Judah Bibas belonged to a small group of mid-nineteenth-century rabbis who urged Jews to resettle the Land of Israel. He was descended from a Sephardi rabbinical family that migrated to Fez following the expulsion of 1492. In 1530, the paterfamilias, Ḥayyim, was invited to Tetouan to become its rabbi and teacher (Heb. marbiṣ Torah). At least eight of his descendants succeeded him as religious leaders in Tetouan and Salé, but in the late eighteenth century the family moved to Gibraltar, where Judah seems to have been born in 1780. Judah Bibas was schooled in Gibraltar and Leghorn (Livorno),…