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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…

Aaron ben Ḥayyim Abraham ha-Kohen Peraḥya(1627?–1697) was born in Salonica into a well-known family of Italian origin. He studied with Rabbis Asher ben Ardut ha-Kohen, Ḥasday ha-Kohen Peraḥya, and Ḥayyim Shabbetay. In 1689, he succeeded Elijah Covo (see Covo Family) as chief rabbi of Salonica. Aaron was the author of Paraḥ Maṭṭe Aharon (Aaron’s Staff Blossomed; 2 vols., Amsterdam 1703), a collection of responsa; Pirḥe Kehunna (Flowers of Priesthood; Amsterdam, 1709), a commentary on tractates Bava Qamma, Bava Meṣiʽa, Ketubbot, Giṭṭin, ʽAvoda Zara, and Qiddush…

Ḥayyim ben Jacob Abulafia (Abū ʾl-ʿĀfiya), known as “the Second,” was the grandson of Ḥayyim ben Jacob Abulafia “the First.” He was born in Hebron around 1660 and studied Torah in Jerusalem after his family moved there in 1666. His teachers were the rabbis Moses Galante, Abraham Amigo, and Solomon Algazi. In 1699 he was sent to Salonica as an emissary. He served as a rabbi in Izmir (Smyrna) in 1712 and from 1721 to 1740; from 1718 to 1721 he served as a rabbi in Safed.In 1740, Abulafia was invited by Shaykh Ḍāhir al-ʿUmar, the ruler of the Galilee, to settle there and renew the communi…

Chios (Turk. Sakız) is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea located off the southwestern coast of Anatolia near Izmir (Smyrna). Jews first settled there in the Hellenistic period. Spanish exiles began to arrive after 1492, and by the time the Ottomans captured the island from the Genoese in 1566, most of the Jews in Chios were Sephardim. In the seventeenth century, there were two congregations on the island, one Sephardi and the other Romaniot. The two groups were recognized by the Ottoman government, which treated the Sephardim and Romaniots as separate communities for t…

Members of the Covo family were scholars and communal leaders in Salonica and Jerusalem for a period of three centuries. They are first mentioned in the seventeenth century. Rabbi Judah Covo (d. 1636) headed a communal delegation from Salonica that went to Istanbul in 1636 in hopes of improving the terms governing the annual gift to the sultan required of Salonica’s cloth manufacturers. Unfortunately, the government officials decided that what the delegation had brought was unsatisfactory in quantity and value, and as a result Judah Covo was executed. His son Elijah (ca. 1628–1688) w…

Raphael Asher Covo (1799– January 1874) was chief rabbi of Salonica, head of a yeshiva, and a sponsor of communal charity. The grandson of Rabbi Abraham Covo (d. 1792), he studied with his father and with Rabbi Isaac Barzilai. Covo was a rabbi in Salonica for over fifty years, during which time he founded the city’s Lishkat ha-Gazit Yeshiva. His halakhic decisions were oft-quoted by rabbis in many communities. By 1835, Covo was already a prominent dayyan (judge), and in 1849 he was appointed chief rabbi ( ḥakham bashi) of Salonica concurrently with Ḥanokh Saporta. In 1856, Sultan Abdülmecid…

The Geron (Gueron) family produced many rabbis, judges, and communal leaders in Edirne (Adrianople) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first known member of the family was Mordecai Geron, a well-to-do merchant in Edirne who died after 1680. The Gerons reappear in the sources in the eighteenth century. After Abraham Ṣarfati, the chief rabbi of Edirne, died in 1722, the Jewish community could not agree on a single successor. One faction selected Menahem ben Isaac Ashkenazi as its chief rabbi. The other chose Ṣarfati’s son-in-law, Raphael Jacob Abraham Geron (d. 1751).…

Solomon ben Jacob Almoli (Almuli) was probably born in Portugal before 1490 and died in Istanbul in 1542. He served as a dayyan, but it is unclear whether he was also a congregational rabbi; he seems not to have raised up students. Earning a meager livelihood as a physician, he lived in poverty and devoted himself to science and to popularizing science. He planned to compile an extensive general encyclopedia, but his fellow scholars in Istanbul rejected the idea. As a result he was only able to publish a brief prospectus for the encyclopedia in twenty-four pages, under the title Meʾassef le-…

Aaron ben Moses Alfandari (1690?–1774) was a rabbi and halakhist and the scion of a distinguished Sephardi family that had spread widely through the Ottoman Empire. He taught at the yeshiva of Izmir (Smyrna) and served also as a dayyan. About 1757 he settled in Hebron, where he was appointed chief rabbi in 1770.His known halakhic works are Yad Aharon (The Hand of Aaron) and Merkevet ha-Mishne (The Second Chariot) . In Yad Aharon, a work in four volumes, he attempted to bring Ḥayyim Benveniste’s Keneset ha-Gedola up to date by including later decisions and other sources, his own d…

David Conforte (1618–ca. 1677) was born into a scholarly Sephardic family in Salonica. His teacher, Asher Zevulun, was a disciple of Conforte’s grandfather, also named David Conforte. The younger Conforte studied Torah and Kabbala in Salonica, and in 1644 moved to Jerusalem to continue his education in a bet midrash. He also spent a year in Cairo, where he studied in the bet midrash of Abraham Skandari, and some time in Gaza, learning with Rabbi Moses Najara. In 1648, he returned to Salonica, but he went back to Jerusalem in 1652 to found his own academy. In 1671 he m…

The Abulafia family (also Abulafia, Abulefia; from Ar. Abū ʾl-ʿĀfiya, father [possessor] of good health) was an influential Sephardic family of rabbis, intellectuals, poets, dayyanim, communal leaders and Court Jews in Spain in the Middle Ages. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, many of its descendants settled in the Ottoman Empire, where they continued to serve as rabbinic and communal leaders and halakhic decisors (Heb. posqim).The most important branch of the family lived in Toledo from the twelfth century onward, and its members were generally called Levi (…

In the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, the congregational rabbi ( marbiṣ tora) also often served as av bet din, or head judge, of a rabbinical court, assisted by two other judges in criminal cases. Thus the number of avot batte din in each community corresponded to the number of congregations. Large communities, such as Salonica, Istanbul, and Safed, had dozens of rabbis in that office. Bursa (Prousa) and Patras in the sixteenth century each had four avot batte din. Jews from small- and middle-seized communities often turned to the avot batte din of the larger communities, w…