Samuel ben Moses Ḥayyim (ca. 1760–ca. 1842) was a rabbinical jurist (dayyan) and teacher in Istanbul, and a chief rabbi (haham başi) of the Ottoman Empire. One of the city’s most learned scholars, Ḥayyim studied in a yeshiva where his teachers were Rabbis Elijah Palombo (b. 1762), Menahem Ashkenazi, and Raphael Jacob Asa. He spent most of his life in Balat, the Jewish quarter in the Fatih district of Istanbul, where he headed his own seminary. As early as 1798, he was recognized as an authority on the laws of divorce (giṭṭin), and in consequence he supervised many such cases in the bet din headed…