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Isaac ben Solomon Luria Ashkenazi (1534–1572), also known as ha-Ari (The Lion; acronym for ha-Elohi [the Godly] Rabbi Yiṣḥaq) was born to a father of Polish or German origin who settled in Jerusalem in the early sixteenth century and there married a Sephardi woman. Luria’s father died shortly after he was born, and his mother took him to Egypt, where he was brought up and educated. Luria studied under David ibn Abi Zimra (Radbaz; d. 1573) and Bezalel Ashkenazi(d. ca. 1594). By the age of twenty, he was already a learned scholar, familiar with rabbinic…

Jacob Berab (Beirav) was born around 1474 in Maqueda, a town located northwest of Toledo in Spain. After the expulsion of 1492, he moved to Morocco, and according to his own statement was appointed the rabbi of the community of Fez soon after his arrival there, at the age of eighteen. Berab’s stay in Fez was of short duration. After a few years, he left for Egypt for business reasons, whence he made visits to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo. In 1524, and possibly earlier, he settled in …

The Laniado family probably arrived in the Ottoman Empire soon after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Rabbis from the family appear to have played a central role in Aleppo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for they are frequently mentioned and quoted by other scholars throughout this period. Most of what information there is about the lives and officia…

The Hebrew term parnas (pl. parnasim), which first appears in rabbinic sources (BT Sanhedrin 82a), denotes leadership status. In medieval Europe, the parnas was the head of the community, elected for a fixed period that, depending on locality, could be as brief as a month or as much as several years. In the eastern Mediterranean and the Arab world, the …

Mordecai ben Eliezer Comtino (1402–1482) was a rabbi, philologist, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. Born in Constantinople, he studied under Hanoch Saporta, a distinguished Catalonian rabbi, and was greatly influenced by Sephardic culture and tradition even though he himself was a Romaniot or perhaps even of French origin. He left Constantinople in the early 1450s on the pretext of a plague epidemic and settled for a while in Edirne (Adrianople). He returned to the new Ottoman capital sometime after the conquest (May 29, 1453), and remained there until his death.In his teachings, Comtino emphasized the importance of general knowledge and Hebrew, arguing that without a broad secular education, it made no sense to study religion, the Bible, and the Talmud. Comtino’s efforts to spread religious and secular knowledge did not distinguish between Jews of different origins and traditions. Although the …

Kamishli (Ar. al-Qāmishlī) is a city in northeastern Syria on the Turkish border, founded in 1926 as a station on the Taurus railway. It has a mixed population of Kurds, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians. Little is known about its Jewish population. Jews arrived in the city in the late 1920s, mostly from neighboring Nusaybin (now in Turkey), where a community had existed for centuries. During the French mandate over Syria, there were about two hundred Jewish families in Kamishli. The number dropped sharply after the establishment of Israel in 1948, as the town’s Jews moved to the larger communities in Aleppo and Damascus, and later to the United States and Israel. In the 1970s a few hundred Jews still lived in Kamishli. By 2006 only three remained.     Upon their arrival from Nusaybin, the Kamishli Jews established a synagogue —a building with one large prayer hall— and an adjacent bet midrash. They brought with them three Torah scrolls and prayerbooks that were kept in the synagogue. The …

The academic study of Jews living in the Ottoman Empire is a subfield of the academic study of Islamicate Jewry. Compared to the general study of Jews under Islam, a field that has grown tremendously since the 1970s, our understanding of Ottoman Jewry is still in its nascent stage. The pre-Ottoman Geniza period is relatively well studied, and in recent years there has been a growing number of works on Ottoman Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the middle Ottoman period, fr…

Safed (Heb. Ṣefat, Ar. Ṣafad) is a town in the Upper Galilee area in Israel, situated about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Tiberias. Jews have lived in Safed at least since the eleventh or twelfth century, and the town was a major center of Jewish commercial and scholarly activity during most of the sixteen…

Bucharest (Turk. Bükresh; Rom. București) was founded sometime in the fourteenth century, and was first mentioned in correspondence issued by …

1. MedievalAleppo (Ar. Ḥalab) is a city in northwestern Syria. Jews first settled there in the Hellenistic period. Between the Arab and Ottoman conquests, i.e., from the seventh to the sixteenth century, the Aleppine Jewish community maintained loose ties with the gaonic centers in Palestine and Babylonia, and elected its own religious and lay leaders.In Jewish tradition, Aleppo is identified as Aram Ṣova (Aram-Zobah), a city conquered in the days of King David (II Samuel…

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