Rabbi Ben-Zion Meʾir Ḥayy Uzziel was Israel’s first Sephardic chief rabbi. Born in Jerusalem in 1880, he came from an illustrious Sephardi lineage. His father, Joseph Raphael, was a chief justice in Jerusalem’s rabbinic court system and hailed from a line of rabbis going back to pre-expulsion Spain. His mother, Sarah, was a member of the Ḥazan family; her grandfather Ḥayyim David and her great-grandfather Raphael Joseph had both served as chief rabbis of Jerusalem over the course of the nineteenth century. Left fatherless…