rabbi and kabbalist. After serving as rabbi in Larisa, he became head of a Jewish court ( bet din) in Salonica in 1761, and while there taught the Sabbatean Abraham Miranda. Abulafia later settled in Izmir (Smyrna) and was appointed one of the community’s two chief rabbis; he died there on February 25, 1775. Abulafia wrote the Nishmat Ḥayyim (Salonica, 1806) on the Sefer Miṣvot Gadol. The book also includes some of his sermons.Leah Bornstein-MakovetskyBibliographyBenayahu, Meir…

Abraham ha-Levi (d. 1837), also known as Hezekiah and Nissim, was the first chief rabbi ( haham başı) of the Ottoman Empire. He became a  dayyan in the Jewish court in the Balat district of Istanbul in 1820, and later served as its chief judge ( av bet din). In 1834 he was a dayyan in the court of the Istanbul community ( bet din issur ve-heter). In January 1835, Sultan Maḥmūd II issued an imperial decree ( ferman) appointing Halevi the empire’s first chief rabbi. He served in this office only a short time, possibly because of blindness, and was replaced in September of…

Isaac ben Samuel Adarbi was a  Sephardi rabbi and halakhic authority in Salonica. Born there between 1515 and 1520, he served for a time as rabbi of the Lisbon congregation in Salonica, with which his family was affiliated, while from around 1552 till his death (ca. 1584), he was rabbi of the Shalom congregation. The date of death on his tombstone (5337/1577) seems to be in error, as Adarbi signed a communal regulation in the year 5384/1584.Like Samuel de Medina, Adarbi was a disciple of  Joseph Taitatzak, but the two students disagreed with each other on some halakhic matters. …

Ephraim ben Aaron Navon (1677–1735) was a rabbi, dayyan, and author. Born in Istanbul, he moved to Jerusalem with his father-in-law, Judah Ergas, around 1700. He returned to Istanbul as an emissary (Heb. meshullaḥ or shadar) of the Jerusalem community in 1720 but chose to remain there. Three years later, he was appointed dayyan in the bet din (rabbinical court) of Judah Rosanes and became one of the leading rabbis of the Istanbul community. Navon was a founder of the Committee of Officials for Jerusalem in Istanbul. His legal work Maḥane Efrayim (The Camp of Ephraim; Istanbul, 1738) c…

Solomon Eliezer b. Jacob Alfandari (b. ca. 1826 or 1829/30), known as Mercado or Maharsha, and as Saba Qadisha, was a halakhist and rabbinic leader. Born in Istanbul to a distinguished family, he was appointed head of the Foa yeshiva at the age of twenty-five and also served as rabbi of the Orta Koy quarter of Istanbul. At the age of thirty, he was elected to the general religious council (Majlis) of the community. Afraid that military service would lead Jews to abandon their religious practice, he objected to plans to recruit Jews into the Ottoman army.In 1897, Alfandari was appointed ap…

Esperanza Malchi (Malkhi) was the third Jewish kira ( kiera, kyra), a Greek honorific title meaning lady, given to the women who attended to matters outside the palace for the queen mother ( valide sultan) and other influential women in the Ottoman royal harem. As a personal agent for Safiye, the consort of Murad III (r. 1574–1595) and the mother of Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603), Malchi played a part in the correspondence between Safiye and Queen Elizabeth I of England. At least once, in 1599, she addressed a letter in Italian to Elizabeth, dealing with the exchange of g…

Jonah ben Jacob Ashkenazi was a printer and publisher who helped to make Istanbul a center of Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire. He was born in Zalosce, Poland (now Zaliztsi, Ukraine), to an Ashkenazi family, and later emigrated to Istanbul. In 1710, Ashkenazi engraved movable-type settings in Hebrew and decorations for title pages, and with these founded a printing press in the city. During his first two years in Istanbul, he worked in partnership with a Jew from Vienna, Naphtali ben Azriel. Ashkenazi later moved his press north of the city, to Ortaköy. In 1714 he went…

Meʾir ben Abraham Ḥiyya de Buton (di Boton) was born  in Salonica around 1575. He studied under his father, the great halakhic scholar Abraham Ḥiyya ben Moses de Buton (1545–1588), and wrote an introduction to the Leḥem Mishne, his father’s commentary to Maimonides’s Mishne Torah. He was later appointed rabbi of the community of Gallipoli and served there until his death in 1649.Under the leadership of Me’ir de Buton, the yeshiva in Gallipoli became one of the great centers of Torah study in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout his life, Meʾir corresponded with the ha…

Isaac ben Moses Beja (d. 1628) was a preacher in several congregations in Salonica, and in his later years taught in the yeshiva of Nikopol (Nigbolu). In addition to homilies, eulogies, and poems, his published works include Bayit Neʾeman (A Faithful House), published in Venice in 1621, and a homily on the building of the synagogue of Nikopol entitled Keter Torah (Crown of the Torah), printed as a section of Le-Ohave Leshon ʿEver (For Lovers of the Hebrew Language) in 1628 in Paris.Two other individuals named Isaac Beja are known to have lived in Salonica. One died in 1635, the other in 1734. Le…

Textiles of various kinds were manufactured and used throughout the Muslim world in the Middle Ages. As S. D. Goitein observed: “Comparable to the place of steel and other metals in modern economy, textiles represented the major industry of medieval times in the Mediterranean area” (p. 101). According to information found in the Cairo Geniza, many Jews in Egypt were in the business of exporting locally grown flax to Tunisia and Sicily for use in the production of linen and of importing and selling silk and cotton (primarily from Central Asia, but …

Bursa (ancient Prousa), in northwestern Anatolia, was the first capital of the Ottoman Empire, between 1326 and 1365. When the Ottomans captured the city from the Byzantines, it had a small Romaniot Jewish presence. In the first half of the sixteenth century, newly arriving Spanish exiles were soon in the majority. Culturally and numerically dominant, the Sephardim fairly quickly assimilated the Romaniots, and Judeo-Spanish became the day-to-day spoken and written language of  the city’s Jews.  The community paid its poll tax ( jizya) through its representative to authorities, the k…

Isaac de Alba was a rabbinic teacher of the young Shabbetay Ṣevi. Their association began in 1642, when de Alba arrived in Izmir (Smyrna) from Salonica along with several other scholars. He taught Kabbala to Shabbetai Ṣevi for several years. Whether de Alba objected when Shabbetai Ṣevi first began making messianic claims is unknown, but he strenuously condemned him for  his conversion to Islam in September 1666.After the death of Rabbi Joseph Eskapa in 1661, de Alba was appointed chief dayyan of the Smyrna community with responsibility for financial and administrative matters (Heb. din…

Ḥasday ben Samuel ha-Kohen Peraḥya was a rabbi and halakhic authority in Salonica. Born around 1605 into one of the city’s distinguished families, and a disciple of Ḥayyim Shabbetay (d. 1647), he was appointed a dayya n in the city’s old Italian congregation in 1647. From 1671 until his death in 1678, he served as chief rabbi of the Salonica community and raised up some noteworthy disciples, most especially Jacob ben Abraham de Boton (d. 1687). In 1723, some years after Peraḥya’s death, a collection of his responsa, entitled Torat Ḥesed (The Law of Kindness) was published in Sal…

Solomon ben Abraham Algazi was born in Jerusalem in 1673 and died in Cairo(?) in 1762. A rabbi and halakhist, and a member of the distinguished Algazi family, he was the half-brother of Ḥayyim ben Moses Abulafia, who restored the Jewish community in Tiberias in 1740. Algazi’s teacher was Hizkiya da Silva. Later Algazi served in the bet din and yeshiva of Abraham Yiṣḥaqi in Jerusalem. One of Algazi’s disciples was Judah Navon.In 1715, Algazi was sent as an emissary to Salonica. In 1728, he became a dayyan in Cairo, and in 1740 he was appointed chief rabbi of Cairo. As a loyal disci…

Solomon Nissim ben Abraham Algazi the Elder, a scion of the famous Algazi family and the grandson on his mother’s side of Joseph de Segovia Benveniste (see Benveniste Family), was the foremost halakhic authority in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. He was born in the Turkish town of Bursa (Prousa) around 1610 and died in Jerusalem in 1684 or 1685. The name Nissim (Heb. miracles) was not given him at birth but was added later upon his recovery from a serious illness. Solomon Algazi was educated by his fat…

David ben Solomon Vital was an Italian rabbi, preacher, philosopher, and payṭan (liturgical poet). He was called ha-rofe (Heb. the doctor) even though he was not a physician. Vital was apparently born before 1492 in Calabria (Italy), and was among the Sephardi and Italian exiles who immigrated to the Ottoman Empire. Vital settled in the Greek town of Patras, but in 1532 fled to Arta, also in Greece, together with the majority of the city’s Jews, just before a Christian army conquered Patras. During the course of this hasty move, many precious manuscri…

Italian Jews, primarily from the cities of Genoa and Venice, began to immigrate to the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages. Most of them settled in the western parts of the empire (Rumelia) and established congregations next to already existing Romaniot ones. The expulsion of Jews from Italian cities in the sixteenth century prompted hundreds of families to move to the Ottoman Empire. Most of the new arrivals in the Ottoman lands, descended from Jews who had been living in Italy for centuries, continued to follow Italian customs ( Bene Roma), but some were Sephardi (Spanish and P…

Yakir Astruc ben Eliakim Geron (1813–1874) was born into the distinguish Geron family of rabbis in Edirne (Adrianople). Early in his career he served as a rabbi in Bucharest. After his return to Edirne, he sojourned for a time in Rustchuk (Ruse, Bulgaria) and helped the Jewish community there reach a compromise on a major (but now unknown) issue. Geron left so strong an impression that in 1852 the community named a synagogue after him, Qahal Qadosh Geron (The Holy Congregation of Geron). When his father died in 1835, Geron inherited the rabbinate of Edirne from him. He helped rees…

The gabela (from Sp. gabela, It. gabella, Fr. gabelle, excise tax; a word thought by O.E.D. to be of Teut. origin, but perhaps ultimately from Ar./med. Jud.-Ar. qabāla, a lease) was a tax on meat and other food staples that Jewish communities in Christian Spain, Islamic lands, and the Ottoman Empire imposed on their members. In the Maghreb, it was often called sija or siza (from Sp. cisa, Mod. Sp. and Port. sisa). In Tripolitania, it was called khaba. Although the terms gabela and sija appear to have come in with Sephardi exiles, such taxes existed in the Islamic world well bef…

The Alfandari family originated in Spain. During the centuries following the expulsion, it produced numerous communal leaders, rabbis, and halakhists in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Istanbul, Smyrna (Izmir), Bursa (Prousa), Egypt, and Palestine. A few members of the family lived in Portugal as anusim.The first known member of the family was Isaac ben Judah in Toledo (d. 1241). He was followed by Jacob ben Solomon of Valencia, who (together with Solomon Zarza) translated Sefer ha-Azamim, attributed to Abraham ibn Ezra, from Arabic into Hebrew. Other members include the mercha…