Isaac ben Samuel Abū ʾl-Khayr, one of the prominent ancestors of the well-known Aboulker family, was the chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Algiers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was named after the first Isaac ben Samuel Abū ʾl-Khayr, a famous sixteenth-century scholar. During his tenure in Algiers there were several waves of emigration to Palestine, including some major Algerian rabbinical figures.

The leadership of Algerian Jewry was deeply divided at the end of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth. One of the major causes w…