Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century 9780804792462

Citation preview

Emissaries from the Holy Land

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture ed i ted by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Emissaries from the Holy Land The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century Matthias B. Lehmann

stan f ord u n iversit y press stanf o rd, calif o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehmann, Matthias B., 1970- author. Emissaries from the Holy Land : the Sephardic diaspora and the practice of panJudaism in the eighteenth century / Matthias B. Lehmann. pages cm—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8965-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sephardim—History—18th century. 2. Jewish diaspora—History—18th century. 3. Jews—Identity—History—18th century. 4. Jews—Palestine—Charities— History—18th century. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. ds134.L44 2014 909'.0492407—dc23 2014018289 isbn 978-0-8047-9246-2 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii 1

1. Network of Beneficence

15

2. Agents of Philanthropy: Emissaries from the Holy Land and the Communities of the Diaspora

71

3. Ideological Foundations

119

4. Solidarity Contested: Ethnic Division and the Quest for Unity

169

5. End of an Era: The Transformation of the Philanthropic Network in the Nineteenth Century

215

Epilogue: Pan-Judaism

261

Notes Glossary Index

277 327 329

Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for quite a few years. I began my research at the Jewish community archives in Livorno one cold winter, with support from an Indiana University College Arts and Humanities Institute fellowship. I had originally traveled to Italy planning to work on a different topic, and it was only while I was sitting in the community building next to the futuristic synagogue of Livorno that I decided to focus on rabbinic emissaries from the Holy Land. Since then I have enjoyed generous funding through a sabbatical leave from Indiana University, which allowed me to complete my research, and from a twelve-month visit to the University of Munich made possible by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, where I completed the first draft of this manuscript. In the course of these years I had the opportunity to present and discuss parts of my research at Indiana University, Stanford, UCLA, Vanderbilt, the University of Antwerp, the University of Munich, the University of Chicago, Yale, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, and the Institute for Humanities at the CSIC in Madrid. I am grateful for all the feedback and comments I received on these occasions. Along the way, a number of people have been important interlocutors. I’d like to acknowledge in particular my colleagues and friends Francesca Bregoli, Javier Castaño, Julia Phillips Cohen, John Efron, Harvey Goldberg, Shaul Magid, Devi Mays, Jonathan Ray, Alvin Rosenfeld, Miryam Segal, Katja Smid, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Yossi Turner, Dror Wahrman, and Steven Weitzman, as well as my former teacher, Peter Schäfer. I am grateful to Yaron Ben-Naeh, always a generous host when I am in Jerusalem; to Jacob Barnai, who shared his transcriptions from the Pinkas Kushta manuscript; Gabriele Bedarida,

vii

viii

Acknowledgments

who allowed me free range in the Livorno community archives; my research assistant in Bloomington, Moraima Mundo-Ríos, who helped with the peculiar Portuguese of the Jewish community documents from Livorno; my colleague ­Patricia Seed at UC Irvine, who drew the map; and Rabbi Steven and Monica Langnas, who opened their home in Munich. I would like to thank M ­ ichael Brenner, my gracious host at the University of M ­ unich in 2010–11, who also read an earlier version of the manuscript, as did Francesca Trivellato and Jeffrey Veidlinger, all of whom offered invaluable comments. I am particularly indebted to Aron Rodrigue, who took an early interest in this project, for his insightful comments and for shepherding this book through to publication. For their patience and support I am ever thankful to my parents, Reinhard and Ute Lehmann, and to Miriam, whose love and friendship make this all worthwhile.

Emissaries from the Holy Land

The two missions of Haim Joseph David Azulai, emissary for Hebron, 1753–57 (continuous line) and 1772–78 (dotted line). Azulai settled in Livorno at the conclusion of his second journey. Map created by Patricia Seed, University of California, Irvine.

Introduction

For about one century, from the 1720s to the 1820s, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, functioned as the center of a far-flung philanthropic network in support of the Jews in Palestine, linking Jewish communities throughout the empire and beyond, from the Caribbean in the west to India in the east, and from England in the north to ­Yemen in the south. This pan-Jewish network of beneficence operated under the patronage of the Committee of Officials for the Land of Israel in Istanbul (Va‘ad Pekidei Erets Yisra’el be-Kushta), which was established in 1726 in response to a severe crisis caused by the underfunded immigration of a group of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem in 1700.1 The Pekidei Kushta (“Istanbul Officials”), as they were called, continued their work well into the nineteenth century, though by the 1820s Amsterdam had emerged as a rival center, organizing Jewish philanthropy on behalf of the Holy Land in much of Western Europe.2 The Pekidim (Officials) in Istanbul represented the interests of the Jewish communities in Palestine to the Ottoman imperial government, they negotiated the restructuring of debts incurred by the Jews in Palestine, and they organized continuous fund-raising among Jewish communities in the Ottoman lands and throughout the Jewish world. Suffering from a cycle of financial crises and political turmoil in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Jews of Palestine had little choice but to appeal to their coreligionists in the diaspora to come to their rescue. In the late seventeenth century, Jewish notables in Cairo and Venice took the lead, but it was the Pekidim in eighteenth-century Istanbul who succeeded in establishing a longlasting and centralized philanthropic operation, no doubt in large part

1

2

Introduction

because of their proximity to the center of political power in the imperial capital. They dispatched rabbinic emissaries throughout the Jewish world, where the shadarim (as those emissaries were known in ­Hebrew) propagated the enduring centrality of the Holy Land as well as the obligation of Jews everywhere to provide financial support for their coreligionists in Palestine.3 The emissaries collected pledges and contributions, which were then sent on to Istanbul and distributed from there to the four holy cities in the Land of Israel: Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and (from the 1740s on) Tiberias. Through the frequent visits of emissaries and the ongoing exchange of information on the situation of the Jews in the Holy Land, the network organized in Istanbul created what we might call a “contact zone” that allowed Jews from distant geographic areas and diverse cultures to encounter one another. As they participated in a shared philanthropic project, they experienced themselves synchronically as part of a broader, pan-Jewish community that transcended the boundaries of geographic, linguistic, and ethnic divisions. Rather than imagining the Jewish community primarily through a common mythical, biblical past or a common utopian, messianic future, Jews now were challenged to think of themselves as part of an intertwined community that could act collectively in the present. This “simultaneity” of experiencing the Jewish diaspora as one inter­related community, linked together by a shared sense of solidarity with the Jews of contemporary Palestine, represented an important shift that was part of a broader change experienced by Jewish cultures in the early modern period.4 The territorial divisions that had shaped medieval Jewish cultures and identities after the eleventh century now underwent a major transformation as a result of massive dislocation and migration, often of entire Jewish communities.5 In the words of Elisheva Carlebach, in the course of this period, “pieces of a cultural mosaic that had been placed precisely and not moved for centuries were suddenly shaken up and scattered about in entirely new combinations.”6 There was, of course, the long series of expulsions that concluded the medieval period of Jewish history, culminating in the expulsion from Spain in 1492; the constant trickle of conversos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been forced into baptism) who left the Iberian Peninsula throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and into

Introduction

the eighteenth centuries; and the large number of Jews who fled war and persecution in mid-seventeenth-century Poland for Western Europe and for the Ottoman Empire. Other factors too brought Jews from different backgrounds into contact: the increased mobility of individuals, moving in overlapping circuits of rabbinic, trading, or ­family networks; students from Eastern Europe attending medical school in Italy; Moroccan Jews deciding to spend their old age in the Holy Land; or the Amsterdam Sephardic community sending its poor on to the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean.7 As Jacob Katz pointed out in his classical study Tradition and C ­ risis (which focused, though, on the Ashkenazi world of Central and Eastern Europe), “the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries produced a strengthening of bonds between the various widely separated sections of the Jewish people. It is doubtful whether there ever was a time since the decline of the Roman Empire when Jewry’s political organization was still centralized, in which contact between Jewish groups was as intense as in [this] period.”8 The philanthropic network in support of the Holy Land and the rabbinic emissaries were part of this dynamic as well and contributed to the “globalization” of the Jewish diaspora in the early modern period, which witnessed a radical realignment of the demographic map of the Jewish world. The network of shelihut (the Hebrew term referring to the missions of the rabbinic emissaries) can be seen as both a symptom of this broader transformation as well as—especially in the eighteenth century—an important (if under­ studied) factor contributing to the rise of a pan-Jewish community. The increased frequency and intensity of the contact—and clash— between different Jewish cultures in the early modern period put notions of Jewish unity and solidarity constantly to the test. As Jews encountered other Jews (or, we might say, the internal “Jewish Other”), they were forced to confront the cultural diversity of a Jewish world imagined as unified yet experienced as fragmented. Historians often focus on the interface between Jews and the various non-Jewish societies among whom they lived as the catalyst for the formation of different Jewish cultures. Just as important in shaping the ways Jews understood themselves and the world around them, however, was—certainly in the early modern period—the meeting of Jews with other Jews. While early modern Jews by and large lived their lives under the sacred canopy of a

3

4

Introduction

shared textual tradition—the Bible, Talmud, and the rabbinic tradition more broadly—they also encountered one another as differentiated by cultural attributes such as language or bodily practice. The “narcissism of minor differences,” to appropriate a term from Freud, accentuated sub-ethnic divisions, for example between Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Maghrebi Jews. What was new in the early modern period was that these sub-ethnic identities themselves were increasingly trans-regional, linking Sephardic Jews in London with those in Curaçao and Venice, or Ashkenazi Jews in Prague with those in Amsterdam, Verona, and Jerusalem. Although a shared sense of Jewishness was still taken for granted, feelings of solidarity more often than not were extended to fellow Ashkenazim, or fellow Maghrebi Jews, or fellow Salonikans but not necessarily to the wider Jewish community. Throughout this period a tension persisted between sub-ethnic patterns of solidarity and identity and the pan-Jewish sensibility propagated by the Pekidim in Istanbul, whose emissaries often experienced resistance to their activities. The philanthropic network of shelihut was predicated on the notion that Jews, wherever they lived, should be tied to one another by bonds of solidarity and that Jewish communities all over the world should feel an attachment to the Land of Israel that was strong enough to override competing claims for charitable munificence. In reality, however, neither one of these factors could easily be taken for granted. As many an emissary learned, solidarity of Jews with one another qua Jews was challenged by a reality inherited from the fragmented Jewish world of the medieval period. Jews often identified with their local environment or a particular region, or with a sub-ethnic group such as the Western Sephardic diaspora, more closely than with a more abstract, pan-Jewish community in the name of which the emissaries from the Holy Land presented their pleas. The idea of the Holy Land, too, was undoubtedly central to Jewish collective memories and spiritual aspirations, but the actual, contemporary Land of Israel remained marginal and far removed from the daily lives of most Jews. These were challenges that needed to be overcome through a relentless effort on the part of the rabbinic emissaries and their allies in Istanbul. To the degree that they succeeded in establishing their philanthropic network, however, the Pekidim in Istanbul in the eighteenth century were instrumental in encouraging a sense of

Introduction

belonging to a pan-Jewish diaspora community, which eventually prepared the ground for the more far-reaching, pan-Jewish international philanthropy of the nineteenth century, in particular in the guise of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and similar organizations. By emphasizing the importance of the emissaries and the link they forged between the Jews of Palestine and those in the Jewish diaspora I do not suggest a return to the telos of Zionist historiography that took for granted a Land-of-Israel-centric pan-Jewish peoplehood and solidarity rather than historicized it as something that needed to be constructed and maintained in the face of competing forms of Jewish identities. On the other hand, the post- (or anti-) Zionist reading that claims that modern Jewish nationalism essentially “invented” the idea of a Jewish nation out of whole cloth also distorts the complex genealogy of modern Jewish peoplehood and its link to Palestine.9 This book argues instead that the unfolding sense of a pan-Jewish identity in the early modern period can provide us with a better understanding of how to historicize the emergence of modern notions of Jewish peoplehood and to appreciate the complex and contested nature of that process. At the same time, the focus on the rise of a pan-Jewish sensibility and its discontents in the eighteenth century also allows for a new approach to the early modern Jewish experience in its own right, and not simply as a precursor of developments in a later period. In his recent book Early Modern Jewry, David Ruderman notes that, according to many scholars of the early modern era, “Jewish history in this period can only be reconstructed on the microlevel. Its variegated histories are radically singular, diverse, and heterogeneous. . . . The general thrust of the recent narratives of early modern Jewish history is to deny the possibility that a distinct early modern Jewish cultural experience can ever be meaningfully described. I wish to assert that such a description is possible and desirable.”10 As I will argue in the chapters that follow, a focus on early modern networks—commercial, scholarly, or, as in the case of this study, philanthropic—allows us to reconstruct an early modern Jewish experience that is understood not only within its many different contexts but also as a dynamic process of interaction among Jewish cultures, between Jews and other Jews. Though the focus of this book probably also displays my own bias as a scholar of Sephardic Jewry, Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe did

5

6

Introduction

play a relatively minor role in the network of shelihut until the immigration of Ashkenazi Jews to the Holy Land gained momentum in the nineteenth century. The Ashkenazi communities were also more likely to resist the claims to pan-Jewish solidarity made by the Istanbul Officials’ emissaries and preferred to deal with “their own,” i.e., Ashkenazi emissaries raising money for the benefit of Ashkenazi Jews living in the Holy Land. Most shadarim were destined for communities in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and, in Europe, to Italy and to the major Sephar­dic communities of the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Emissaries visited the Ashkenazi communities of Italy, the German-speaking lands, France, and the Netherlands en route to major Sephardic centers such as Amsterdam, but relatively few ventured to Eastern Europe, something that only changed in the course of the nineteenth century when emissaries became a common sight in the Ashkenazi communities throughout that region as well.11 The prominence of Sephardic Jews in the network of shelihut was not accidental, as the philanthropic enterprise of the Istanbul Pekidim did not exist in isolation. The Pekidim themselves derived their position from their proximity to the Ottoman imperial government and were able to tap into the ties linking Istanbul with cities in the provinces, including those of Damascus and Sidon, to which southern and northern Palestine belonged at the time, respectively. The international framework of the fund-raising and the emissaries’ missions, in turn, overlapped with trading networks that facilitated travel, communication, and the transfer of money. While they were in the estimation of many historians past their prime, the Sephardic and converso trading networks of the early modern period were still formidable in the eighteenth century, and the mostly Sephardic communities of the major port cities of Italy and the Atlantic seaboard continued to be the home of many wealthy merchants and philanthropists who could be tapped to sustain their coreligionists in Palestine.12 Much recent research on early modern Jewish history, in particular in the orbit of Sephardic Jewry, has focused on these trading networks and emphasized the special path to modernity of “port Jews” living in the cosmopolitan centers of early modern commerce.13 Shelihut needs to be understood in this context as one factor that interacted with many others in creating the specific character of the

Introduction

early modern Jewish world. It was both instrumental in shaping crosscultural contact between Jews and, at the same time, can be seen as a symptom of a much broader “globalization” of the Jewish diaspora in the early modern period. The philanthropic network of the Istanbul Pekidim and their emissaries provides, however, a unique vantage point that sets it apart from the more widely studied merchant networks of the time. The Sephardic trading diaspora was so successful in part because it reached beyond the confines of the Jewish community when that proved economically beneficial—one of its key advantages over contemporary Armenian trading networks, for example.14 At the same time, though, the Sephardic merchants largely limited their operation to the Sephardic-converso diaspora, rather than branching out to involve non-Iberian Jews. The network of shelihut, on the other hand, connected Jews all over the world as Jews, and, though centered around the Sephardic communities of the Mediterranean basin and Europe, reached well beyond to include Ashkenazim, the Arabicspeaking Jews of the Mashreq and the Maghreb, and others, thus putting notions of Jewish solidarity, unity, and peoplehood to the test. In 1951, Abraham Ya‘ari (1899–1966), a scholar and bibliographer working at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (today the National Library of Israel) and author of numerous books and articles on Jewish history and the history of Erets Israel, published a massive tome on the emissaries from the Holy Land. His 947-page opus on shelihut can be seen as an example of what is sometimes called the “Jerusalem school” of Jewish historiography in the spirit and service of the Zionist project.15 Ya‘ari presented shelihut as a continuous institution dating back to the days of the Jerusalem Temple, proving an uninterrupted connection between the Jews in exile and their ancient homeland. Not only that, but the enduring practice of shelihut demonstrated, in Ya‘ari’s view, the centrality of the Land of Israel despite centuries of Jewish life in dispersion. The “main lesson” to be learned from the history of shelihut, he maintained, was that “even in those times when the yishuv in the Land of Israel was small, depleted, and oppressed, its influence on the Jews of the exile (yehudei ha-golah) was great beyond measure. This influence was enduring, as enduring as [the institution of] shelihut itself, and extended to every country where Jews lived.”16

7

8

Introduction

In the year following the publication of Ya‘ari’s Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Emissaries from the Land of Israel), historian Jacob Katz wrote a scathingly critical review of the book. Though he agreed with the estimation that the Jews of the pre-emancipation era generally met the requests presented by the shadarim from the Holy Land with sympathy, he criticized Ya‘ari’s portrayal of the emissaries and their interaction with the Jewish communities of the diaspora as a “romantic idealization.” More importantly, Katz lamented that Ya‘ari did not seem to have “any analytical categories” at his disposal and therefore “it appears that any fact known to him was worthy to be included in his description.”17 In other words, while Ya‘ari succeeded in amassing an incredible amount of information about hundreds of emissaries from several centuries, he failed to analyze and interpret his material and thus move beyond an endless parade of mini-biographies of emissaries and their itineraries. Given the wealth of material collected by Ya‘ari it is surprising that sixty years have gone by since the publication of Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el without Jewish historians showing much interest in the institution of shelihut and the role of the emissaries in Jewish history.18 Over the years, some scholars have published additional information and material regarding the visits of individual emissaries. The wealth of information accumulated by those scholars and by Abraham Ya‘ari himself (without which the present book could not have been written) has not engendered, however, any sustained effort to study the significance of shelihut in Jewish history, especially during its heyday from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Several Israeli historians, to be sure, have mined the material related to the philanthropic network in support of the Holy Land for information on the history of the yishuv (as the Jewish communities in Palestine were referred to collectively), but they have largely been uninterested in the emissaries themselves and their encounter with the communities of the diaspora. Minna Rozen, for example, perused a manuscript preserving hundreds of letters asking for financial support from abroad for her study on Jerusalem in the seventeenth century; Jacob Barnai explored the record book (pinkas) of the Istanbul Officials for his monograph on the Jews of eighteenth-century Palestine; and Arieh Morgenstern employed the vast collection of letters written

Introduction

by the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam, another philanthropic organization operating in support of the Holy Land under the leadership of Zvi Hirsch Lehren, for his studies on the Ashkenazi yishuv in the nineteenth century.19 In this book, by contrast, I focus on the diaspora side of the story, employing shelihut and the activities of the emissaries and their supporters in order to better understand the dynamics of communication and exchange between various parts of the Jewish world in the period before the emancipation of the Jews. The sources employed in the present study range from texts produced by the emissaries—including sermons, literature in praise of the Land of Israel and its virtues, and legal opinions (responsa)—to the correspondence emanating from those who organized the philanthropic network in the eighteenth century, in particular the over five hundred letters of the Istanbul-based Officials for the Land of Israel from the mid-­eighteenth century preserved in a manuscript now held at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Another unique source for the eighteenth century is the extensive travelogue written by one of the most prominent Sephardic rabbis and emissaries at the time, Haim Joseph David Azulai, published as Ma‘gal tov; other such texts only exist from the nineteenth century, with Jacob Sapir’s Even Sapir being of particular interest. In addition, letters from and to emissaries, extracts from their record books, and letters provided to support them, have been published, for the most part in Israel, and complement the material compiled in Abraham Ya‘ari’s classic study of the topic. Invaluable insight into the visits of emissaries in the communities of the diaspora can also be gained from the rich material preserved in the archives of the Jewish community in Livorno, the busy Tuscan port city that was home to the largest Jewish community in Italy in the eighteenth century and that served as a central way station for many emissaries from the Land of Israel. No doubt many more sources, from letters to account books, still lie untapped in numerous Jewish community archives around the world, and the present study can only (re-) introduce a topic that still deserves a great deal of further research. The language of the sources used here is itself indicative of the overlapping networks that traversed the Jewish world of the eighteenth century and onto which the philanthropic network of shelihut was mapped. When writing to their appointed representatives in Jerusalem,

9

10

Introduction

for example, the Jewish Officials in Istanbul employed Ladino (JudeoSpanish), written in Hebrew characters; however, when writing to their counterparts in Livorno, a major Sephardic community in the West, they used a Hispanicized Ladino, written in Latin characters. Whereas varieties of Judeo-Spanish thus served as a lingua franca connecting different parts of the Sephardic diaspora, Hebrew was used when crossing the linguistic divide separating the various sub-cultures of the Jewish world, for example when Ashkenazi communities of Germany or Eastern Europe wished to address the Jewish community in Livorno or those of Turkey addressed their counterparts in North A ­ frica. The Istanbul Officials also tended to employ Hebrew, rather than Ladino, when directing themselves to the rabbinic scholars of the Holy Land. Even Hebrew as a shared language, however, still accentuated the differences between various Jewish communities because Ashkenazim and Sephardim used different Hebrew handwriting (and varying pronunciation, in the case of personal encounters between emissaries and Jews in the diaspora). When the community of Livorno corresponded with Lazzaro Uffenheim of Innsbruck in the early 1790s, for example, the scribe employed by the community carefully transcribed all Hebrew letters received from Austria into Sephardic handwriting.20 Rabbis published their own literary works in Hebrew, which continued to be the language of highbrow literature, but in their interaction with the various communities of the diaspora, the emissaries used all the linguistic skills they could marshal, with Sephardic rabbis often employing Ladino in their dealings with Sephardic communities in the Ottoman Empire and in Western Europe, and Hebrew when visiting Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi communities or other Jews whose vernacular they did not share. Internally, the Livornese community maintained its documents in Portuguese, the vernacular language of the Western Sephardic diaspora of the eighteenth century—or rather, a Livornese Judeo-Portuguese that displayed many influences from Castilian Spanish and Italian and included numerous Hebrew loan words. The ability of the Pekidim in Istanbul to exercise control over the philanthropic network in support of the Holy Land was limited by the  circumstances of communication and travel in the early modern ­period. We should not imagine a highly centralized, hierarchical, and stable operation, and overseeing the fund-raising of their emissaries

Introduction

meant that the Pekidim in the Ottoman capital had to contend with difficulties similar to those experienced by early modern long-distance trading diasporas. Unlike international Jewish organizations of the nineteenth century, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, with their hierarchical structure and centralized bureaucratic apparatus, philanthropic support for the Holy Land in the eighteenth century functioned as a “network,” which we may define for the purpose of the present discussion as “any collection of actors that pursue repeated, enduring exchange relations with one another and, at the same time, lack a legitimate organizational authority to arbitrate and resolve disputes that may arise during the exchange.”21 A network, by definition, may be enduring but is also inherently unstable and needs to be understood dynamically as something that “happens” rather than a structure that simply “is.” It is best described as a “circuit” connecting a “nodal center” (or centers) with a “cluster of dispersed nodes around it,” and is maintained by the ongoing movement of bodies, goods, and information between the nodes and the nodal center.22 It was this constant circulation of people and information within the network that had the potential of forging separate places across geographic distances into one community.23 Whereas the Pekidim in Istanbul served as the central node of communication, mediating between the various actors, they ultimately had no way to impose their will and to assert their authority in any direct way. The basic challenges faced by the Officials in Istanbul, their emissaries, and community leaders in the diaspora and in the Holy Land mirrored those identified by Abner Cohen in a seminal study on the organization of trading diasporas: how to create and maintain relations of trust, how to develop and maintain an authority structure, and how to ensure the regular exchange of information, all in the face of long distances and the inevitably slow pace of communication in an era predating telegraphs, railroads, and steamships.24 In the chapters that follow, I explore these issues by focusing on instances when the smooth functioning of the philanthropic network was challenged. Establishing mutual trust was central, for example, in ensuring the success of the emissaries: whereas proper written credentials could be provided to assuage legitimate concerns about impostors making the rounds deceiving Jewish communities in the diaspora, the initial appointment of an emissary had to rely on the reputation of trustworthiness of the

11

12

Introduction

individual involved. Despite all precautions, unauthorized emissaries were by no means infrequent, and even a legitimate emissary could end up embezzling funds. More intangible issues such as cross-cultural suspicions between Ashkenazi communities and Sephardic emissaries, or vice versa, were more difficult to address and persisted, despite the best efforts of the Istanbul Officials to overcome such divisions, into the nineteenth century. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the philanthropic network of shelihut in the eighteenth century. Most immediately, as we will see in Chapter One, the Jewish leadership in Istanbul responded to an acute financial crisis of the Jewish community in Jerusalem in the early eighteenth century. In and of itself this was nothing unusual: throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, individuals with connections to the central government had come to assist distressed Jewish communities of their respective countries. The role of shtadlan (an ad hoc or even permanent representative of Jewish interests to the government) was common throughout the Jewish world, and the Istanbul Officials came to play this role as intercessors for the Jews in Palestine, under Ottoman rule at the time, during the eighteenth century.25 New, however, was the international dimension and longevity of the rescue effort coordinated by the Pekidim in I­ stanbul. Their activities transcended the confines of the Ottoman Empire and thus the traditional role of shtadlan as an intermediary between a clearly defined Jewish community and the gentile political authorities, and their philanthropic endeavor did not remain a one-time response to an acute crisis but grew into an organized network that lasted for more than a century. What allowed the Pekidim in Istanbul to play this role was their prominence in the imperial capital—many of them belonged to the financial elite, including a number of banking families who served as the main financiers of the Ottoman Janissary corps—and the emergence, by the middle of the eighteenth century, of “a very competitive and developed financial market in Istanbul, fully integrated with the major financial centers of Europe.”26 Overseeing the fund-raising operation for the Holy Land involved ensuring that money collected in the diaspora could be properly invested and transferred to beneficiaries in Palestine. The rise of the Ottoman capital as a financial and trading hub, well connected to its European counter-

Introduction

parts, facilitated the rise of the philanthropic network under the auspices of the Istanbul Officials. On the level of ideology, too, we should not assume that the Istanbul Officials simply tapped an already existing sense of Jewish solidarity and unquestioned commitment to the welfare of the Jews in the Holy Land. Abraham Ya‘ari, in his classical study of shelihut, conjured up an image of the emissary network as an uninterrupted tradition going back to the days of the Second Temple. The data collected by Ya‘ari himself, however, suggest that shelihut and the organized support for the Jews of the Holy Land were largely a phenomenon of the early modern and modern periods, in particular the “long” eighteenth century: thirty-one pages of his extensive study document emissaries before the Ottoman conquest of Palestine in 1517, and forty pages those from the Ottoman conquest to the year 1700—the remaining 570 pages deal with the period from 1700 to the mid-nineteenth century. (Admittedly this imbalance likely is also a reflection of the preservation of sources in different time periods and different regions. Still, the overall impression remains that the network of shelihut experienced its heyday between the late seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries.) What the Istanbul Officials and their emissaries accomplished, then, was to initiate a process that sought to put the contemporary Land of Israel at the center of an interconnected, global Jewish community, overcoming the ambiguity found in medieval and early modern Jewish society when the Holy Land remained somewhat of an abstraction, a memory of a glorious past and the promise of a utopian future, but marginal to Jewish life in the present. Indeed, the number of Jews living in the Land of Israel in the eighteenth century remained small, both as a portion of the Jewish population around the world and as a portion of the overall population in Palestine. Historians have estimated the average number of Jews in eighteenth-century Erets Israel to have been around six to eight thousand, out of a total population of anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000. Another estimate puts the Jewish population in Palestine around the year 1800 at about 5,000, along with a Christian minority of 25,000 and a total population of 275,000 (though the two religious minorities combined accounted for about half of the urban population).27 Despite this reality, the rabbinic emissaries sent forth from the Holy Land argued, with varying success, that

13

14

Introduction

Erets Israel remained central to the Jewish world even at present, that its sanctity was by no means diminished by the desolate situation of its Jewish population, and that indeed the Jews living in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias were a spiritual vanguard who should benefit from the generosity of their brethren in the diaspora. A note about terminology: throughout this book, I use “philanthropy” and “beneficence” interchangeably. I have avoided describing the network of support maintained by the rabbinic emissaries from the Holy Land as “charity,” in part because its Hebrew equivalent, ­tsedakah, was generally understood as poor relief and the emissaries considered their own mission, as we are going to see, in rather different terms. Moreover, a clear distinction between “traditional” forms of beneficence or charity and “modern” forms of philanthropy is somewhat misleading when considering a transitional era such as the eighteenth century. It is true, though, that the philanthropic enterprise discussed here differed from self-consciously modern (or modernizing) philanthropic endeavors, which sought to transform, “improve,” or “civilize” their beneficiaries, whereas the benevolent activities of the Istanbul Pekidim and their emissaries were emphatically conservative. Another term that I use frequently is “pan-Jewish,” a neologism roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew term klal-Yisra’el, which in turn is an invention of modern Hebrew.28 I use the term to describe both the idea and the experience of an interconnected Jewish diaspora community that transcended regional or ethnic divisions between, for example, Sephardic and Ashkenazi or Ottoman and European Jewries. Finally, without the intention of making a political statement, I have chosen to use the terms “Land of Israel” (the equivalent of the Hebrew Erets Yisra’el, always employed by the Jewish sources of the time), “Palestine” (found in contemporary European texts and often preferred by modern historians), and “Holy Land” interchangeably. For the sake of simplicity and uniformity, I have also decided to refer to the Ottoman capital by its modern name, Istanbul, rather than Constantinople.

O n e  Network of Beneficence

Defending the practice of dispatching emissaries from the Holy Land to collect funds among the Jews of the diaspora, the prominent ­eighteenth-century rabbi Haim Joseph David Azulai invoked the power of legal precedence: citing a responsum by Joseph Colon (d. 1480), in which this early modern Italian rabbi had come out in support of an emissary from the Land of Israel, Azulai concluded that evidently “more than three hundred years ago, in the days of . . . Joseph Colon . . . they were already accustomed to give contributions for the Land of Israel and emissaries were going abroad.”1 It is significant that ­Azulai chose to cite, as a historical precedent, an example from the late fifteenth century, implicitly acknowledging that the philanthropic network of shelihut was very much a product of the early modern period. This is not to say that there had not been any support for the poor or for institutions of rabbinic learning in the Holy Land from individuals in the diaspora before. In late antiquity and during the days of the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates, both the Rabbanite and Karaite yeshivot in Palestine and in Babylonia had devised their own fund-raising networks. We also know of a small number of emissaries who were sent abroad to collect money for Jews in Palestine. The first letter furnished to a shaliah in support of such a fund-raising mission that has come down to us in its entirety dates from the second half of the tenth century and was given to Rabbi Jonah, son of Rabbi Judah ha-sefaradi (“the Spaniard,” i.e., an immigrant who had moved to the Holy Land from Muslim al-Andalus).2 In the case of northern Europe we know that in Nuremberg in the second half of the fourteenth century individual Jews bequeathed part of their inheritance for the benefit of the poor in Jerusalem, which is the first evidence of this practice—

15

16

Network of Beneficence

elsewhere documented in the Cairo Genizah for the tenth and eleventh centuries and from the fifteenth century in North African responsa— from Ashkenaz.3 There also is some information on several individual emissaries from Palestine during the Mamluk period (late thirteenth century to the Ottoman conquest in 1517), though they were few and far between—Ya‘ari lists five names for the entire period.4 These isolated examples notwithstanding, fund-raising for the Jews of the Holy Land among communities in the diaspora and in particular the practice of sending out emissaries became more widespread only after the Otto­ mans incorporated Palestine into their empire in the early sixteenth century, and gained real momentum in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. The Ottoman conquest of Palestine brought greater stability to the region and led to growing prosperity and an increasing number of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel in the sixteenth century—the Galilean city of Safed as the home of luminaries such as Jacob Berab, Joseph Caro, Isaac Luria, and Moses Cordovero is a well-known case in point.5 The influx of immigrants from Ottoman lands, Europe, Egypt, North Africa, and Yemen led to renewed, and closer, ties between communities in the diaspora and the Holy Land, and the heads of yeshivot and the different congregations established in cities like Safed and Jerusalem sought financial assistance from supporters abroad. The practice of sending sheluhim became more widespread, and already in the early sixteenth century emissaries from the Holy Land must have been common enough for an impostor, a certain Joseph Ish Helbo, to pose as a shaliah from Jerusalem and successfully pilfer funds throughout Italy.6 More than a political or financial crisis it may thus have been the new set of opportunities created by the Ottoman conquest that led to a deeper engagement of the Jews in the diaspora with those in the Holy Land. This reality was also reflected in a responsum by Samuel de Medina, a rabbi in sixteenth-century Salonika, who discussed whether a Jewish husband could force his wife to join him if he wanted to relocate to the Holy Land: “In our time,” de Medina mused, “we see many people traveling to the Holy Land and the journey involves no risk, especially since both Palestine and our country [i.e., Macedonia] are under the same ruler.” Therefore, he argued, the wife had no reason to refuse.7

Network of Beneficence

From the onset of Ottoman rule in the Arabic-speaking Near East, including Greater Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz, one of the prime sources of legitimacy and prestige for the sultans in Istanbul was their role as guardians of the Muslim holy places in Mecca and Medina, as well as that of protectors of the annual pilgrimage (hajj ). Members of the imperial household endowed pious foundations (waqf, in Arabic, or vakıf, in Turkish), the proceeds of which were designated to benefit mosques, schools, and a whole range of public services for the inhabitants—in particular religious scholars and the poor—in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Ottoman sultans had already dispatched regular gifts (sürre) for the poor of Mecca and Medina on the occasion of the annual pilgrimage before the empire took control over those cities, a practice that began with Sultan Bayezid I (ruled 1389–1402) and that sometimes included the Muslim poor of Jerusalem, another holy site for Islam.8 Sultan Süleyman (ruled 1520–66) and his wife, Hürrem Sultan, endowed soup kitchens in Mecca and Medina, and properties all over the Ottoman lands were designated to provide support for the most holy places of Islam. Often the income of these Ottoman pious foundations derived from tax revenues, for example the taxes collected in designated villages in Egypt that were earmarked to sustain pious foundations sustaining Muslim scholars in Medina.9 Jerusalem as the third most holy city of Sunni Islam also attracted imperial beneficence. Süleyman’s wife, Hürrem Sultan, for example, endowed a soup kitchen for the poor in Jerusalem in 1558, with an entire complex of buildings generating income in support of the waqf.10 Another revenue stream that the Ottomans began to channel toward sustaining pious foundations, which in turn supported Islamic institutions and Muslim scholars in Jerusalem, was the special fees collected from Christian pilgrims visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Most of the taxes collected within the district of Jerusalem—fees paid by pilgrims, the poll tax paid by the non-Muslims, as well as other taxes—were in fact spent in the district itself in order to promote the Islamic character of the city.11 The example of Ottoman support for the scholars and poor of the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem does not explain, of course, why Jews in Italy or the German lands decided to offer donations for the support of rabbinic scholars and the Jewish poor in places like J­ erusalem

17

18

Network of Beneficence

and Safed. The context of Ottoman imperial practice may suggest, however, why it was precisely in the early modern period that Jewish support for the holy cities grew so significantly, and it certainly seems relevant when we want to understand why it was the Jewish leadership in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, that managed to consolidate and centralize the philanthropic network on behalf of the Jews in Palestine. There are, of course, some obvious and crucial differences between the Ottoman and the Jewish practices and one should not exaggerate the significance of the Ottoman context for the Jewish model of philanthropy. First and foremost, in the Ottoman case it was often the state and the imperial government that distributed the funds and could, as they did, commandeer tax revenues to sustain pious foundations set up for reasons that were as much political as they were religiously philanthropic. It is interesting, however, that—as we will see below—even in the absence of coercive power, the Pekidim in Istanbul sought to impose special taxes on the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire in order to sustain financial support for the holy cities in Palestine. Though there is no direct evidence for this, it certainly seems plausible that they were trying to emulate an imperial practice that they surely were aware of.

Venetian Precedents Jewish financial support for the holy cities in the Land of Israel before the seventeenth century was haphazard and ad hoc, and it was only in the course of the seventeenth century and even more so in the eighteenth century that a more institutionalized, enduring network of support was established under the leadership of Jewish notables in Istanbul. To a certain degree, these notables were perpetuating and combining practices already established in the medieval period: acting as shtadlanim, or intercessors with the government, and organizing the provision of financial support for the poor, for the Torah scholars, and for Jewish communities in distress.12 What truly distinguished the activities of the Istanbul Jewish leadership in the eighteenth century were the transregional reach and the longevity of a fairly centralized operation. Jewish communities usually dealt with poverty on a local level and sought to restrain the presence of paupers in their midst. In

Network of Beneficence

the early modern period, Jewish communities in different countries began to join forces to respond to acute crises, for example to deal with the wave of refugees brought on by the Chmelnicki massacres in Eastern Europe in the mid-seventeenth century or to lobby against the expulsion of Bohemian Jewry in the eighteenth century. Such measures remained limited in their reach, however, and did not lead to the creation of enduring structures of interregional cooperation. There were, however, three precedents for the Istanbul-based network of beneficence that anticipated some of its features. In all three of these early modern philanthropic endeavors, seventeenth-century ­Venice played a pioneering role:13 First, the ransoming of captives (pidyon shevuyim), a religious obligation that many Jewish communities engaged in but which was organized and institutionalized in an unprecedented way in Venice since the early seventeenth century;14 second, the establishment of benevolent societies that provided dowries for poor and orphaned girls throughout the Sephardic—in particular the Portuguese Sephardic—world, also pioneered by Venice (in 1613) and then emulated by communities in Amsterdam (1615) and Livorno (1656);15 and third, the organizing of support for the Jews in the Holy Land, with seventeenth-century Venice again leading the way, and the appointment of a special official, gizbar kelali, there to oversee the fund-raising and disbursement of support to the Jewish communities in the Holy Land. (The office of gizbar kelali continued to exist through the first decade of the eighteenth century and disappeared from the records after 1708; as we will see, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Livorno took over the role played by Venice and greatly expanded the reach of its philanthropic activities.)16 Significantly, these Venice-based philanthropic activities reached well beyond the confines of the local community and forged wider networks that included communities throughout the far-flung Jewish diaspora, though their focus was Italy, the Mediterranean, and Western Europe. Not all of these benevolent endeavors, however, were intended to transcend the boundaries separating the various subethnic groups (“Portuguese,” “Italian,” Ashkenazi) within the wider Jewish world. The Portuguese dowry societies, for example, were designed explicitly to benefit the members of the Portuguese Sephardic “­nation,” to the exclusion of anyone else.

19

20

Network of Beneficence

In the early 1600s, a society for the redemption of captives was established in Venice. Throughout the century, the city served as the main center for organizing the rescue both of Jews who had fallen captive to the pirates roaming the Mediterranean, in particular the Knights of Malta but also the Muslim corsairs of North Africa, and of Jews who had been captured during wartime and were put up for sale on slave markets. A clear and universal mandate of Jewish law, the redemption of captives had transcended the limits of the local community already in the medieval period and, unlike charity (tsedakah), it was not subject to the principle of ‘aniyei ‘irkha kodmim, or giving preference to the poor of one’s own city. Since the Middle Ages, the redemption of captives had been a pragmatic imperative especially for communities of Jewish merchants engaged in overseas trade, whether in the period of the Cairo Genizah in the eleventh century or in seventeenth-century Venice.17 Besides Venice, other communities too played an important role in the collection of money to redeem captives, and in organizing and coordinating the rescue efforts, negotiating the price of the ransom to be paid, and ensuring the allocation and transfer of the appropriate funds. The Jews of Istanbul were often called upon to redeem prisoners who were put up for sale after they were captured by Ottoman troops or their Tartar allies, and the Western Sephardic communities in Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg all maintained special voluntary associations that were in charge of collecting money for pidyon shevuyim and that sent their contributions on to Venice.18 In the eighteenth century, the Tuscan port city of Livorno, where a society for pidyon shevuyim had existed since 1606, inherited the leading role in organizing the redemption of captives from Venice.19 These Italian communities created a philanthropic network that was not unlike that operating in support of the Jews in the Holy Land under the auspices of the Pekidim in Istanbul in the following century, drawing on the support especially from other Sephardic and Italian communities, operating internationally, and making use of new opportunities to invest and increase their capital that arose in the early modern period. In Livorno in 1764, for example, the community leaders decided to invest two-thirds of the money collected for the ransom of captives to generate new income, half the amount with the London East India Company and the other half elsewhere.20

Network of Beneficence

At the end of the sixteenth, early seventeenth centuries, the difficulties of the Jewish community in Safed also led to the establishment of regular support for the Jewish yishuv in the Holy Land, which became increasingly dependent on contributions from abroad in the subsequent two centuries. In Istanbul, a benevolent society to support the Jews of Palestine, Hevrat Erets Yisra’el, was created in the late sixteenth century, and similar benevolent societies were set up in Rome in 1617 and in Hamburg in 1659. In the early 1600s, the Jewish community in Venice imposed a special tax to help the Land of Israel.21 At one point, the Jerusalem community turned to Hevrat Erets Yisra’el in Istanbul and requested the appointment of two individuals as kapı kahya (“lobbyist”) to represent the interests of the Jews of the holy city to the imperial government.22 Elsewhere, the community of Fez, in Morocco, adopted a community regulation in 1603 that stipulated regular collections to support the holy city of Jerusalem.23 In 1683, the community records in Cairo noted matter-of-factly the practice of sending a third of the income from indirect taxes ( gabella) to the Holy Land.24 The organized and far-reaching activities of the Venice community began when Rabbi Leone (Judah Arieh) da Modena (d. 1648) sent an appeal, in late 1600, “to the holy communities in the lands of Ashkenaz, Poland, and Russia,” asking them for contributions to support the Jews of the Holy Land. “May it find favor in their eyes,” he added, “to send all the donations . . . by way of Venice, for it is on the seaboard and the ships depart from here.”25 Good intentions did not always translate into smooth operations, however, and it is important not to mistake the prescriptive texts of communal regulations for descriptive texts of what actually happened. Even though the Italian congregation of Venice had adopted elaborate rules about the collection and disbursement of funds for the Holy Land, including the appointment of an official overseeing these ­moneys, in 1649 a complaint was submitted to the community leadership that “for several of their terms, the officials for the Land of Israel have not submitted an account of the funds that they received and of what is supposed to be collected from the members of our holy congregation, and not a single coin has been sent to the Land of Israel.” Rabbi Isaac Volterra was charged with investigating the matter and with reviewing the accounts; two weeks later, he was able to report

21

22

Network of Beneficence

that it was the community itself that owed a huge amount to the Erets Israel fund after one of its previous officials had granted the community a loan, in 1643, to cover the rental expenses for the synagogue premises. Since then, no one had seen to repaying the loan and none of the officials in charge of the funds for the Holy Land had bothered to present any demands. It was therefore decided to repay the loan by imposing a special tax, but the community records suggest that only a fraction of the amount was ever collected and paid out.26 Even after the Italian congregation in Venice had begun to transfer its contributions through the gizbar kelali, who was supposed to collect all the donations for the Land of Israel and forward them to their destination, this centralization of the fund-raising operation also did not mean that the funds were now moved more quickly and efficiently. Thus, the Italian congregation in the city forwarded the contributions it had collected for the year 1664 to the gizbar kelali only in 1670; those for the year 1665 in 1670 and 1674; those for 1669 in 1674 and 1675, and so on. Similar delays occurred with the money collected by the Ashkenazi congregation in Venice.27 These examples illustrate the limitations of the philanthropic efforts in seventeenth-century Venice, even within the city itself. In a sense, the Venetian efforts (and those in other cities at the time) were a precursor of the philanthropic network established under the auspices of the Istanbul Officials in the eighteenth century, and the latter certainly had to confront their own share of logistical challenges. It is also clear, however, that the eighteenthcentury network of beneficence operated on a far larger scale, was far more centralized, and, despite its own shortcomings, also was far more successful than its seventeenth-century precursors.

Budget Woes in Jerusalem In his book Sefat Emet (Language of Truth), published in Amsterdam in 1707, Rabbi Moshe Hagiz of Jerusalem included an overview of the budget of the Jerusalem community: against annual expenses of 10,000 kuruş, he listed an income of 6,000 kuruş, 2,000 each from local tax revenue, from the estate tax, and from the funds raised by emissaries dispatched to the Jewish communities of the diaspora.28 The numbers

Network of Beneficence

are obviously rounded and we do not know how accurate Hagiz’ information was; nonetheless they point to a chronic deficit that would continue to haunt the Jewish communities of the Holy Land throughout the eighteenth century. The large expenses were mainly due, Hagiz explained, to the burden of regular taxes—the djizya, or poll tax, as it was prescribed in Islamic law for non-Muslim subjects (the dhimmis)—as well as an ever-growing number of extraordinary taxes, fees, and bribes that had to be paid to local and provincial authorities. Apart from the city’s governor appointed by the imperial authorities in Istanbul, payments had to be made to the qadi (the judge of the sharia court) and to a range of other local officials. “Every time one of them says that he wants something,” Hagiz lamented, the Jews of Jerusalem “are obliged to fill his mouth with pieces of silver.”29 The djizya, imposed on the Jewish and Christian populations under Islamic rule, was not the greatest burden. Since the official appointed by the imperial authorities to collect the djizya was paid a percentage of the total sum owed by the non-Muslim population—the administration issued as many poll tax forms (evrāq) as there were non-Muslims liable to pay the tax—and not the actual amount raised, he had little incentive to ensure that all taxes were actually paid. Throughout the eighteenth century, therefore, about half of the evrāq issued were returned to the treasury unpaid, and in the last decade of the century, as many as sixty percent of the tax forms remained unpaid.30 At the same time, the number of evrāq did not always reflect the actual number of nonMuslims living in the district and did not keep up with the increasing number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the eighteenth century. If we accept various contemporary estimates that set the Jewish population in Jerusalem at about 1,200 in the 1690s, 2,500–3,000 in 1744, and 5,000 in 1770, then it is surprising to see how the number of evrāq collected jumped from 1,600 to 2,200 between 1724–25 and 1746–47 but remained stable from the 1740s through the 1770s, with 2,200 evrāq in 1749–50, 2,210 in 1764–65, and 2,221 in 1775–76.31 (The numbers finally did increase in the last decade of the century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.)32 At the same time, however, the governors of Jerusalem had every reason to impose a large range of other taxes and fees on the local population, in particular the non-­Muslim population, and to take advantage of the large numbers of Jewish and Christian

23

24

Network of Beneficence

pilgrims and immigrants since unlike the poll tax, which had to be forwarded to the central government, they would be able to keep the revenue from the other imposts for themselves. (Some fees, as we saw, served to support Muslim pious foundations in the city.) Though the Sublime Porte in Istanbul repeatedly issued decrees declaring many of the new taxes and fees illegal and contrary to sharia, this was to no avail. Thus, each pilgrim arriving in the port of Jaffa had to pay a fee of seven kuruş, which was supposed to pay for providing the services of a dragoman to ensure the safety of the pilgrims on their way on to Jerusalem; from the 1740s onward, however, the fee was still collected but no dragoman provided, and around the middle of the century, the impost doubled. Each pilgrim now also had to pay a twenty-kuruş road tax, and yet another fee (which had risen to three to four kuruş by the 1740s) upon entering Jerusalem. Burial taxes and special fees in exchange for permitting the Jews to maintain their cemeteries were levied on the community, and upon the arrival of a new governor, judge, and other official, as well as on religious holidays, special “gifts” had to be made by the community.33 The surviving account books of the Jerusalem Jewish community, which cover eleven years between 1760 and 1796, list dozens of individuals who received payments, from the governor in Damascus and the mütesellim (mayor) and the mulla (i.e., the qadi, or judge) of Jerusalem down to a myriad of other officials, agents, and servants who received smaller payments. According to Jacob Barnai’s analysis of the account books, between 25.4 percent (in 1795–96) to 46 percent (in 1784–85) of the community budget went to payments of taxes, fees, and bribes to government officials.34 In light of all this, it is not surprising that already by the 1690s, according to Raphael Mordecai Malki (d. 1702), the Jews of Jerusalem were paying about 5,000 kuruş a year in taxes, even though Ottoman documents suggest that only about 2,000 kuruş of djizya were collected in the early 1700s.35 Malki also provided an estimate of the financial needs of the Jerusalem community, indicating, on the one hand, that the bulk of the budget was needed to keep up with the poll tax and other payments to the Ottoman provincial authorities and, on the other hand, that only the ongoing support from the Jewish diaspora could sustain the Jerusalem community financially. “The Jews have enough with 5,000 reales for the payment of taxes,” Malki wrote, “and

Network of Beneficence

to ensure the learning of Torah [they need] another 2,000 or 3,000, altogether 8,000 reales, or in times of great need up to 10,000 reales in the three cities of the Land of Israel, and everywhere in the reaches of exile (nefutsot ha-golah) they are obliged to support them, and in particular the settlement of Jerusalem; whereas [supporting] Safed and Hebron appears to me optional (rashut), but [support for] Jerusalem is an obligation (hovah).”36 These numbers paled, Malki emphasized, next to the 50,000 reales in support of the Catholic Church in the Otto­man Levant that came every year from Spain, or the 10,000 reales from Venice, as well as the 40,000 reales that supported the Armenians and the 30,000 for the Greeks.37 Malki and his son-in-law, Moshe Hagiz (writing about two decades later), agreed that the Jewish community in Jerusalem, if left to its own devices, could not generate the income that it needed to sustain itself. “In the Land [of Israel] there is no wealth and no trade, but there are [many] expenses and food has gotten more expensive, and therefore there are fewer and fewer [Jews living] there,” lamented Malki.38 Hagiz emphasized that those who were considered as belonging to the middle class in Jerusalem would be considered poor in any other Jewish community, and even the wealthy, who would be paying as much as 100 kuruş in yearly taxes to their communities in the diaspora, could only be expected to pay about a quarter of that sum in Jerusalem where they had no income from business and depended on the interest payments on the capital that they had invested abroad.39 Income from taxes, Hagiz suggested, could not cover the ever-­growing expenses of maintaining a community that was at the mercy of a corrupt provincial administration. The general image presented by these two authors is confirmed by the account books of the Jerusalem community from the last decades of the eighteenth century. In the years for which data are available, an average of 25 percent of the revenue came from donations and e­ missaries. A large portion of the community’s income derived from legacies of individuals who passed away without relatives in the Holy Land (­‘izvonot) and special burial taxes paid by new immigrants, often negotiated and paid in advance (around 20 percent), and an ever-growing portion was financed through loans and endowments, reaching over 40 percent in most years, and sometimes over 50 percent. (Loans and

25

26

Network of Beneficence

endowments were listed together because the principal of loans made by Jews, for which they received a regular payment of interest, usually became endowed property of the community after the individual had died.) Only a small part, on average no more than around 10 percent, came from property taxes levied on the members of the community and the gabella on items such as kosher meat and wine.40 The contrast to the situation in other communities was striking: in 1772 in Istanbul, for example, with a total revenue of 49,000 kuruş, 24,000 came from property taxes, 22,000 from the gabella on meat, and 3,000 from the gabella on cheese; no other source of income was listed.41 It was thus the support from the diaspora that ensured the survival of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, yet, according to Hagiz, the funds collected by the emissaries from Jerusalem only provided an additional revenue of about 2,000 kuruş per year, after deduction of the expenses for the maintenance of the emissary’s family, for his travels, and the percentage he was owed to compensate him for his efforts. As Hagiz pointed out, even someone like Hezekiah da Silva—a prominent scholar who was well-connected abroad—had only managed to collect about 500 kuruş for the Jerusalem community during his mission to Europe, although “he was accomplished and learned, and complete in his knowledge . . . and he was a son of the city [Amsterdam], and he had wealthy and prominent relatives there.”42 The struggle to raise contributions from the Jewish communities in the diaspora, Hagiz felt, thus had to be redoubled and rabbinic emissaries from Palestine would have to play a central role.

The Pekidim in Istanbul In 1700, a large number of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, motivated by messianic expectations and led by Rabbi Judah Hasid, immigrated to Palestine. As a result the Jewish population in Jerusalem doubled, according to some estimates, to about 2,000 individuals, and the financial troubles of the community got worse.43 This first group of Ashkenazi immigrants would later spark the imagination of Zionist historians, and Ben-Zion Dinur went so far as to maintain unequivocally that “modern Jewish history begins with the immigra-

Network of Beneficence

tion to Palestine of one thousand Jews led by Rabbi Judah the Pious in the year 1700.”44 These were by no means the only Jews who joined a growing number of individuals arriving on the shores of the Holy Land in the early eighteenth century, and Moshe Hagiz praised the immigrants from “the cities of Turkey, the Maghreb, Ashkenaz, and Poland, who, though it is a long way for them, have not been deterred from coming [to Palestine], and every year there are groups of visitors who arrive, some to live and establish a home, others at least to prostrate themselves [i.e., as pilgrims].”45 The immigration of Judah Hasid’s group lacked organization and was seriously underfunded, however, and the Ashkenazi community that they established in Jerusalem rapidly accumulated huge debts. Despite sending emissaries, appealing to their home communities in Europe, and involving the services of the Viennese court Jew Samson Wertheim, their efforts fell short. In 1720, the Muslim creditors destroyed the Ashkenazi synagogue and the “Ashkenazi courtyard” (­hatser ha-ashkenazim), the living quarters of the recent immigrants. Much of the community dispersed, and it fell to the long-established Sephardic community of the city not only to support the remaining Ashkenazi Jews in town, but also to service their debt, for which they were held responsible by the authorities. It was in response to this crisis that the Committee of Officials for the Land of Israel in Istanbul was established in 1726. Drawing on their connections to Jewish leaders in Europe as well as at the Sublime Porte, the Jewish leaders in Istanbul intervened and negotiated an agreement, confirmed by an imperial firman (decree), according to which the interest on the debts accumulated by the Ashkenazi community was forgiven and the remaining debt, the impressive sum of 60,000 kuruş, was to be paid in fixed installments over a period of ten years. From that point on, the Pekidei Kushta assumed the responsibility for overseeing the financial affairs of the Jerusalem community, appointed their own representatives in the holy city, and established a far-ranging philanthropic network designed to raise money to pay off the accumulated debts and support the Jews in Palestine. According to a letter from Izmir to Livorno, dated December 1732, the Istanbul community had raised 5,000 kuruş to help pay the debts of Jerusalem, Izmir and Cairo another 2,500 each, and emissaries had raised about 6,000 in other communities of the Otto-

27

28

Network of Beneficence

man Empire.46 Thus, if the Jerusalem community survived the crisis of the early eighteenth century, it was no doubt due to the intervention of the Jewish leadership in the imperial capital.47 According to a regulation signed by the Istanbul Officials in 1730, a special tax was imposed on the Jews of Istanbul in order to contribute to the rescue of the Jerusalem community. They implored other communities to join them: “Here in Istanbul, every Jewish man must give one silver para every week to pay for the debts of the holy community of Jerusalem. And we send emissaries (sheluhei mitzvah) to every city, so they will make their contributions and every man will give one para every week for the redemption of the captives of Jerusalem.”48 The para (worth 1/40 of one kuruş) had to be paid by each individual earning at least forty paras, or one kuruş, each week.49 In addition to the para payment, the community committed to pay a fixed amount, kitsba, which was imposed for a period of ten years and subsequently renewed. Other communities joined the effort, with Izmir, for example, shouldering a payment of one-fourth of the amounts collected in the capital.50 According to a letter written by the Pekidei Kushta, the Istanbul community committed to raise 3,000 kuruş of para payments in addition to 300 kuruş for the kitsba, and Izmir 750 kuruş in para payments in addition to the fixed allotment of 75 kuruş.51 In later years, the distinction between kitsba and para payment seems to have disappeared and the para payment was included as a lump sum in the community budget. In 1748, Istanbul’s contributions were set at 1,800 kuruş for the kitsba, 2,000 for the para payment, and a 200 supplementary payment, for a total of 4,000 kuruş. In 1772, the same amount—4,000 kuruş—was raised in support of the Holy Land, so that, considering the accelerating inflation in the Ottoman Empire especially after the 1760s, the real value of the fixed contributions for the Land of Israel seems to have declined.52 If the annual para payment in Istanbul was calculated, in 1748, at 1,800 kuruş (72,000 para) per year, or about 1,385 para per week, and the Istanbul community at the time counted about 30,000 individuals, it is clear that only a small portion of the community was actually paying the tax.53 It is important to remember, however, that the fundraising for Jerusalem was only part of the overall effort undertaken in Istanbul and elsewhere in the Ottoman communities on behalf of the

Network of Beneficence

Holy Land. In 1765, for example, the Istanbul Pekidim responded to a crisis in Hebron: “In addition to the 1,000 kuruş that we send you each year from our community, we have obligated all the residents in our city to give . . . one para each week . . . and [we have instituted] a new gabella . . . on wine and sugar, and we have obligated the sextons of the synagogues and study houses to collect eighty kuruş each year.”54 While significant sums were raised in support of the communities in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land, the Pekidim in the imperial capital still faced a great deal of resistance, either from entire communities or from individuals, when it came to collecting the special imposts. In Istanbul itself, the Officials were granted far-reaching powers to enforce payment of the para tax in support of Jerusalem. A decree issued by the leading rabbis of the city declared, In the vernacular (be-la‘az [i.e., Ladino]), so that the speakers of the vernacular (ha-lo‘azim) can understand it: we decree with the power of the Torah that every man . . . who owes the para allotment must pay to the official ( gabai) at his first request, without any resistance. . . . And everyone who resists and does not want to pay, . . . authority is granted to detain him and they can take him by force, since he is transgressing a decree by the rabbis and [his refusal] is the cause of the destruction of Jerusalem. He shall be punished . . . and an additional fine of 5 kuruş for the benefit of Jerusalem is imposed on him, and after [he pays] he will be released from prison.55

Beyond Istanbul, however, the Officials had to rely on the power of persuasion, and for this they depended on the local lay and rabbinic leadership as well as the emissaries from the Holy Land, whose fundraising missions they organized and coordinated. Different forms of regular or occasional fund-raising on behalf of the Land of Israel were instituted throughout the period in various parts of the Jewish world. Some communities, in particular in the Ottoman lands, joined (or were expected to join) the example set by Istanbul; elsewhere, other arrangements were made. In the Moroccan city of Sefrou in the 1790s, for example, a community regulation was adopted that stipulated the collection of an impost (tasa) in support of the Holy Land by everyone who got married, on the occasion of the birth of a son, on the day of circumcision, and again when a son reached adulthood and put

29

30

Network of Beneficence

on phylacteries for the first time. In memory of the “half shekel” of biblical times, a collection for the Land of Israel was to take place on the first day of the month of Adar and on Purim, as well as at other times that appeared appropriate to the treasurers, as long as they did not overlap with fund-raising for the synagogue or charity for the poor of the city. The agreement had its own precedent in Morocco and was practically the same as—and likely modeled on—the takanah that had been adopted in Fez in 1603, mentioned above. The community agreement in Fez had been issued in response to the visit of two emissaries from the Holy Land, Solomon ibn Hagai and Meir Maimaran; in the case of Sefrou, the emissary Benjamin Moshe Meyuhas of Jeru­ salem, who was visiting at the time, formally appointed the officials and treasurers who would be in charge of collecting the funds for the Holy Land.56 The exact circumstances under which the Committee of Officials was set up in Istanbul are not documented, but by 1726, the Pekidim were active on behalf of Jerusalem; later in the century, officials were named to oversee the affairs of Hebron (1733), Tiberias (1740, when the Jewish community, which had fallen into ruin a century earlier, was rebuilt under the leadership of Rabbi Haim Abulafia), and Safed (in the 1740s).57 Whereas they responded to an immediate crisis in Jerusalem, which had reached its climax with the destruction of the Ashkenazi community in 1720, it was a broader confluence of developments that facilitated the rise of the Istanbul Pekidim and the ­development of their philanthropic endeavor centered in the Ottoman capital. Historians of the Ottoman Empire have abandoned the once dominant narrative of a prolonged Ottoman decline following the “classical age” of the sixteenth century and the failed second siege of Vienna in 1683.58 Moreover, competition between the imperial center and provincial elites is no longer understood as a zero-sum game. Some scholars have argued that the localization of power by provincial elite households, which imitated the imperial household of the sultan in Istanbul, could be seen as “a more subtle and profound expansion of Ottoman forms of political rule to the provinces” rather than as a sign of Ottoman decline.59 For the province of Damascus, of which Jerusalem was a part, Karl Barbir has shown that during the first half of the eighteenth century the Ottoman imperial government was, in

Network of Beneficence

fact, successful in strengthening the provincial administration led by the governor in Damascus.60 The intervention of the Istanbul Pekidim in the affairs of the Jewish communities in Jerusalem and Hebron in the first half of the eighteenth century thus was not a symptom of imperial decline and crisis but, to the contrary, a result of the relative stability and consolidation of Ottoman power in the province. The case of Tiberias and Safed was somewhat different. Here the activity of designated Pekidim in Istanbul coincided with a period during which two local rulers, Zahir al-Umar (d. 1775) and then Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (d. 1804), asserted a great deal of independence from Istanbul and aggressively developed the local economy (though al-Jazzar refrained from defying the imperial government and was appointed as governor over both the Sidon and Damascus provinces). Zahir al-Umar laid the foundation for his expanding political power in the Galilee through promoting trade with Europe, exporting cotton, olive oil, and tobacco, and he encouraged the settlement of Christians and Jews in the Galilee. He is credited with supporting the reestablishment of a Jewish presence in Tiberias in the 1740s. Whereas improved political circumstances, rather than Ottoman decline or crisis, allowed for the Pekidim to establish their philanthropic program, their eventual displacement in the nineteenth century (a topic to which I will return in the last chapter) was linked to the increasing encroachment of European powers in Palestine and the Ottoman Levant more generally. An intriguing parallel exists between the role of the Istanbul Pekidim in the crisis of the 1720s and the contemporary situation of the Armenian community in Jerusalem and its supporters in the imperial ­capital. Whether there is a direct relation or whether the Jewish notables modeled their actions on the example of their Armenian counterparts remains speculation, however. From 1670, the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem had been placed under the authority of the Patriarchate in Istanbul, perhaps to strengthen the Armenian position in the ongoing disputes with the Greek Orthodox and Latin Christians, all of whom competed over control of the Christian holy places in Palestine. In the following decades, however, the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem had accumulated an ever-increasing burden of debt—which seems to have been even more dramatic than what the Jewish community faced

31

32

Network of Beneficence

in the 1720s—borrowed from local Muslim and Jewish lenders. In 1713, the Armenian notables of the imperial capital designated Hovhanness Vartabed Paghishetzi (who subsequently became Armenian Patriarch in Istanbul) and sent him to Jerusalem, where he managed to negotiate a deal with the creditors that resolved the crisis, much like the Jewish notables of Istanbul did about a decade later.61 In the case of the Greek Orthodox, too, the support of local notables with connections in the imperial government—the Greek notables, merchants and bankers known as the Phanariotes—was marshaled as the Patriarchate in Istanbul sought to centralize control over the Orthodox Christians elsewhere in the empire in the early eighteenth century.62 The Istanbul Pekidim came from the top echelons of the capital city’s Jewish elite, as their work required that they have connections with officials in the imperial government as well as close working relations with other Jewish leaders elsewhere in the empire and abroad. They also had to handle the investment and transfer of significant amounts of money endowed for the benefit of individuals and communities in the Holy Land or collected by the emissaries from the Jews of the diaspora. Among the Pekidim in Istanbul was, for example, David Zonana, who served as general paymaster, or ocak bazerganı, for the Janissary corps, a position held by about a dozen Jews in the course of the eighteenth century until the violent suppression of the Janissaries in 1826. The prominent position came with a great deal of influence and power, to be sure, but it also carried its risks: Zonana was executed in 1746 and his body thrown into the sea, a fate that befell several of his successors as well.63 Other Pekidim were prominent sarrafs (bankers) providing financial services to the government, for example as tax farmers, or important merchants, such as the Camondo family. This financial elite of the community, maintaining close relations with the highest echelons of the Ottoman administration, consisted of a limited number of families who were involved in a range of philanthropic activities on behalf of the Jewish community. The same family names appeared as signatories on letters from the Pekidei Kushta throughout the century—Adjiman, Alfandari, Ashkenazi, Angel, Asseo, Barukh, De Medina, De Mayo, Zonana, Hatem, Hodara, Yerushalmi, Magula, Fua, Palache, Fresco, Sonsin, Camondo, Kimhi, Carmona, Rosanes, Shaki—and as sponsors of printed works of rabbinic scholarship, or

Network of Beneficence

patrons of yeshivot, such as Yeshivat Damesek Eli‘ezer established in Jerusalem in 1757 by Eliezer Ashkenazi of Istanbul.64 Sometimes also a prominent rabbi might serve as one of the Istanbul Pekidim, for example Haim Moda‘i. A rabbi of Istanbul, Moda‘i settled in Safed, where he lived for twenty-five years. In 1749, he was sent as an emissary for Safed to Egypt; upon his return, he established himself in Istanbul where he was appointed to serve on the rabbinic court and as one of the Pekidim for Safed. After his second shelihut in Europe in the 1760s, Moda‘i returned to Istanbul where he lived until accepting a rabbinic appointment in Izmir in 1776. In 1793 he returned to Safed and died there the following year; among his numerous writings was a poem denouncing the smoking of tobacco.65 The oligarchic character of the Pekidei Kushta and the way they employed their proximity to the imperial government to assert power within Ottoman Jewish society echoed a wider process in Ottoman society. One historian has described this trend as the “­aristocratisation” of Ottoman society in the eighteenth century, seen among the Islamic religious leadership (ilmiye) of the capital city, the growing influence of a small class of bureaucrats (kalemiye), as well as among the Greek Orthodox Phanariotes of Istanbul (thus named after the Fener neighborhood in the capital where they lived in proximity to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate), who served as translators and held other important positions in the imperial government, including the governorship of Wallachia and Moldavia after 1711, and exerted significant influence over the Greek Orthodox Church leadership.66 In July 1746, two documents preserved in the pinkas of the Istanbul Officials recorded the appointment of a new group of Pekidim for Jerusalem: David Kimhi, Shabbatai Alfandari, Jacob Alfandari, Moshe Asseo, Moshe Ashkenazi, Joseph Barukh, and David Zonana, the paymaster of the Janissary corps. The first document was issued by the rabbinic court in the imperial capital; it formalized the appointment and granted the new Officials “the power to collect money and to take large loans in time of need,” and instructed them to honor bills of exchange issued by the Jerusalem community to be drawn on the Istanbul Officials, and to “pay the debt within three days, without exception.” A second document was issued by the leadership of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, accepting the authority of the Istanbul

33

34

Network of Beneficence

Officials. The text leaves no doubt about the hierarchical relationship that was to be established in which all authority would be surrendered to the Pekidim in Istanbul: We have given them appropriate power and sufficient authority to be supervisors of all our affairs, to conduct our work, to coordinate the communities of our city, to take care of the poor of our locality, and no man may do anything without their permission. We obligate ourselves totally in a manner that is legally binding and halakhically valid, accepting their authority, following their decrees, listening to their words and acting according to their leadership.

The signatories went on to say that they had given them appropriate power and sufficient authority to impose and collect and take whatever is needed for the benefit of our community in general and in particular, from all the cities of Rumelia and ­Anatolia, from the east and from the west, all the lands of the ­Muslims, until the cities of Yemen, from the Christian countries, ­Europe . . . until the remote islands, the fixed donations, such as the para collection . . . and [handle] the other allotments, funds, pledges, legacies, and collections, and the occasional donations.67

The newly appointed Pekidim soon followed up with a letter addressed to the rabbis of Jerusalem in which they asked them to write to the K. K. London by itself,68 to the K. K. Amsterdam by itself, to the K. K. Livorno by itself, to the K. K. Venice and its environs by itself, and to any other place to which you usually write, to let them know that you have, for the benefit of Jerusalem, accepted us as pekidim, and thus they must send to us any allotment that belongs to the holy city, public [i.e., for the community] or private [i.e., for individuals in Jerusalem].69

The leadership in Jerusalem, having accepted the complete authority of the Officials in Istanbul, now had to certify to the communities in the diaspora that the newly appointed Pekidim were entitled to collect anything that was to be provided in support of Jerusalem. Telling was the list of addressees specified in the letter, outlining the geography of a philanthropic network that, in the 1740s, apparently continued to be a largely Sephardic operation. In order to facilitate fund-raising in a complex network that linked communities in faraway places to the

Network of Beneficence

philanthropic endeavor coordinated in Istanbul, the Pekidei Kushta appointed local notables as their representatives and charged them with the collection of funds for Jerusalem to be forwarded to Istanbul. Thus, a couple of months after they had taken charge in the summer of 1746, the new officials appointed Solomon Rokeah of Venice: “On the power granted to us by the rabbis and sages of the holy city of Jeru­ salem we gave him [i.e., Rokeah] the power and sufficient authority to represent us (la‘amod bi-mekomenu)” and to collect all the contributions and donations to be sent to Jerusalem.70

Establishing a Fund-Raising Network Given the importance of the support provided by communities in the diaspora, the Istanbul Officials developed the practice of sending rabbinic emissaries to collect donations and pledges for future support on an unprecedented scale. They organized the fund-raising missions into four broad geographic regions, though at times emissaries would visit more than one or only part of one area. Most important were the shelihut to Turkiya (“Turkey”) and to Frankiya (“Europe”). The former, “the first among the first,” according to Moshe Hagiz, was divided into a region including Anatolia and extending to Aleppo and even Damascus, and Rumelia, reaching from Izmir and Istanbul to Edirne, Salonika, and the entire Ottoman Balkans. The shelihut to Europe, which, according to Moshe Hagiz, “people regard as the most distinguished in wealth (muflag be-‘ashirut),”71 included, in the eighteenth century, Italy, France, and England, as well as Ashkenaz, i.e., the German-speaking and the Habsburg lands. Poland-Lithuania became part of the circuit more regularly after the Hasidic immigration of 1777, and was then visited almost exclusively by Ashkenazi emissaries who raised funds in particular from the home communities of the Ashkenazi immigrants to the Holy Land.72 In the mid to late eighteenth century, a few emissaries to Europe continued onward from Amsterdam or London and visited the communities of the Caribbean and, in the nineteenth century, North America. A third region was referred to as shelihut Ma‘arav (Maghreb), divided into Ma‘arav ha-penimi (Gibraltar and Morocco) and Ma‘arav ha-hitsoni

35

36

Network of Beneficence

(Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania). The fourth region, referred to as ‘Arabistan, extended from the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Syria and Iraq, to Yemen in the south and east to Persia and Central Asia; since the eighteenth century, emissaries dispatched to Persia or Yemen sometimes went even further east to India. The regional division was largely determined by the established routes of travel and communication at the time, not by political borders: emissaries going to Europe went, by sea, to Izmir or Istanbul (or, after crossing the Sinai desert, through Egypt and then, by sea, from Alexandria on to Izmir or Istanbul), and then continued on to Europe via Venice or Livorno. There were also direct connections between Palestine and the ports of Italy; returning from his mission in early 1702, the emissary Abraham Rovigo, for example, sailed on a ship with twenty-five people from Livorno to Jaffa, a trip that lasted twentyseven days.73 Sometimes circumstances dictated more circuitous routes: thus, when Haim Joseph David Azulai set out on his second mission to Western Europe, in the 1770s, he went first to Egypt, then by ship from Alexandria to Tunis, and finally from Tunis to Livorno, since the direct route to Italy was considered too dangerous because of the corsairs in the eastern Mediterranean.74 Istanbul, of course, and Izmir, the preeminent port city of Ottoman Turkey in the eighteenth century, served as major way stations, as did Venice and Livorno, the latter displacing Venice as the major Italian port in the course of the eighteenth century. Livorno was referred to as “the gateway to Europe” (puerta de la Franquía),75 but it also served as a major connecting point between the Ottoman lands and North Africa.76 Emissaries on their way east would usually take the overland caravan routes through Aleppo and Baghdad and, from there, on to Basra and into Persia and Central Asia or southward toward Yemen; other emissaries to Yemen went through Egypt and by ship, crossing the Red Sea.77 Some communities played a larger role than others in the organization of shelihut. The major communities of the Ottoman Empire, in particular the imperial capital and the port city of Izmir, as well as ­Salonika—all three among the largest Jewish communities in the world in the eighteenth century—were of particular importance: as centers for the organization of shelihut, of Hebrew printing, of commerce, and of major donations, as well as the home of prominent rabbis who provided

Network of Beneficence

ideological support. In Italy, Venice and later Livorno served as the main centers for the collection and transfer of funds and as a way station for emissaries to Europe. Elsewhere it was Amsterdam, the largest Jewish community in eighteenth-century Europe outside the Ottoman Empire, that became a destination no emissary to Europe could ignore and a conduit connecting the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities throughout Europe, as well as the Portuguese Sephardic communities of the Atlantic world, with Istanbul and the Holy Land. In Eastern Europe, funds for the Land of Israel collected under the auspices of the Council of the Four Lands were channeled through Lvov. Elsewhere, a series of regional centers emerged that served as a way station for emissaries and for the collection and transfer of money to Palestine, either through Livorno or Istanbul: in Central Europe, those were Breslau, Prague, Frankfurt on the Main, and Vienna;78 in North Africa, Algiers played an important role.79 These centers were part of other—commercial, rabbinic, or ­family— networks that were closely intertwined. Thus the Ashkenazim of Hamburg sent their contributions to Frankfurt and from there on to Italy, whereas the Portuguese Sephardim in Hamburg employed their own contacts and transferred the funds directly to their counterparts in Livorno: an illustration of the fact that the Jewish world in this period is best understood as a series of separate, if overlapping, sub-ethnic networks. Rabbi Jacob Emden of Altona praised the example of the Sephardim who provided well-organized support for their brethren in the Holy Land and lamented that the Ashkenazim of Altona-Hamburg had failed to follow the suggestion of his late father, Hakham Tsvi Ashkenazi, who had tried to forward the funds collected there through a faithful middleman in Livorno. Thus, Emden wrote, “had our European communities initially taken the trouble to adopt such an arrangement, then the settlement of our Ashkenazi brethren in Eretz Yisrael would have been constantly strengthened.” Instead, the rich funds collected by Ashkenazi communities throughout Europe had been misappropriated by corrupt officials, “communal robbers who devoured the property of the poor (of Eretz Yisrael).”80 As noted above, in the 1700s Livorno inherited the role that Venice had played a century earlier. The busiest port in eighteenth-century Italy and a trading center with international and, indeed, global con-

37

38

Network of Beneficence

nections,81 Livorno served as a point of contact between the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and North Africa. At the same time, it was also one of the foremost centers of Hebrew book printing and home to many Jewish philanthropists endowing yeshivot or sponsoring the publication of rabbinic scholarship. Because of the logistics of travel between Palestine or Istanbul and Europe as well as North Africa, and because of the standing of Livorno within the philanthropic network for the Holy Land, numerous rabbinic emissaries passed through the city on their way to their destinations elsewhere. Livorno in the eighteenth century therefore played host not only to sheluhim who had been destined specifically to that community, but also to many others who were in transit. For any number of reasons, many of the emissaries ended up staying for a lengthy time. First they had to clear quarantine in the port of Livorno, and when going on to North Africa they needed to wait for a ship sailing to carry them to their next stop. Sometimes their onward travel was delayed by the insecurity on sea, or violence or epidemics in North Africa. On their return many of these emissaries would find themselves in Livorno again, and again they frequently were in need of additional support for the trip back to the Holy Land: since the funds they collected were typically transferred to the care of the Pekidim in Istanbul and not handed to the emissaries directly, they often ran out of money to pay for their travel. It was therefore quite common that emissaries in transit approached the deputies for the Holy Land in Livorno and asked for help with their travel expenses and it appears that these requests were almost always approved. In the half-century from the 1740s to the 1790s, at least thirty-seven emissaries from the Holy Land passing through Livorno and going elsewhere asked for and received support for their travel, in a range from 12 to as much as 80, but in most cases between 30 and 50 pieces of gold, which were charged to the account of the holy city that the emissary represented.82 In 1803, however, the Pekidim in Istanbul wrote to Livorno and denounced what they considered to be the “abusive” practice of awarding money for travel costs to emissaries not destined to Livorno and doing so at the expense of the funds collected for the cities in the Holy Land. They insisted that henceforth such subsidies should only be granted to emissaries who had been explicitly authorized in advance by the Istanbul Officials.83

Network of Beneficence

The case of Livorno illustrates that fund-raising in support of the Jews in the Holy Land was by no means the only international philanthropic effort that major Jewish communities were involved in. Besides hosting the shadarim from the Land of Israel, Livorno also received numerous emissaries from Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean and beyond who appealed for help in the face of all kinds of calamities, from epidemics and earthquakes to the rescue of captives as the result of war. Other communities sought help by sending letters, and it appears that more often than not such requests were granted. From the 1730s to the turn of the century, emissaries visited the city from Algeria, Tripolitania, and Morocco, from Germany and Poland, from Salonika, Izmir, and Skopje. In the same ­period, letters requesting help arrived from Venice, Rome, Bratislava, Tetuan, Mogador, Gibraltar, Belgrade, Zante, and Patras.84 Livorno was also involved in the international lobbying organized in response to the threatened expulsion of the Jewish communities of Prague, Bohemia, and Moravia by empress Maria Theresia in 1744–45 (Jews left Prague in early 1745). Appeals reached Livorno from Prague, Augsburg (where Wolf Wertheimer played a central role in coordinating the activities on behalf of the affected communities), and Amsterdam, and the parnasim promised to send 500 florins in support of the Prague Jews in response to a letter from Baron Diego de Aghilar of Vienna in 1745.85 Given its geographic location, many of the appeals for help reached Livorno from North Africa, in particular Morocco, where the ­Spanish-speaking community of Tetuan seems to have served as a relay of information between the Maghreb and Livorno. In response to a request for help from Tetuan in 1750, Livorno provided rescue funds itself and collected contributions from Amsterdam, London, Turin, Modena, Mantua, Sienna, Reggio, and Florence.86 Approached from Tetuan again, in 1776, the parnasim in Livorno decided to wait until they learned how much money would be provided by Amsterdam and London and then to match those amounts.87 When a letter reached Livorno from Tetuan in 1782 asking for relief from a severe food crisis in Tetuan, Mogador, and Salè, the parnasim at first rejected the request but reconsidered their stance following the visit of an emissary on behalf of those communities in the spring of 1783.88

39

40

Network of Beneficence

There were limits to what the community was willing to take on, however. In 1772, the Jews of Massa, in Tuscany, inquired whether Livorno could provide annual support to pay for a teacher, which the local community was unable to afford. The parnasim clearly rejected the request, noting that “we cannot provide annual support for foreign communities (keilot estrageiras).”89 Regular, annual commitments, in other words, could only be made to benefit one’s own community— and those of the Holy Land. Stranger appeals were received, though: a few years earlier, the parnasim discussed a plea from the Convento della Madonna in Livorno. The convent, the letter explained, was expecting the arrival of the Superiore Generale, who was going to pass through Livorno on his way to Madrid, and in order to provide the kind of reception that was deemed appropriate for such a high-ranking representative of the Church, the convent was inquiring whether the parnasim could assist with a donation.90

The Slow Pace of Communication In their dealings with other communities in the diaspora, with those in the Land of Israel, and with their emissaries, the Pekidim in Istan­ bul faced a very basic, systemic problem: the slow pace at which information could be exchanged. Even though Istanbul as the imperial capital and as an important trading entrepôt was at the very center of various networks of communication, the operations of the ­Pekidei Kushta were still limited by what James Grehan has called the “natural and technological ‘speed limit’ on the circulation of people, goods, and ideas” that persisted throughout the eighteenth century. While communication within the Ottoman administration could work with remarkable efficiency, connecting Istanbul and Damascus in just one week, not everyone had access to these official channels of communication. What is more, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater and caravans from Damascus to Jerusalem (which belonged to the province of Damascus) needed another two weeks or so.91 According to Jacob Barnai, the trip, by ship, from the main cities of Turkey and  the Ottoman Balkans or from Italy to Palestine took between ten and twenty days, and such overseas travel—apart from the dangers posed by pirates or

Network of Beneficence

storms—was very expensive at 100 or more kuruş for an individual, not including the various taxes to be paid upon arrival.92 In a responsum published in 1769, Rabbi Samuel Salem noted that it was impossible to determine the amount of contributions to be sent to the four holy cities in Palestine according to the number of poor in each place because such information could only be exchanged at a slow pace and therefore was bound to be outdated: “Because the four cities of the Land of Israel are far away from the cities of Ashkenaz, even if they write from the cities of Ashkenaz to Istanbul and they write to the four cities about how many poor there are in each place, more than two years go by.”93 In their letters to Jerusalem, the Istanbul Officials frequently complained that they were not informed about new developments in a timely manner. In a typical example, they grumbled: We have tired of reminding you in the past that you need to let us know in Istanbul about every person who passes away [in Jerusalem] by carrier pigeon and you have not listened to our words so that when the great rabbi . . . [the name does not appear in the letter] was summoned from above [i.e., died] we received no letter from any one of you, and we heard about it from a woman who wrote [to Istanbul]. . . . It is shameful . . . that every day rumors reach individuals here and we have no knowledge and are suspected by the public that we already knew and just concealed [the news].94

Keeping track of the emissaries, who after all were constantly on the move, proved even more difficult. In December 1741, for example, the Istanbul Officials were awaiting the arrival of the Jerusalem rabbi Nisim Berakha, who was supposed to go out on a mission to the Jewish communities of the Balkans. “May God grant his arrival any moment now,” they wrote to their representative in Jerusalem, Meir Benveniste, because “the emissary from Safed will get here today or tomorrow and will go to Rumelia. It would be good if our emissary went just a step ahead of him in a time like this.”95 Anxious about having to compete over scarce funds with the holy city of Safed, they hoped Rabbi B ­ erakha could be dispatched just ahead of the shaliah from the Galilee. Yet, in March 1742 their emissary had still not arrived in Istanbul while the emissary from Safed had already set out

41

42

Network of Beneficence

on his mission.96 Two months later, the Pekidim wrote again to Benveniste in Jerusalem noting that “we heard about a year ago that Rabbi Nisim [Berakha], whom you sent as an emissary to Rumelia, arrived in Sidon to go from there to Constantinople,” but nothing had been heard from him since.97 In August 1742, Nisim Berakha finally arrived in Istanbul. We do not know what had caused the long delay, but when he reached his destination coming from the Ottoman port city of Izmir he brought news about a devastating conflagration in which most of Izmir had burned to the ground and had left some 20,000 Jews without a home.98

Tensions between Istanbul and Jerusalem Year after year, the Pekidei Kushta chastised the officials in Jerusalem for runaway spending and ever-increasing debts. While the appeals to the communities of the diaspora emphasized the burden of regular taxes and extraordinary fees imposed by the Muslim authorities, lamented the poverty of Jerusalem’s Jewish residents, and pointed to the need of ongoing financial support without which the study of Torah in the holy city would cease and the Jewish community collapse, the letters from the Officials in Istanbul tended to blame the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem itself for many of the problems of their community. In 1741, for example, the Pekidim in Istanbul admonished Meir Benveniste, their appointed official in Jerusalem, that beyond payments of debt and other expenses met by the Istanbul leadership, a review of the most recent account had shown that additional, unjustified (she-lo ke-hilkhatan) expenses of 6,000 kuruş had accumulated.99 On the other hand, when the Pekidim in Istanbul wrote a letter to the parnasim of the Jewish community in Livorno that same year in support of the emissary Abraham ben Asher, they painted a different picture. The letter explained that a good decade after the visit of their first shaliah to Europe, Moshe Israel, the “holy city of Jerusalem saw itself burdened by new debts even though it had still not liberated itself from the old ones, because of the misfortunes of the time ( por la infelicidad delos tiempos).” They called on Livorno to set an example for all other communities and make another ten-year commitment of

Network of Beneficence

funds for Jerusalem, which was suffering from “the large impositions of the new tyrannical rulers who are inevitable in these barbarian lands.” Moreover, the community in Jerusalem had found itself forced to rebuild the Talmud Torah synagogue, which required another large sum of money to obtain permission from the governor.100 For the Officials in Istanbul it was clear that the ongoing support from the Jewish communities in the diaspora had created in Jerusalem what economists call a problem of “moral hazard.” The over-reliance on donations from abroad and the collection of money by emissaries had led to a situation where “the people of Jerusalem seem to believe that the money lies ready in the treasury and therefore they do not think to balance income and expenses. Everything that appears to them and every kind of expense they simply charge to the community (kolel [pl. kolelim]) and when the time comes they send a bill of exchange (polisa) of 2,000 or 3,000 kuruş [to Istanbul].”101 One of the persistent complaints was the “mixing” of private and community funds—in other words, the practice of charging expenses that should have been the responsibility of private individuals or of individual congregations to the account of the Jerusalem kolel. Still in the 1760s, the Istanbul Officials reminded the rabbis of the holy city that it was not appropriate for the community to pay the poll tax on behalf of individuals, whether for the benefit of the poor or the Torah scholars. Most people in Jerusalem are poor, they wrote, “but nobody is poorer than the kolel itself. . . . Certainly whenever an individual is falsely accused [and needs to be ransomed] you expend money from the kolel and justify it as a life-saving matter (pikuah nefesh). But this is not right, for the kolel is in such poverty that every­ one must look to help himself with his own money, whether he is a Torah scholar (talmid hakham) or a regular person (am ha-arets).” In fact, they suggested, “If you want the Land to be inhabited [by Jews], why don’t you agree that from now on the Torah scholars (talmidei hakhamim) should no longer take ten percent of the donations from the ­emissaries?”102 Such statements were certain to inflame tensions between the leadership in Istanbul and the rabbis in Jerusalem, a topic to which I will return below. The language of the letters sent to Jerusalem gives a clear indication of the hierarchical relationship between the two sides: the center of the

43

44

Network of Beneficence

philanthropic network was, no doubt, Istanbul, and it was there that the important decisions were made. The leadership in Jerusalem, on the other hand, was to follow the instructions from Istanbul faithfully and was expected to show proper respect and deference to the Pekidim in the capital. On one occasion, the Officials in Istanbul responded to what they considered the inappropriate tone and content of a letter they had received from Meir Benveniste in Jerusalem: “We received your private letter dated 26 Tevet [1749] and saw that you were very agitated.” They complained that Benveniste had written to them “like someone who is addressing his servants,” and continued: When you tell us to our face that you are serving Jerusalem without receiving any benefit, we will respond to you in the same way, for we are also day and night serving [Jerusalem] without receiving any benefit. . . . You are sitting there and have nothing to do and you have free time to deal with public affairs, and only respond to the people in a small town. But we find ourselves in a very tiring and busy city and do not even have enough time for our own business, and we still leave our business for the sake of an impossible task (maxcando fiero), fighting with everyone to make sure that we can send a treasure to Jerusalem year after year.103

Most of the time, the Pekidei Kushta and the leadership in Jerusalem were bickering over the proper use of funds, and year after year the Officials in Istanbul complained about the persistent deficit in Jerusalem. In 1751, they wrote to Jerusalem with tangible desperation: We saw that this year the expenses rose 5,000 or 6,000 kuruş more than usual. . . . You contracted new debt so that after accounting for all the income [from taxes] in Jerusalem there still was a deficit of 12,150 kuruş. . . . At the time of the Officials . . . who came before us all that was sent from Istanbul to the holy city was 4,000 or 5,000 kuruş each year to pay the old debts, for the expenses of the city were paid through the revenue [from taxes], or perhaps 500 kuruş more or less [than this amount]. . . . But now we see such evil that it almost has no remedy. . . . New debts of more than 31,000 kuruş were accumulated. . . . It is necessary that you return to the old way, so that the revenue in Jerusalem meets the expenses each year, or 1,000 kuruş more or less.104

Network of Beneficence

The Pekidei Kushta insisted time and again that expenses had to be controlled, the budget balanced, and that the community had to make sure that all individuals, including the talmidei hakhamim and rabbis, paid their djizya and their share of community taxes. Given the constant disagreement over the finances of Jerusalem, what is it that the Istanbul Officials could do in order to assert their authority and enforce their oversight? The philanthropic network they organized depended, like networks of long-distance commerce, both on establishing trust and maintaining an authority structure. The ­Officials in Istanbul needed to be able to hold their agents—whether their emissaries or their appointed officials in Jerusalem—accountable for their actions and there had to be a credible threat that a breach of trust, or defiance of the hierarchy, would not be tolerated. Probably the strongest weapon of the Istanbul Officials was the threat to step down from their position, something that the Jerusalem community could ill afford. As their criticism of the growing expenses in 1751 continued, the Pekidei Kushta repeatedly threatened that if things did not improve they would not stay on as Officials and new Pekidim would have to be found.105 Although they succeeded in having Meir Benveniste removed from office, the problem of persistent deficit spending endured and the Pekidim in Istanbul continued to accuse the officials in Jerusalem of mismanagement and waste. In 1758, for example, they lamented that the community’s deficit had grown to 17,833 kuruş and they wondered: “How could you spend more or less 4,800 for building the synagogue Talmud Torah, knowing that without imperial authorization ( firman) one cannot build a synagogue?” Apparently the Jerusalem community had not only spent a large amount of money on a new (or rebuilt) building but had done so in violation of Ottoman law.106 The unauthorized construction or renovation of a synagogue would have exposed the community to the accusation of violating the conditions under which the authorities granted protection to their non-Muslim subjects, and it would have made the Jews vulnerable to attacks from Muslim religious leaders or provincial administrators who could use the pretext to extort money from the community. Again, the Istanbul Officials found themselves responding to persisting problems only after the fact. Shortly after their letter denouncing the deficit of almost 18,000 kuruş and the spending of 4,800 kuruş

45

46

Network of Beneficence

on the synagogue building, another letter was penned and sent to Jeru­salem, carrying only the signature of the scribe employed by the Pekidim in Istanbul, Abraham ben Giat: he informed the community in Jerusalem that “the [Istanbul] Officials have renounced their position and thus did not want to sign this letter and it was therefore sent only with my signature. . . . Nobody wants to listen to me because of the bad account that was received from [Jerusalem], with so many bad expenses, which left a deficit of about 18,000 kuruş, and thus they determined that they would not accept any more bills of exchange, neither small nor large.”107 It was clear to everyone that the welfare of the Jerusalem community depended on the supporting network created by the leadership in Istanbul, thus the threat to withdraw from their position—or, as in this case, the actual suspension of their activities—would have been the most powerful tool at the disposal of the Pekidei Kushta. Meanwhile, the role of the rabbis and rabbinic law was clearly circumscribed. The leaders in Istanbul deployed the force of halakhah strategically, but they were never willing to subject the administration of their philanthropic network or, indeed, the oversight over the Jewish communities in the Holy Land to the rabbinic elite. What is more, while the Istanbul Officials seem to have cooperated closely with the rabbinic court in the capital, their relation with the rabbis and rabbinic scholars of Jerusalem was ambiguous and often taut. Much of the tension revolved around the demand to exempt the rabbinic scholars from taxation,108 whereas the Officials in Istanbul insisted that every individual, including rabbis, was responsible for paying his own poll tax. In a letter from 1754, for example, they insisted that “the community account of Jerusalem has no obligation regarding the poll tax (haraç) . . . since this is something that is collected by the king for each individual, so that every person must pay his own poll tax as it is the practice everywhere in the Turkish kingdom.” The Pekidim added somewhat nonchalantly, lest the addressee of their complaint remain unclear, that also those “who claim that they know how to learn (con ta‘ana que saben meldar),” that is, rabbinic scholars, were responsible for their own poll tax.109 When a certain donor, Elijah h ­ a-Levi, created an endowment for the exclusive benefit of the talmidei hakhamim in Jerusalem, and not the community at large, the Istanbul Officials

Network of Beneficence

quipped: “It has apparently eluded the sight of this notable that if there is no kolel in Jerusalem there will not be any talmidei h ­ akhamim studying in the yeshiva either.” They enclosed a decision from the rabbinic court in Istanbul, which determined that the return on the endowment was to benefit the community as a whole, not just the rabbinic scholars studying in the yeshiva.110 In the summer of 1754, the confrontation between the Officials in Istanbul and the rabbis of Jerusalem escalated in the wake of a decision of the latter that a committee of seven rabbinic scholars—called shiv‘a tovei ha-‘ir—should oversee the financial affairs of the community. The Pekidei Kushta protested vigorously, denouncing the decision—about which, they claimed, they had not even been informed previously—to both the rabbis and the appointed officials in Jerusalem. They argued: If revenue and expenses in Jerusalem are to be conducted according to Torah law (kefi din ha-Torah), then one could never do anything, for if we go to the Pasha or the Mullah [i.e., the Ottoman governor or the qadi], they won’t hear about Torah law (din Torah). Here in our city [i.e., in Istanbul] there is no lack of people who go and ­complain about us to the Chief Rabbi (rav ha-kolel) about the money we request from them . . . and what he answers them is that “in matters of the ­Pekidim I do not get involved,” and he does not look to din Torah.111

In a parallel letter addressed to the rabbis of Jerusalem, the Istanbul Officials declared in no uncertain terms: “If you think that what you did can be for the benefit of Jerusalem we tell you that we think it is the opposite. You are free to do as you wish but you need to know that from today we will resign from our office and you can rule as you see fit, and if you need officials in Istanbul appoint whomever you wish and send people from Jerusalem here so they can take control.”112 No doubt the immediate issue at hand concerned the exemption of rabbinic scholars from certain taxes. But I would suggest that the implications of the missive from the Istanbul Pekidim were broader: rather than enhancing relations of trust, their letter implied rabbinic oversight on the basis of halakhah was counterproductive and, indeed, was bound to undermine the very foundations upon which they had built their philanthropic network.

47

48

Network of Beneficence

When it came to the financial administration of community affairs and the dealings with the Ottoman authorities, the Istanbul ­Officials thus asserted their authority over the rabbinic scholars. They claimed that the chief rabbi in Istanbul did, in fact, accept their exclusive prerogative in these matters, and rebuked their representatives in Jerusalem for allowing the rabbis to interfere in the community’s administration. Beyond the ongoing conflict about taxes it was the desire to maintain centralized control over the philanthropic network in the imperial capital that led to the uncompromising stance of the Istanbul Officials in the matter of rabbinic oversight of the community’s administration. The conflict shows once again that the ultimate recourse at the disposal of the Istanbul Officials in ensuring their control was the threat to withdraw from their role entirely. The power imbalance between the leadership in Istanbul and the rabbinate in Jeru­ salem was thus expressed in stark terms: the lay leaders in the capital city could permit themselves to defy the authority of the rabbis, but the rabbis could not afford to lose the support of the Pekidei Kushta and the services they provided. Despite the seemingly strong position of the rabbinic leadership in the Ottoman Jewish communities of the eighteenth century and notwithstanding the rhetoric affirming the spiritual primacy of the Holy Land, the actual power relations between secular and rabbinic leaders and between the symbolic center—Jerusalem—and the political center—Istanbul—were always tilted toward the lay leadership in the imperial capital.113

A Crisis of Trust In the event, the Officials in Istanbul soon came to regret their unwillingness to involve the rabbis in the administration of the community’s finances in Jerusalem and the trust they had placed in the lay leadership. The trouble began when one of the lay officials appointed by the Istanbul Pekidim to oversee the community’s affairs in Jerusalem, Abraham Alhadef, passed away in 1754. The Pekidim had trusted Alhadef, and as recently as in early 1753 they had assured him of their support. In a letter from 26 Tevet that year they informed Alhadef that they had appointed Moshe de Boton and Abraham Finzi

Network of Beneficence

to join him in the administration of the community, but hastened to add that they had done so “out of friendship for you so that you have someone to help you, but be assured that it is you that we recognize . . . as the leader and chief officer (por grande y patron de todo).”114 After Alhadef’s death, however, irregularities were discovered in the Jerusalem community’s treasury, and one wonders whether the appointment of de Boton and Finzi meant that the Istanbul Officials had privately held their own suspicions of Alhadef all along. They now discovered that Alhadef “had mixed the funds of the community with his own money”—in other words, he had embezzled funds for his own business and the community had lost money. The leaders in Istanbul chastised the remaining officials in Jerusalem, pointing out that they shouldered a collective responsibility and intimated that they knew, or certainly should have known, that something had been amiss.115 Things got worse, however. Just over a year after Alhadef’s demise, a review of the annual accounting transmitted by the Jerusalem officials to Istanbul revealed “a major mistake” (ta‘ut muy grande), a discrepancy in the account for the year 5515 (1754–55) of 9,669:8 kuruş: whereas there should have been 10,812:12 kuruş in the treasury, the balance of the account book for the year only showed 1,148:4. In their letter to Jerusalem, the Pekidei Kushta blamed this on a mistake by the scribe and complained that the lay officials in Jerusalem evidently were “not vigilant about what the scribe is doing.” The Pekidim in Istanbul also noted that the payment of the poll tax (haraç) for the year 5515 had been listed already in the preceding year’s budget and was listed now again; moreover, the sum of 1,455 kuruş for the poll tax appeared to them “unusually high.” (Apparently their earlier admonition that the kolel should not be involved in paying the haraç at all had also gone unheeded.) They requested an explanation of the discrepancies and warned that “if the rabbis [in Jerusalem] hear about this mistake it will be very bad and they will have an excuse to say [about the lay officials’ administration] whatever they want.”116 While under the impression that a mistake had been made but that it could be corrected by carrying the balance over to the following year, the Pekidei Kushta clearly were worried not only about incompetence of the administrators in Jerusalem but also about fraud. After all, the Alhadef debacle was still fresh on their minds. Thus, in their letter

49

50

Network of Beneficence

regarding the mistake in the account for 5515, they also complained that the account book and accompanying letter lacked the signature of one of the officials in Jerusalem, Moshe de Boton, and they insisted that all four of their appointed officials—de Boton, Rahamim ha-­Kohen, ­Joseph Samanon, and Dr. Isaac Velasco—needed to sign all documents. While they were at it, they also expressed their opposition to a plan by the Jerusalem officials to have a seal made that they would use to authenticate their documents: the seal “could fall into the wrong hands, a servant could steal it or they could make a counterfeit seal, but with the proper signatures there are no such doubts.”117 One of the problems during this crisis of confidence was the slow pace of communication. When the Istanbul Officials wrote to Jerusalem in January 1756, they still had not received another letter from Jerusalem sent a month earlier, to which they eventually responded in March 1756. In that response, they expressed their dismay that the officials in Jerusalem had “taken again a loan of almost 2,000 kuruş and we do not understand this, given that according to the account of the year 5515 almost 11,000 kuruş still remained in the treasury,” and they voiced their surprise that the officials in Jerusalem apparently had yet to detect the mistake in their account book.118 In the ensuing correspondence, the relation of trust between Jeru­ salem and Istanbul quickly unraveled as the officials in Jerusalem traded accusations against one another; it now seemed that the discrepancy of almost 10,000 kuruş had been more than just a scribal error. In August 1756, the Pekidei Kushta wrote to the officials in Jeru­salem that they had received separate letters from Joseph Samanon and Isaac Velasco exchanging serious accusations against one another. Subsequently these two officials had apparently reconciled and sent a joint letter to Istanbul in which they suggested that their previous accusations had been false and were based on “lies and the gossip of the people,” and that in reality everything had been the fault of a third official, Shaykh Rahamim ha-Kohen. Rahamim ha-Kohen himself also wrote to Istanbul, defending himself against the accusations. “And we here are no prophets to know what the truth is,” the Istanbul Officials noted in desperation. In fact, they pointed out, they were still waiting for a satisfactory explanation of the huge discrepancy found in the account for the preceding year, and they complained that Samanon’s excuse was

Network of Beneficence

ridiculous: “He says that he signed the account book on the eve of the Sabbath bein ha-shemashot and did not know anything about the account, which was prepared by Shaykh [Rahamim] with the scribe at home. . . . And how can he sign the account book of a budget of more than 40,000 kuruş of revenue and expenses without knowing anything, especially if he is the one who is in charge of the treasury?”119 The Pekidei Kushta were increasingly desperate about what was going on in Jerusalem. “We do not find a solution because we are far away and do not know who is to blame,” they noted, acknowledging the fundamental problem of overseeing the finances of Jerusalem from afar. Aware of the severity of the problem, they added that people were still reeling from the Alhadef affair and they were afraid that if there was another problem with embezzlement, trust could not be repaired easily. In fact, as they pointed out in a separate letter to ­Rahamim haKohen, “this can cause a great deal of damage if word gets out to the cities of Turkey and Europe.”120 They therefore resolved to change course and involve the rabbis of Jerusalem in investigating the accounts and finding out what was going on and who was responsible. The Istanbul Officials had only recently admonished the rabbis not to interfere in the financial affairs of the community, of course, but it had become clear to them that the legal expertise and prestige of the leading rabbis in Jerusalem would be needed to restore confidence in the community’s administration. In a letter drafted to the rabbis of Jeru­salem (in Hebrew)—a letter which, according to a note that appears at the top of the page was never sent—the Istanbul Officials formally apologized: “In the past we wrote to you not to involve yourselves in the administration of the city, and this seemed, God forbid, like an insult to your honor, God forbid. . . . And now we return to you . . . and ask forgiveness from you for the past.”121 The letter that was sent, in Ladino and a few days later, omitted this apology, but the Officials in Istanbul were able to appease the rabbis in Jerusalem in another way. A disagreement had arisen between the lay officials in Jerusalem and the rabbis when the latter had decided to remove the ritual slaughterers appointed by the community’s leaders. Now, the Istanbul Pekidim reported to the rabbis that they had informed the lay leaders “not to interfere and let you decide and appoint those who appear worthy to you, since this issue is one of isur ve-heter [i.e., laws regard-

51

52

Network of Beneficence

ing forbidden foods and related matters].”122 In a parallel missive to the lay officials in Jerusalem, they wrote that “even if . . . it seems to you that the [slaughterers] you appointed are apt (kesherim), it is sufficient that the rabbis say they are not good for not keeping them.”123 It was certainly no coincidence that the Officials in Istanbul informed the rabbis of their support in the matter of the kosher slaughterers in the same letter in which they told them about the conflict among the officials in Jerusalem and the glaring discrepancy in their accounts. They requested that Rabbis Meyuhas Bekhor Shemuel, Abraham ben Asher, and Moshe Bula review the account books and determine what had happened to what was now referred to, in a letter from Rabbi Abraham Meyuhas, head of the rabbinic court in Istanbul, as “the missing money from the year 5515”: an indication that, rather than the result of a simple mistake in the account books, the nearly 10,000 kuruş was in fact unaccounted for.124 All kinds of other irregularities had come to light too, and the Officials in Istanbul were not amused: a wall at the site of Rachel’s grave, on the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, had been demolished despite the Istanbul Officials’ objection; in their opinion, the expense of 500 kuruş had been a waste of money. Dr. Velasco, meanwhile, was facing accusations that he had charged the community treasury for the cost of medical treatment for people who had since died. The Pekidim in Istanbul also warned about a certain individual “who serves in the community treasury and whose salary is negligible,” but who has nonetheless married his sons and provided a generous dower, “and it is clear that the money was stolen from the treasury, for this man has no other job.”125 In the end, the review of the account vindicated Rahamim ha-­Kohen (though it is not clear what had happened to the missing funds) and he continued to serve in Jerusalem until 1767. This was not the last controversy he was involved in, though, and a major crisis erupted in the first half of the 1760s and split the community into factions. Shaykh Rahamim ha-Kohen—who, according to Benayahu, originally hailed from Iraq— maintained a close relationship with the Muslim authorities, clearly one reason the Istanbul Officials had appointed him to his position in the first place. Throughout his tenure, however, he encountered opposition from many of the rabbinic scholars, though he continued to enjoy the support of Jerusalem’s chief rabbi, Meyuhas Bekhor Shemuel. Rahamim

Network of Beneficence

ha-Kohen did not hesitate to involve the Ottoman authorities to quell opposition. A rabbinic decree in 1762 signed, among others, by Rabbi Meyuhas, authorized the lay officials to investigate anyone who defied their authority and, even on the account of a single witness—including a single female witness—they had the right to have the instigator arrested, even if he was a prominent talmid hakham, and hand him over to the Muslim authorities. These harsh measures did not eliminate the opposition, and Rahamim ha-­Kohen was twice removed from his position—but reinstated each time. In 1764, Jerusalem’s rabbinic leadership (shiv‘a tovei ha-‘ir) decided to dispatch a high-powered delegation of leading rabbis, including Haim Joseph David Azulai, about whom we are going to read in later chapters, to Istanbul in order to defend their decision to remove Rahamim ha-Kohen. In the end, the mission failed and most of the rabbis involved did not even make it all the way to Istanbul, and the much-­maligned official was once more reinstated by the leaders in the capital.126 (He was removed from his office for good, along with the other lay officials in Jerusalem, by the Pekidei Kushta in 1767.)127

Funding for the Holy Land: Pious Endowments Given the persistent budget woes of the Jewish communities in the Holy Land and their dependence on support from abroad, mechanisms needed to be devised that would ensure the collection, investment, and transfer of funds. Central to this were pious endowments (hekdeshot or hekdeshim, the plural of hekdesh) to benefit the needy or the Torah scholars in one of the holy cities. In some cases, wealthy philanthropists in the diaspora chose to endow a yeshiva in the Holy Land. In many other cases, individuals who decided to spend their old age in the Land of Israel negotiated an agreement that allowed them to create an endowment in one of the major communities of the diaspora—and in some cases in Palestine itself—and live off the returns on their investment. In the eighteenth century, the Istanbul Officials typically acted as intermediaries between individual donors who established such endowments and their beneficiaries in the Land of Israel. In their correspondence with Jerusalem, the Istanbul Officials frequently insisted that the proper way of managing endowed funds was

53

54

Network of Beneficence

to entrust them to the general community treasury in the imperial capital. Pointing out the ups and downs of the market and other risks that could endanger the capital endowed for charitable purposes, on one occasion they wrote to Rabbi Solomon Algazi in Jerusalem: according to a ruling by the rabbis in Istanbul, “any endowment that a Jew creates for the benefit of the community, or for the yeshivot in the Land of Israel or abroad, or for the Torah scholars or for the poor, must be put in a safe place where nobody can touch it,” and therefore, in Istanbul, the endowment money was entrusted to the community, which invested it and managed to receive a good return.128 Endowments established relations of patronage between the donors, members of the wealthy elite in the large communities of the diaspora, and their beneficiaries in the Holy Land. While ostensibly under­lining the preeminence and symbolic centrality of the Land of Israel, the hekdeshot established an unequal relationship between the benefactor abroad and those who depended on his generosity in Palestine. Without implying that their intentions were insincere or selfish, it would seem that the philanthropists established their hekdeshot primarily in order to advance their own prestige and standing within their home community and, in the case of major donations, in the Jewish world more widely. This attitude was made explicit in the words of a major donor from Amsterdam in the eighteenth century, Jacob Pereyra, who endowed the Beit Ya‘akov yeshiva in Jerusalem and noted in his preface to the endowment’s stipulations: “Our sages opined that those who dedicate part of the capital to sustain those who study the divine law enjoy a greater reward than the scholars themselves.” Referring to the famous verse from Deuteronomy 33:18, he added: “the sacred schools of Issachar could not exist without the business and the income of Zebulun.”129 It was one thing for a rabbinic emissary to present such an argument in order to encourage donations; it was quite another for the donor himself to emphasize that it was only thanks to his generosity that Torah study was possible at all and that, according to Jewish tradition, the merit of sponsorship was even greater than the act of study itself. From the rabbinic responsa literature we know of hekdeshot established in support of a wide range of charitable purposes, whether to feed the poor of one’s city, to support a synagogue or the study

Network of Beneficence

of Torah, or to provide funds for the redemption of captives. Since endowments also played an important role in channeling support from donors in the diaspora to the Jews of the Holy Land, conflicts and doubts that arose about their administration and implementation often came to involve broader questions about the proper relationship between the Jews of the diaspora and those of the Land of Israel. As we learn from the responsa, several general principles were applied to the administration of pious endowments throughout the early modern period. First, the intent of the donor was to be considered and the purpose of the endowment was to be honored—though what that meant was of course open to interpretation. David ibn Zimra (d. 1574), for example, explained in a responsum that “one always respects the intent of the donor.” If the endowment was to support an individual heading a yeshiva, “if [his] heir takes the place of his father and he also leads a yeshiva, then he takes the place of his [father, i.e., benefits from the endowment]. And if the heir does not take his place [i.e., does not follow in his footsteps and does not lead a yeshiva], we consider that the endowment was only made for the sake of the mitsvah and thus it should be given to the grand yeshiva in the city [and not the donor’s descendent], for this was the intention of the donor.”130 Second, the endowment was perpetual. In one instance, Rabbi Moshe Mitrani (d. 1580) discussed the case of an individual who had endowed a certain amount of money, stipulating that two-thirds of the interest produced should be used to support the poor of the Land of Israel and one-third used at the discretion of the endowment’s administrator. Several years later, however, the granddaughter of the donor had fallen on hard times, moved to the Land of Israel, and the endowment administrator had decided to take the two-thirds set aside for the poor in the Holy Land and use the money to support her. Mitrani rejected this new arrangement: “The poor of the Land of Israel have owned (heheziku) for several years the two-thirds of the interest, how can you come after several years and take it away from their ownership (me-hazakatam)?”131 According to a principle in the Shulhan ‘Arukh (Hoshen Mishpat 149:31), the Talmudic rule that one acquired ­hazakah (“presumptive ownership”) after three years of undisputed possession also applied in the case of a hekdesh, and thus “the poor” of the Land of Israel continued to be entitled to benefit from the endowment.132

55

56

Network of Beneficence

Even the donor himself could not simply change his mind during his lifetime: to cite a much later example, which incidentally indicates the longevity of this kind of endowment, a certain individual who immigrated to the Land of Israel in the mid-nineteenth century had endowed 6,000 kuruş in Salonika for the benefit of ten Torah scholars whom he would choose upon his arrival in Jerusalem. Once he got there, however, he apparently had a change of heart and wished to cancel his endowments—Haim Abraham Gagin, who was chief rabbi of Jerusalem in the 1840s, ruled that this was not possible.133 All this should not be taken to mean that there was no leeway in the administration of pious endowments. In reality, the third principle that arises from the discussion about hekdeshot in the responsa literature is indeed the remarkable flexibility in their use. While the endowments were considered perpetual and the intent of the donor—insofar as it was documented—had to be taken into account, the rabbis often allowed a change in purpose or a diversion to other beneficiaries, as long as the new arrangement could be considered the equivalent of the original one, or as serving a higher purpose than the original endowment. What is interesting in the context of our present discussion is that for many rabbinic decisors in the early modern period, it was by no means clear that endowment money was always better spent in the Land of Israel than abroad. On several occasions they permitted funds produced by a pious endowment, which had originally been established to benefit an institution in the Holy Land, to be redirected to an equivalent purpose elsewhere. Samuel de Medina, the prominent rabbinic scholar in sixteenth-century Salonika (d. 1589), wrote regarding an endowment that had been established to support a Talmud Torah society in Hebron: the society had ceased to exist and now the administrators of the funds wanted to transfer them to another beneficiary, a Talmud Torah society in Salonika. They were concerned, however, that it might not be permissible to change “from the Talmud Torah in Hebron, which is a holy place, to a Talmud Torah in Salonika, because, with all the greatness and holiness of its Talmud Torah society, in the end studying Torah in the Land of Israel has [more] merit than studying Torah abroad.” De Medina—who could not be suspected of questioning the sanctity of the Land of Israel and the imperative of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land134—ruled that such a change was

Network of Beneficence

permissible, especially since the Talmud Torah of Salonika taught children, which was more important than the studies of established Torah scholars in the Holy Land.135 A similar decision was rendered by Rabbi Haim Benveniste (d. 1673), who was asked about the endowment made by a certain A. Adrabi of Tire (near Izmir) in support of the study of Torah in Safed. In this case, it was the concern of the administrators of the endowment about the precipitous decline of Torah study in Tire itself that led them to inquire whether it was admissible to use the proceeds from the endowment to sponsor Torah learning in Tire rather than in the Holy Land. The case thus pitted the interest—according to the principle cited by Moshe Mitrani, referred to above, the acquired right—of the Torah scholars of the holy city of Safed against a community in the ­diaspora struggling to maintain Torah learning in its midst. Benveniste not only allowed this change, but in his legal reasoning went out of his way to suggest that the donor would have agreed with the decision as well. Had he anticipated that Torah study in Tire would fall on such hard times one day, he would surely have donated the money to be disbursed in Tire, “lest the city where he grew up and where he is buried be destroyed, ‘and that the land may not become a waste’ [Gen 47:19].” The language chosen by Benveniste is suggestive: there is the “home” of the donor, defined as the place where he grew up and where he was buried, as opposed to Safed, part of the collective Jewish homeland, which remained a place presumably farther from the heart of the benefactor than his Anatolian hometown. Benveniste added another reason for his decision: whereas the Torah scholars of Tire had no other source of help, Safed already was receiving help “from the four corners of the earth.”136 Hekdeshot established a relation of patronage that outlived the original donors: their administration continued to be overseen by members of the wealthy elite in the communities of the diaspora who were to ensure that the original stipulations of the endowment were met but who also could, within the limits set by rabbinic law, change the purpose and beneficiaries of the endowment if circumstances required it. Hekdeshot were thus instrumental in establishing an unequal relationship between the diaspora and the Holy Land favoring the former, all ideological declarations to the contrary ­notwithstanding.

57

58

Network of Beneficence

What is more, endowments also ensured a clear hierarchy within Jewish society in the Holy Land, as they determined who was more or less deserving of support and how funds were to be distributed among various potential beneficiaries. Within the class of Torah scholars too the endowments created a clearly felt hierarchy that depended in part on the reputation of individual scholars and their standing within the local Jewish society, whether based on learning, pedigree, or political connections; ultimately though, it was the endorsement by the lay leaders abroad, who could appoint one scholar or another as the head of a yeshiva, or allot a greater or lesser annual stipend to different groups of scholars, that helped shape and maintain the hierarchy. The rabbis, not surprisingly, tried to hold such interference from lay leaders at bay. Rabbi Haim Ya‘akov, for example, a native of Izmir who lived in Safed and was an emissary to North Africa in the 1710s and to Europe in the 1730s, responded to the proposal of an endowment administrator who had suggested adjusting the allocations for individual scholars and “reducing the amount for one and increasing it for another . . . so that in this way the study increases.” Such a “competitive” approach to Torah study, providing a financial incentive for learning, and leaving the evaluation to the lay administrators of the endowment, was clearly not to be tolerated and therefore was rejected by Haim Ya‘akov.137 From the drawn-out correspondence regarding an endowment for the Jews of Hebron between Lazarus Uffenheim of Innsbruck and the parnasim of the Livorno community in the 1790s, we know that Jewish benefactors abroad at times circumvented the Pekidim in ­Istanbul. At least toward the end of the eighteenth century, it seems that some philanthropists in Europe had come to distrust the services of the I­ stanbul Officials and their emissaries. In a series of letters to Livorno, Uffenheim explained that an anonymous donor—whose name he refused to reveal even when prompted by Livorno—had endowed 6,000 florins for the Jewish community in Hebron. Half of the interest generated by the endowment was to go to the Sephardim, the other half to the Ashkenazim of the holy city. In the event a poor relative of the donor was ever to go and live in Hebron, a portion of the income generated by the endowment was to be disbursed to the donor’s relative, with the remainder to be distributed as before. Since the donor wished to

Network of Beneficence

remain anonymous, any relative bringing such a claim in the future would identify himself by a secret code consisting of the Hebrew letters beit-peh-kuf. The parnasim in Livorno were not satisfied with this arrangement, considering that anyone could obtain this code and instead wanted a formal obligation (shtar hov) written up, which, in turn, was rejected by Uffenheim because the donor did not want to reveal his name.138 Uffenheim further stipulated that the funds be invested “in the community (kehilah kedoshah) in Livorno or the community in Istanbul, exclusively in the hands of the kahal [i.e., the community administration], but not in the hands of the Officials for the Land of ­Israel and not in the hands of the emissaries.”139 The following summer, he reiterated that the endowed funds were not to be entrusted “either to the Pekidim or to the emissaries, because,” he added ominously, “I have heard what I have heard and I have seen what I have seen.”140 A close parallel existed between the Jewish practice of establishing endowments and the Islamic institution of waqf (pl. awqāf ). It is clear that Ottoman Muslim practices regarding these pious endowments had an influence on Jewish society, and indeed, within the Ottoman Empire, Jews (like other minorities) often made use of awqāf according to Islamic law and sometimes registered their endowments in the sharia courts.141 Others established hekdeshot according to Jewish law, and despite the similarities with the Islamic institution of waqf (and the influence it had on Jewish practice), hekdeshot were of course known elsewhere in the Jewish world, outside the realm of Islam, as well. Not unlike the waqf sustaining the public soup kitchen for the poor created by Hürrem Sultan in the 1550s in Jerusalem, the endowments made by wealthy Jewish patrons for their coreligionists in Palestine allowed the donors to leave their imprint on the social life of the city. If Ottoman imperial endowments projected Ottoman hegemony in the provinces, the Jewish example was more complicated, to be sure: ostensibly, they were made in recognition of the special status of the Holy Land while, at the same time, enhancing the status of the donor. There were other parallels between the Islamic and Jewish endowments: in the sixteenth century, Sheyhülislam Ebu’s-Su‘ud Efendi (d. 1574) had allowed cash endowments, which “came to provide an important source for credit in Ottoman society.” This was true for Jewish society as well, as the community of Istanbul (and that of Jerusalem) began to operate like

59

60

Network of Beneficence

financial institutions, especially in the eighteenth century, administering endowed capital and using it to make interest-bearing loans, thus providing much needed credit to the local economy.142

The Transfer of Funds In a letter from 1744, the Istanbul Officials lamented that it was difficult to transfer money to Jerusalem “because of the wars of the gentiles” and explained that they had sent 1,500 kuruş to be distributed among individuals in Palestine by ship to Sidon to a certain Aharon Asseo, a merchant, and “although we still have not had notice from the said friend (amigo), Aharon Asseo, about the 1,500 kuruş that we entrusted to him, we know him as a man who desires righteousness (ish hafetz hesed ) and he has certainly forwarded the funds already, so today we have sent an order for another 1,500 kuruş [to him].”143 Thus, despite the lack of confirmation that the money had in fact reached its recipients, the Istanbul Officials explicitly invoked the personal reputation of Aharon Asseo as “a friend,” a trustworthy individual, so much so that they entrusted him once again with an equally large sum. When employing the services of individuals who were not so clearly embedded in the network, the risk turned out to be greater. Involving a relatively small sum—30 kuruş—the Officials in Jerusalem relied on a certain Joseph Pinhas, who had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to accompany his mother who was moving to live in the holy city, to deliver the money on his return to someone in Istanbul. According to a letter sent by the Istanbul Officials to Jerusalem, however, it had been impossible to extract the money from him: “He says that on his way back he was captured [by pirates and used the money to pay his ransom], but this is a lie, for in Livorno they rescued him and his companions with money from the community, and they did not pay anything themselves. You should speak with the mother . . . so that she may write to her son that he must pay.”144 It is clear that warfare and corsairs added to the risk of using the sea route between Istanbul and the Holy Land. Having been captured by pirates—and subsequently liberated through the intercession of the Jewish community in Livorno—Joseph Pinhas apparently speculated that he could keep the money and claim that he had used it

Network of Beneficence

to buy his freedom. Here, the exchange of information with the Jewish community in Livorno allowed the Istanbul Officials to uncover the attempted ruse. It is noteworthy too that using Joseph Pinhas’ services to send money from Jerusalem to Istanbul was probably an ad hoc, improvised measure and that his was not a regular involvement in the philanthropic network: the lacking “network embeddedness” is what made the trust placed in him a much riskier bet, and it was arguably what tempted Pinhas to seize the opportunity for breaching this trust in the first place. As these isolated examples illustrate, one of the most formidable challenges faced by the Istanbul Officials was to establish reliable channels that would allow the transfer of funds collected from distant places everywhere in the Jewish world to Istanbul and from there on to Palestine. Philanthropic, commercial, and rabbinic networks overlapped in the organization of the fund-raising network. While rabbinic emissaries were employed to make the case for Erets Israel and to encourage donations, the actual transmission of funds was often entrusted to merchants, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. All of these dealings required a great deal of trust. Shared religion (adherence to rabbinic Judaism), ethnicity (being part of a far-flung Sephardic diaspora, for example), or even kinship ties were not sufficient in and of themselves to ensure the trustworthiness of the various actors. In the end, the Pekidim in Istanbul had to rely on the reputation of the individuals acting on their behalf and had to take the calculated risk that is always involved when establishing relations of trust. While they did have recourse to the rabbinic court in Istanbul, there was little the Pekidim, or the rabbinic authorities, could do to enforce their authority beyond the confines of the Ottoman capital. Rabbinic networks therefore served more to mediate communication, rather than exercise any kind of direct, coercive influence on the functioning of the philanthropic operations. The overlap of the networks of shelihut and commerce, as well as the risk involved in relying on the services of faraway agents, emerge clearly in a controversy involving the Officials in Istanbul and a businessman, Ovadia Parache, in Basra in the 1740s. In a letter from January 1742 to the leader of Yemenite Jewry, the court Jew Shalom Al-‘Iraqi of San‘a, the Pekidei Kushta reminded the commu-

61

62

Network of Beneficence

nity in southern Arabia of a commitment made to the special emissary, Amram Divan, who had visited Yemen in 1730, to make a regular contribution in support of Jerusalem. They noted that since Divan’s visit they had received some of those funds on only one occasion, and that several of their letters to ‘Iraqi had gone unanswered: “We don’t know how to interpret this silence, for it is true that the place [Yemen] is far away and it is common that letters get lost on the way.” They now wrote again to request delivery of the promised funds and urged the Yemenites to act before they had to send yet another emissary to the distant country: We send emissaries by sea, to the great kingdom of the Turks and to all the northern kingdoms, which are the cities of Europe. And since we saw that for the emissaries sent to Yemen there are many dangers along that way and great expenses and a great burden for the public, therefore we have waited for the moment and we are sending a written appeal to admonish you so that you meet your obligation . . . and all you owe to date as a contribution.

Before they had a chance to dispatch the letter, however, news reached the Pekidim that Shalom ‘Iraqi had already sent the funds to Istanbul, via Basra. “Between the writing of this letter and signing it,” they wrote in a note on the margins of the letter to San‘a, “we received a few words from Rabbi [Laniado] in Aleppo and he says that you have sent a certain amount for the three holy cities to the notable Ovadia Parache in Basra, and the donations have not reached us yet.”145 As it turned out, however, a problem had arisen. The Istanbul Officials explained in a letter to Rabbi Laniado in December 1741 that ­Ovadia Parache was withholding the funds he had received from Yemen and was refusing to send them on because of a disagreement between him and the Pekidei Kushta regarding some precious stones he had sent with a previous emissary, Nisim Agosi. Apparently he had entrusted the shaliah with selling the stones in Istanbul and the two were going to share the profit, but Agosi had died in Mosul in 1738 before completing his mission.146 Somehow the stones had been delivered to Istanbul and were now in the possession of Agosi’s heirs. Two of the stones—rubies—had proved impossible to sell, at least for a price Parache would have deemed appropriate.

Network of Beneficence

According to the explanation provided in the letter to Laniado, it was impossible to sell the stones for more than 300 kuruş; an appraiser for the Istanbul rabbinic court, however, had said they could be sold for as much as 325, which the Istanbul Officials considered overly optimistic. Since Parache was holding the Yemenite funds for the Holy Land hostage in Basra, the Istanbul Officials had little choice but to seek a compromise. Thus they laid out a ruling that they had obtained from the rabbinic court in Istanbul and which gave Parache a choice: He should either agree to the sale of the rubies in Istanbul for 300 kuruş—he would take his share of the sale from the Yemenite funds as well as an additional 12½ kuruş, to compensate for the difference between the selling price and the highest appraisal—or, if he did not like this option, they would send the stones back to Basra and he would sell them himself. In the latter case he would forward all the funds he had received from Yemen to Istanbul, in addition to the 150 plus 12½ kuruş that were the share of the late emissary for the precious stones. They requested his response within thirty days.147 In their letter to Parache, which also spelled out the compromise, the ­Pekidim further explained that the heirs of Nisim Agosi had not wanted to give up the stones, claiming that Parache had given his share as a personal present to the shaliah. It seems that the Officials in Istanbul had been unable to prove the matter one way or another, and they had felt obliged to pay 150 kuruş to the late emissary’s family for them to turn over the stones. They now appealed to Parache to show generosity toward Jerusalem and reimburse them for that expense, so that the matter should not result in a loss for the holy city.148 After the Istanbul Officials had written to Parache in December 1741 they waited for a response. They wrote again in October 1742 because they had not heard anything. Their dilemma illustrates well one of the weak points in the philanthropic network: to secure the funds for the Holy Land collected by the Jewish communities in Yemen, they could on occasion forego dispatching a special emissary, and given the significant travel expenses and dangers of such a long journey it is not difficult to see why they would do so. For the transfer of the funds, however, they had to rely on individuals over whom they had no direct control, in this case a wealthy merchant in Basra whose services they undoubtedly had used before and who had gone into business

63

64

Network of Beneficence

with one of the earlier emissaries. But when this individual decided to hold up the funds to resolve a legal conflict of his own, their options were limited: they could ask the rabbinic court in Istanbul to intervene, but they had to offer a compromise if they wanted to ensure that the Yemen­ite contributions would arrive in the capital. They could mobilize the rabbinic network and appeal for the mediation of the leading rabbi in Aleppo, Laniado, with Aleppo evidently serving as a crossroads to establish contact with Basra. They could also resort to evoking empathy for the fate of Jerusalem and its Jews and appeal to Parache to be generous to the poor of the Holy Land. But in the end, they depended on the voluntary cooperation of the merchant whose services they relied on. At last, as we learn from a letter written to Laniado in February 1743, the issue seems to have been resolved, since the Pekidim in Istanbul gave him instructions to entrust the funds received from Parache to the notable Shelomo Uziel of Istanbul, who was currently in town and who would make sure that the money reached its destination.149

Overlapping Networks If trust between the Officials in Istanbul, the emissaries, the community leadership in Jerusalem, and Jewish notables in the diaspora could not be taken for granted simply because of a shared ethnic and religious identity, what was the role of non-Jews in the philanthropic network? As one might expect, the regular constituents of the network were all recruited from among the elites of Jewish society and included the lay community leaders who served as Officials in Istanbul, Jerusalem, and the communities of the diaspora, as well as rabbis and rabbinic emissaries. But the network did not operate in a vacuum and, in fact, references to both Muslims and Christians are fairly frequent  in the letters preserved in the pinkas of the Istanbul Officials. At times, the Pekidim in Istanbul had recourse to the services of Muslims, often government officials, for the transfer of funds from Istanbul to Palestine. On one occasion, for example, they noted that they had sent a total of 1,188 kuruş to Jerusalem—733 kuruş by way of the Jewish businessman Aharon Asseo of Sidon and 455 kuruş

Network of Beneficence

via an official they refer to as the vezir ağası, who was on his way to Palestine by ship.150 The Pekidei Kushta also made sure to appoint individuals to oversee the affairs of the community in Jerusalem who they hoped would be in a position of establishing good relations with the local Ottoman authorities: when they named Isaac de Velasco as one of the Officials in Jerusalem, they expected him to serve as a liaison “to the mullah [i.e., the qadi], the mütesellim [the city’s governor], and the shaykhs . . . because, since he is a doctor, people listen to his words.”151 As we saw earlier, the Istanbul Officials themselves had assumed their task precisely because of their contacts in the Ottoman imperial administration, with the paymaster of the Janissary corps perhaps the most prominent example. Nonetheless, it appears from references throughout the letters by the Pekidim in Istanbul that relations with Muslim officials were fraught with tension and a priori distrust, and involving the authorities was not generally seen as desirable. One letter drew a negative comparison between dealing with Ottoman authorities and the presumed practice in European states: “It is necessary,” the Pekidim explained to their counterparts in Jerusalem, “to pay money first and then they will give the firman that you request, for as you know the practice of the Turks is different from the Europeans, who are true to their word ( gente de palabra).”152 What is implied here is not only the lack of trust in dealing with Ottoman officials, as opposed to Europeans who were believed to keep their word, but also the hardly veiled acknowledgment that every action of the state required the payment of bribes, generally referred to as “gifts” in the letters. In one letter, the Officials in Istanbul observed that Muslim creditors “find false witnesses very easily, for they simply serve as witnesses for one another, [according to the principle] ‘I do this for you today and you for me tomorrow.’”153 Other references illustrate the existence of overlapping networks yet persistent distrust as well. Consider the following example: When you are sending a letter of recommendation for some Turk [Muslim] over there it is not necessary for you to say in the letter that it was given under pressure, for they bring the letter open and read it right away and see that it was given under obligation, and so they will turn against you. We already assume that it was given under pressure and not out of goodwill, without you saying so.154

65

66

Network of Beneficence

Unfortunately, the letter does not provide any context, but the passage illustrates that it was not unheard of for a Muslim to carry a letter of introduction from the Jewish community leaders in Jerusalem. To cite another example, we know of a letter sent by the community in Jerusalem to a member of the Jewish elite in Istanbul in the seventeenth century, attesting to the justice and fairness of an individual who hoped to be appointed mufti in Jerusalem and apparently assumed that the Jews of Istanbul could use their influence to support this appointment.155 Yet, on the other hand, the instructions sent to the Officials in Jerusalem also make it patently clear that one should not read too much into the occasional evidence of cross-cultural cooperation when it comes, for example, to providing individuals with letters of introduction. As Francesca Trivellato has pointed out in her study of Livornese-­ Sephardic trading networks in the eighteenth century, the cosmopolitan language of business correspondence in cross-cultural trading networks of the time could easily coexist with enduring cultural prejudice and should not be taken as an indication of genuine cosmopolitan tolerance.156 Cases of cooperation between Jews and Muslims, or Jewish and Ottoman authorities, also cannot necessarily be seen as a sign of inter-communal trust; instead, they appear as instances of pragmatism and necessity that were pursued despite an underlying distrust. At the same time, of course, there were rogue individuals who had no qualms about betraying the trust of their own coreligionists as well as that of their business partners from other religious communities. This was the case of a certain Yako (Jacob) son of Angel, serving as a broker for a French trader in Istanbul, who submitted forged receipts to his employer and embezzled 16,000 kuruş that he was supposed to pay to the Jewish community.157 Frequent was the recourse to Christian, usually European, merchants for the transfer of money. On one occasion, the Istanbul Officials instructed an emissary of theirs who was about to visit the Syrian city of Aleppo to make sure that he send all funds collected to Istanbul through the services of “the English merchants who live in that place” by bills of exchange.158 In the letters from the Istanbul Officials, the a priori suspicions that marked their interactions with Ottoman officials were absent when they referred to the services of European merchants. That is not to say, of course, that the relation between Ottoman Jews

Network of Beneficence

and Christian European merchants was not fraught with tension, but it indicates that there was an expectation that commitments would be honored and that one could trust the other as a merchant whose business depended on a reputation of being creditworthy. When the Istanbul Officials wanted to transfer funds—money collected by emissaries, the proceeds from endowments, donations from other communities— they usually availed themselves of bills of exchange (called polisa in the Hebrew and Ladino documents), which circulated between the various cities of the Ottoman Empire as well as abroad. Using bills of exchange, typically drawn on European merchants operating in the cities of the Ottoman Empire, was considered safer than cash transfers, which the Pekidim sought to avoid. “The truth is that we tried hard to send [the collections] through bills of exchange and were not successful,” they noted on one occasion, “but sending the money with the ship [of pilgrims] we do not dare.”159 As we can tell by the ubiquitous references in the letters from the Istanbul Officials to Jerusalem, the communities in the Holy Land also frequently sent polisas to Istanbul to pay for their own expenses and trusted that the Pekidim in the capital would cover the costs from the funds collected there. Unfortunately, the letters do not provide details and simply note—or rather complain—that yet another batch of bills of exchange had been received from Jerusalem. The text of a bill of exchange that does appear in the pinkas (though it does not involve Jerusalem directly) exemplifies how these polisas were employed. In 1749, the Pekidim in Istanbul sent two bills of exchange to Izmir: “Please pay at eleven days of sight to Mr. Jean Pierre Cassas & Cie. the sum of 500 kuruş . . . in return for the same sum which we have received here from Se. Magy and Cie.,” and another bill, over 1,536¾ kuruş, also in favor of Cassas & Cie. They dispatched the two bills to Haim Avshalom and Aharon Bekhor Elija ha-Levi and to the community of Izmir, respectively, and requested that they have these bills endorsed by a certain Nunes, who would surely pay promptly (una hora más antes). The reason for this measure was that the Istanbul Officials had needed the funds as the annual ship transporting pilgrims to Jerusalem was about to leave and they were going to send the money that way (something they had tried to avoid in the past).160 One can imagine, then, a similar situation when the Jerusalem community was

67

68

Network of Beneficence

in immediate need of funds. They might obtain the money from, for example, merchant A in Jerusalem who owed money to merchant B in Istanbul. They would then send a bill of exchange to Istanbul, requesting payment of the amount they had received from merchant A to merchant B. Since bills of exchange were transferable by endorsement, the scenario could be significantly more complex, of course. Though convenient, bills of exchange were not without their difficulties. As we have already seen, at times the Pekidim in Istanbul had trouble sending large sums of money through bills of exchange to Jeru­salem, presumably because being a minor provincial city, Jerusalem was not home to many European merchants. Another problem was fluctuating exchange rates between different currencies. According to a case reported in a responsum by Rabbi Nisim Haim Moshe Mizrahi, an emissary for the city of Safed was sending the funds he collected during his mission on to a community official, “Simon,” in Sidon. He did so by means of bills of exchange from a Jewish merchant in Europe to be paid by another individual, “Levi,” in Sidon. The bills of exchange were issued in reales, “and the value of the real goes up and down over time,” and Levi noted that the bills were losing value. He therefore requested Simon’s permission to exchange them, presumably for Ottoman currency, and to invest the money with a Christian merchant in Sidon. Unfortunately, things did not turn out as expected and the Christian went bankrupt.161 The greatest risk was, of course, that a bill of exchange might not be honored by the bill’s drawee. The Officials in Istanbul had little choice but to accept the polisas that Jerusalem was drawing on them if they did not want to undermine the creditworthiness of the Jewish community in the Holy Land, though they threatened to do so on more than one occasion as a last resort. In the second edition of his famous handbook of commerce, Le parfait négociant, published in 1679, the French merchant and author Jacques Savary explained that goods bought in Constantinople are not sufficient to balance those which are brought there from France, Italy, England and Holland; that is why traders from these four nations or their commissioners settled in Smyrna, Aleppo and other échelles of the Levant draw bills

Network of Beneficence

of exchange on Istanbul or have remittances made to them to the equivalent of the sums they need to buy the merchandise for exports to their country; and on this trade of drafts and remittances there is up to 6 or 7 percent of profit to be made. Bills drawn on Istanbul are easily found in these échelles, because customs taxfarmers always need bills of exchange to transfer their money to Istanbul, and they would rather pay an interest than to send their money in cash, due to the great risks involved.162

The link established through bills of exchange between the provincial periphery and the imperial center—and thus between Jerusalem and Istanbul—illustrates how the rise of the philanthropic network of the Istanbul Pekidim in the eighteenth century was situated within its broader Ottoman context. The circulation of bills of exchange tied to commerce and tax farming provided a mechanism that allowed the Istanbul Pekidim to develop their own network, which could not have functioned in isolation. As Karen Barkey has observed, “two macrohistorical developments, commercialization and tax farming,” led to an important realignment of the Ottoman body politic. Once lifelong tax farms became officially available in the 1690s, “the capital and the provinces became increasingly more networked, interweaving fiscal relations both within themselves and across center-regional lines.” At the same time, especially from the so-called Tulip Era of the early eighteenth century, trade with Europe grew exponentially and tied Otto­man lands into European-dominated markets. As a result, Barkey ­argues, “the central and local structures of the empire began to take a different shape, connecting nodes and further decreasing peripheral segmentation. . . . Social actors of different origins, locations, and interests connected through political and economic networks of association, and explored the means by which they could become empowered vis-à-vis the state.”163 It was within this context that the Pekidim in Istanbul first rose to prominence and used their position of relative power to reorganize the relation between the Jewish communities in Palestine and in the Jewish diaspora, centralizing control over a wideranging philanthropic network under their auspices in the imperial capital, Istanbul.

69

Two  Agents of Philanthropy Emissaries from the Holy Land and the Communities of the Diaspora

Emissaries from the Holy Land were a common presence throughout the Jewish world in the eighteenth century. They had been dispatched by the various yeshivot in the Land of Israel before and individuals had undertaken fund-raising missions on their own throughout the early modern period, but by the mid-seventeenth century shelihut had become both more common and more central for the survival of the impoverished communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Serving as shadarim were generally rabbis living in one of the holy cities though, at times, rabbinic scholars residing in the diaspora were also chosen for a fund-raising mission. The emissaries represented the entire spectrum of Torah scholars in the Holy Land, from prestigious members of the rabbinic court to young men who had yet to establish a reputation.1 Throughout the eighteenth century, the Officials in Istanbul oversaw the network of shelihut, though they delegated the decision of who should be appointed as emissary and the negotiation of the precise terms of the mission to the rabbinic leadership in the Holy Land. In 1741, for example, the Pekidim in Istanbul wrote to the  rabbis of Jerusalem regarding the appointment of one emissary to the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and two emissaries who would go to Western Europe: “Choose three Torah scholars who are prominent, worthy and respectable for this effort, and if they decline to go abroad or if you do not find anyone let us know and we will request someone from Safed or Hebron or some other place.” They further instructed the rabbis to reach an agreement with the emissaries of their choice regarding the conditions of the mission and to provide them with the appropriate letters of introduction. Upon their arrival in Istanbul, where they would go first, “the conditions [of their mission]

71

72

Agents of Philanthropy

will be recorded and signed . . . according to the terms that you agree to in the holy city, and two general letters (kelaliyot) [to the communities in the diaspora] will be written and signed here . . . and both will be printed (ya‘alu ‘al mizbah ha-defus).”2 The Istanbul Officials thus retained the right to review and authorize all documentation, from the agreement between the rabbis of Jerusalem and the shaliah to the letters that were to be presented to potential donors abroad. Istanbul being a major center of Hebrew printing (and no Hebrew printing press operating in the Land of Israel until the mid-nineteenth century), the official letter (ha-igeret ha-kolelet) would also be printed so it could be more widely distributed in support of the emissary’s mission. Going out on a mission meant that the emissary would be away from his family for an extended time, typically three or four years. Given the hardship of travel in the eighteenth century, many scholars were reluctant to pursue an appointment as shaliah. In one case, a rabbinic scholar who had already accepted to serve as an emissary and had negotiated the terms of his mission with the community changed his mind and decided not to go when he received the offer of a regular stipend by a benefactor in the diaspora.3 Still, in the 1820s, one author warned those who were considering settling in the Holy Land that, “according to what we see, it is difficult for a person to make a living in the Land of Israel and most are forced to leave when they seize a shelihut to travel to cities abroad for ten years or more, and they live dreadful lives, and their wives even more so.”4 On one occasion, the Istanbul Officials warned the leadership in Jerusalem not to recruit yet another shaliah from a yeshiva that had already provided an emissary in the recent past: “Regarding the sheluhim that you think to send to Persia and to the outer Maghreb, we advise you that . . . you should not think of sending someone from the señores francos, for the head of the yeshiva is Abraham ben Asher and he already went out on a ­shelihut . . . and if we take more people from his yeshiva, they will surely . . . move the yeshiva to another place.”5 At the same time, however, there was a strong material incentive to become an emissary, apart from the sense of obligation that one might have felt toward the community or the simple need to accept a shelihut in the absence of any other source of income: the emissaries typically kept a third of the funds they collected, which could amount to a

Agents of Philanthropy

considerable sum.6 Thus, while some tried to avoid an appointment as emissary, others considered it desirable. In 1750, when the Officials in Istanbul decided to send two emissaries to Europe, they had initially settled on Rabbi Mordecai Rubio, but, as they explained in a letter to Jerusalem, “some people were upset with us” because they thought “that Rabbi Abraham Israel should go on this mission, because of their friendship with his late father, so we determined that both should go together in order to do right by both.”7 In a letter from 1766, the Istanbul Officials provided a detailed account of the funds raised by three emissaries who had recently completed their mission, Jacob Ashkenazi, Bekhor Navon, and a Rabbi Nisim, who had died before he was able to return to Jerusalem.8 The account provides some rare and valuable information about the kind of financial compensation an emissary could expect, as well as the considerable cost involved in sending sheluhim abroad. From a sum of over 11,143 kuruş collected by the three emissaries, only about 5,226 remained for the Jerusalem community:9 Total [funds collected, by all three emissaries] Minus travel expenses  Minus what they took in the holy city [Jerusalem] for travel expenses and sustenance for their family  Minus the 1/3 portion of the emissaries  Minus the 10 percent for the talmidei hakhamim 

11,143:18 989:112 10,153:26 1,442:86 8,710:60 2,903:60 5,807.00 580:84 5,226:36

At the end of the letter, a more detailed breakdown of the 1,442:88 kuruş for travel expenses and cost of sustaining their families in Jerusalem was provided for each of the three emissaries: For R. Jacob for his [travel] expenses Food for his household, 1 Av 1763 to 1 Av 1766 For his servant, [dates] as above 

157:99 308 154 619:99

73

74

Agents of Philanthropy

For Bekhor Navon for his travel expenses Food for his household, [dates] as above 

145:54 308 453:54

For R. Nisim for his travel expenses Food for his household, 1 Av 1763 to Elul 1765 

145:54 224 369:54

These figures demonstrate that the fund-raising missions conducted under the auspices of the Pekidei Kushta could involve significant amounts of money, but they also vindicate critics in the diaspora who contended that dispatching emissaries was wasteful. In the case documented here, almost half of the sizeable contributions collected had to be used to defer the cost of the fund-raising missions involving three different emissaries. What these number also help to explain is why the Istanbul Officials were successful in recruiting sometimes prominent rabbis in the first place: each of these sheluhim collected a commission of over 967 kuruş, or about 323 kuruş for each of the three years of the mission. From elsewhere in the pinkas of the Istanbul Officials we know that the head of a yeshiva in Jerusalem would receive a very substantial salary of around 500 kuruş a year, as much as a Jewish broker working for a European merchant in Istanbul could expect to earn;10 other members of a yeshiva received more modest payments in the range of 50 to 80 kuruş a year.11 In another letter, the Istanbul Officials explained that “the most wretched of the poor” get by on 50 kuruş a year,12 but more common were references to people who lived on 2  kuruş per week (or around 100 kuruş a year). An income of over 300 kuruş and all expenses paid to maintain the emissary’s family for the duration of his shelihut was therefore a serious incentive. An emissary who had proven to be competent and trustworthy could not only look forward to collecting a sizeable commission for his troubles, he could also expect the leaders in Istanbul to look out for him and to lend him their support in the future. When the emissary Nisim Berakha completed his shelihut in 1745, the Pekidim in Istanbul were satisfied with his performance and advised the community leaders in Jerusalem that the emissary, who had complained about the meager income he received from the Pereira Yeshiva in Jerusalem, was to receive a new (and probably more lucrative) appointment in the

Agents of Philanthropy

Neve Shalom yeshiva where he would take the place of Rabbi Haim ha-­Kohen.13 On the other hand, if they were not content with an emissary, the Istanbul Officials could withhold future support. It was therefore perhaps no coincidence that Nisim Berakha was to take the place of Haim ha-Kohen, who had served as an emissary to Egypt around the same time as Rabbi Berakha and who had proven a disappointment. In their letters to Jerusalem, the Istanbul Officials repeatedly expressed their dismay at the results of Haim ha-Kohen’s mission. “All our hope is that perhaps God will have mercy and what was destroyed in the past will be rebuilt with the help of the emissaries. But when we saw how much this emissary consumed of the funds collected on his mission, so that barely a quarter of it arrived, we lost all our strength.” The emissary had kept a large portion of the money for himself, had used another chunk to pay off an old debt of 200 kuruş to a certain Y. Gomes-Pato, and the Pekidim considered the funds he had gathered to be meager. The Istanbul Officials therefore instructed their representatives in Jerusalem to convene a meeting with the rabbis, scholars, and community leaders and explain that “if they allow this to happen with a small fund-raising mission, tomorrow other emissaries are going to do the same when it comes to a great fund-raising mission, and thus all the gates of hope will be closed.”14 Haim ha-Kohen, they felt, had been more interested in raising money for himself than for the Jerusalem community, and the Pekidim conveyed their disapproval: “Money was borrowed on interest in the hope that the debts [of Jerusalem] could be paid with the funds collected by the emissaries, but we have yet to see the benefit because the [rabbis] who were worthy withdrew and in the end you sent the ones you did (mandaron los que mandaron),” implying that they considered individuals such as Haim ha-Kohen to have been a poor choice as emissaries all along.15

A Question of Trust The emissaries were expected to represent the best interests of the Jews in the Holy Land and of the leaders in Istanbul who appointed them. Gone for months, often for years, and traveling over great distances crossing multiple geographic and political boundaries, they

75

76

Agents of Philanthropy

had to be trusted to make the right decisions, to be diligent in their work, to be effective advocates for their mission—and, of course, they had to be trusted with handling often significant amounts of money. As Francesca Trivellato has argued in her recent work on Livorno and Sephardic trading networks in the eighteenth century, it is not sufficient to assume that trading diasporas identified with attributes such as shared ethnicity or religion were automatically tied by bonds of mutual trust and solidarity. “Historians often presume rather than demonstrate,” she noted, “that religion, ethnicity, and kinship provided the glue for cooperation in long-distance trade.” Yet rather than invoking “trust as a self-evident and self-explanatory concept,”16 it is necessary to explore how relations of trust and the reputation of trustworthiness were constructed and maintained in the first place. This insight is also valid for the philanthropic network in support of the Land of Israel in the eighteenth century, and in particular for the web of fund-raising missions by rabbinic emissaries dispatched to Jewish communities throughout the world. As representatives of the Jewish communities in the Holy Land and acting on behalf of the Pekidim in Istanbul, the emissaries played a role that was not altogether different from that of an agent in a merchant network acting as a representative of a commercial firm or as a partner in a long-distance business arrangement. In the same way that relations of trust between business partners,17 between merchants and their agents, could not simply be taken for granted, we should not assume that the Istanbul Officials, the leadership in Jerusalem, the rabbinic emissaries, and the Jewish communities in the diaspora were able to maintain relations of trust simply because they were all Jews, “naturally” tied by bonds of solidarity, or because they felt a collective commitment to the welfare of the communities in the Holy Land. Trust needed to be built and reaffirmed and, as between merchants in a far-flung trading diaspora, it was the constant exchange of information as well as the personal reputation of individual emissaries that ensured the functioning of the network.18 If trustworthiness was not an intrinsic attribute of the emissary, it was controlled and maintained through what the sociologist Vincent Buskens has called “network embeddedness”:19 the shaliah as an agent of the ­Pekidei Kushta was trusted to the degree that he was part of the network and its control mechanisms, under the central authority

Agents of Philanthropy

of  the Istanbul Officials and subject to the exchange of information about the performance and reputation of the individual participants in the philanthropic network. In other words, the philanthropic network to support Erets Israel in the eighteenth century was not built on intrinsic, already established bonds of solidarity and trust among Jews qua Jews, but rather was the cumulative effect of acts of bestowing trust on individual emissaries and on the overall network organized by the Istanbul Officials. Elaborate measures were taken to certify the trustworthiness of individuals appointed as emissaries and to ensure that they were accountable to the leadership in Istanbul. For instance, the Pekidim equipped their emissaries with extensive documentation to facilitate trust between the various parties involved. One of the most important of these documents was the general letter (ha-igeret ha-kolelet) to the communities in the diaspora that the shaliah was to visit, as well as a usually abbreviated version of this letter addressed to individual notables in the diaspora. The igeret kolelet was written in elaborate script, usually on parchment, always in Hebrew—though oftentimes translations were prepared and printed as well—and was signed by the chief rabbi of the city that sent the emissary, his rabbinic court (beit din), as well as other prominent rabbis, the heads of ­yeshivot, and former emissaries. In addition, the emissaries would also carry a letter signed by the Istanbul Pekidim, and sometimes the ­Istanbul Officials would send their endorsement in advance of the emissary’s visit directly to the relevant communities in the diaspora. The general letter explained the reasons for the shelihut and described in detail the situation of the community in Palestine that was requesting support, introduced the emissary and his mission, and spelled out the request made of the communities in the diaspora.20 In 1727, the Istanbul Officials dispatched the first group of sheluhim under their auspices, with Israel Meir ben Joseph Mizrahi and Joseph Taragan going to Rumelia (starting out their mission in Izmir and going to the Ottoman Balkans) and Moshe Israel to Europe. The following year, the Pekidim sent Judah ben Amram Divan, who had previously served as a shaliah to Persia and had lived in Aleppo upon his return from that mission, to Anatolia, Iraq, and Yemen; in 1729, they also dispatched an emissary to Egypt to promote the institution of a regular para payment

77

78

Agents of Philanthropy

there.21 The igeret kolelet for Moshe Israel’s mission to Europe is a typical example of this kind of document:22 it began with a flowery introduction, addressing “the assembled men of kindness, the kings known as kings of kindness, merciful and providing kindness, the treasurers, officials, leaders, and principals and deputies for the Land of Israel, and all those who work for the public and for the sake of heaven . . . in all the cities of Europe and Italy.”23 The generous use of biblical language throughout the letter, in particular in its opening paragraphs, and the effusive praise of the addressees was more than a stylistic convention, of course, and served to establish a common point of reference, a shared cultural foundation, and a relation of respect and honor upon which the ensuing request for support for the communities in the Holy Land could be built. The letter regarding Moshe Israel’s mission went on to describe in great detail the growing debts of the community, which had gotten out of hand ever since the immigration of Judah Hasid and his followers in 1700, even though “for almost fifteen years” a strenuous effort had been made “and a great and mighty sum of money” had been forthcoming “from all the lands, from the cities of Turkey and the ­cities of Europe, from the east where the sun rises to [the west] where [the sun] sets.” Nonetheless, “until today we have been sending [to Jerusalem] every year several thousand [kuruş], from the community and from individuals, but the gap would still not close.”24 The authors of the letter then described the attempts to renegotiate the debt and the agreement that had been reached and confirmed by the imperial government, and they explained how the communities of Istanbul and Izmir had taken it upon themselves to institute the new para payment, with every eligible householder contributing one para each week. Thus, while Istanbul previously provided 300 kuruş to support Jerusalem every year it was now giving 3,300 kuruş, Izmir had increased its contributions from 100 to 825 kuruş, and special emissaries had been dispatched throughout the empire.25 The elaborate description of the situation in Jerusalem and the ­efforts undertaken by the major Ottoman communities was followed by an introduction of the shaliah, Moshe Israel, and an appeal to the communities of Europe not to lag behind the heroic effort of their Ottoman counterparts and to increase their own contribution. The

Agents of Philanthropy

plea was endowed with more urgency by identifying the help for Jeru­ salem as an act of pidyon shevuyim, or redemption of captives, and a dire warning followed about the ills and destruction that threatened the holy city in the absence of help. “Have you not heard about the catastrophe that befell Israel and the congregation of the Ashkenazim [in Jerusalem], whose court went up in flames?”26 Only the generosity of the communities in the diaspora would ensure that such a disaster would not be repeated. The letter closed by asking the Jews of Europe to establish a permanent collection for the holy city and to forward all funds, through bills of exchange, to Istanbul, “for [Jerusalem] is not far from here.”27 The “general letters” to the communities thus combined information about the situation in the Holy Land, designed to create empathy and a sense of urgency, with practical matters related to the smooth functioning of the philanthropic network: providing a reference for the emissary and assuring the recipients of the letter of his trustworthiness, as well as giving specific instructions regarding the collection and transfer of the donations. Another important document carried by the emissaries was the pinkas, or account book, in which the communities visited by the emissary noted their contributions and pledges. Often an emissary would carry the pinkas of his predecessor, following the same trajectory, and imploring the communities to renew, and increase, their previous commitments.28 Noting the contribution by the community, as well as by individual notables, established a record that facilitated bonds of trust between the donors, the emissary, the Pekidim in Istanbul, and the recipients of the donations in the Land of Israel: the communities were assured that their donations would be properly accounted for; the ­Pekidim in Istanbul kept track of the revenue from each shelihut, knew about outstanding pledges, and could confirm that their emissaries did not embezzle any of the contributions; and as for the emissary himself, whose compensation was a percentage of the funds collected, the pinkas allowed him to claim his reward upon his return. What is more, carefully naming all the donors in the emissary’s pinkas, rather than providing anonymous donations or simply recording a lump sum for each city, made sure that individual philanthropists, no less than the entire community, could enhance their reputation and prestige as benefactors who helped maintain the Jewish communities in the ancient homeland.

79

80

Agents of Philanthropy

For historians, pinkasim provide a glimpse into the social structure of individual communities, recording the names of the most prominent and affluent individuals and families. They also give a good sense of the mechanisms of fund-raising, revealing the connections between smaller communities and a regional center. A good illustration is the pinkas of Jonah Moshe Navon and his cousin Jonah Sa‘adia Navon, who went to Morocco after the upheavals the Jewish community in Jerusalem suffered in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1799. While the two emissaries were in Gibraltar in February 1802, to cite just one example, the scribe of the Gibraltar community made a series of notes in their pinkas: the first record specified the donation collected in the four local synagogues as well as the individual donations forthcoming from Joseph Taurel, Jacob ibn Hamid, Judah Toledano, and Solomon Benoliel.29 The next entry specified the amount of the special collection made in Gibraltar every year during Purim for the Land of Israel. Though the money was usually to be divided among the different cities in the Holy Land, the community decided to award the entire amount to the two emissaries from Jerusalem, given the dire situation that the city was going through and which was described in dramatic detail in the igeret kolelet presented by the shadarim.30 A third entry in the pinkas recorded donations that had been received from Tetuan, which had forwarded the funds to Gibraltar, and a fourth entry was added when, while the emissaries were still in town, a donation arrived from Mahon.31 The records in the pinkas of the Navon cousins illustrate well the various sources of funding tapped by the emissaries: regular donations instituted by the community which accumulated between the visits of sheluhim; donations and pledges made by the community and by wealthy individuals in response to the appeal made by the emissaries during their mission; and funds collected in regional centers from other communities which chose to transfer their donations through the trusted services of a regional commercial hub.32 The Jewish communities themselves recorded the pledges made to visiting emissaries as well, of course. A ledger kept by the “triple” community in Altona/Hamburg/Wandsbek, for example, recorded the pledges made by its constituent congregations to the emissary Abraham Conque, for the benefit of the Jews in Hebron, in the late sev-

Agents of Philanthropy

enteenth century. In Altona, funds would be raised “from house to house” on the eve of each new moon, the eve of Yom Kippur, and on Purim for a period of five consecutive years; Hamburg was going to contribute 5 Reichsthaler each year for three years; and Wandsbek promised 10 marks. A list of no less than sixty-six individual donors and their pledges followed. Most promised to pay a fixed sum over a three-year period, others for as little as two, and still others for as much as ten consecutive years (the last was the case with a donation from the only woman who appeared on the list).33

The Emissary Comes to Town As we saw in Chapter One, Livorno was one of the most important destinations for emissaries from the Holy Land. The visit to Livorno by Solomon Hassan of Safed in June 1784 can be seen as a typical case of how a major community in the Western European diaspora might deal with the request by a shaliah from Palestine. On June 1, 1784, the parnasim sent out a note to convene the se[nhores] do governo (the community board) for the following Sunday, June 6, at 10 a.m. to discuss Hassan’s mission. When no quorum was present that day, as happened quite frequently, the governo was reconvened for June 8 to consider the case of the emissary along with a number of other issues, including several requests for providing charity to the poor and a petition from one Reuben Jesurun Lopes who asked for help to enable his sick wife to go to the thermal springs in Pisa.34 Regarding the mission of Solomon Hassan, at first his various documents were read to the twenty-three members of the governo present at the meeting. For that purpose, the community’s scribe typically prepared Portuguese translations of the Hebrew letters. Sometimes the emissary carried a version of important documents in the vernacular as well, and the Pekidim in Istanbul sent letters in Judeo-Spanish (in Latin characters) when they needed to address the Livorno lay leaders directly. Following the reading of the letters, the emissary himself was heard and expounded on the troubled situation of the Safed community in more detail (com mais precisidade). The parnasim then called a vote on whether the request should be considered at all, which usually, if the scribe could authenticate the

81

82

Agents of Philanthropy

credentials and signatures, was approved, in this case with a vote of twenty-two to one. The parnasim then proceeded to propose that the community, nosso Publico, provide 200 pieces (pezze da otto reali, or “pieces of eight”), as well as another 200 pieces from the regular public nedavah, or fundraiser, held for the benefit of Jerusalem, Safed, and Hebron on the second day of Passover. The emissary himself would receive 50 pieces for his travel expenses. They also noted that only nine years had passed since the visit of the previous emissary from Safed, Mas‘ud Bonan in 1775, whereas a ten-year interval was usually required between two sheluhim from the same place (more on this rule below). Since eleven years had passed between the last emissary from Safed, Haim Moda‘i, and the visit of Bonan, however, they recommended that Hassan’s mission be considered legitimate, something that apparently did not raise opposition (but may explain the single no-vote regarding the admissibility of Hassan’s request). The 200 pieces from the community would be charged the Caixa de Sebuim, or rescue fund for the captives, and given to the Livorno deputies of the Holy Land—­always two officials served in that capacity—who would then proceed to transfer the entire amount on to the Deputados Jerais de Terra Santa ­residentes em Constantina, as the Istanbul Officials were referred to in the Livornese sources. In the discussion that followed, David de Medina moved to increase the amount provided by the community to 400 pieces whereas Jacob Bonfil and Gabriel Pereira de Leon argued that no less than 600 pieces should be provided since the same amount had been awarded to an emissary from Hebron (Abraham Israel Zvi, also in 1784), even though it was a much smaller community. In the end, the first and last proposals were rejected (each by a vote of 6 to 17), and the governo approved de Medina’s suggestion to provide the emissary with 400 pieces from the community, in addition to the 200 pieces from the nedavah and 50 pieces for travel expenses, by a vote of twenty to three.35 One of the most important conditions for a successful mission was the verification of an emissary’s credentials. In Livorno this seems to have been a routine matter as the scribe of the community and the local rabbis, who were entrusted to confirm the authenticity of the documents presented by the shaliah, were familiar with the signatures of the

Agents of Philanthropy

individuals involved in the Holy Land and in Istanbul.36 The matter was more complicated when individuals visited Livorno who sought assistance for communities outside the Holy Land and who were thus not part of the established network. In that case, the personal connections—mostly business relations—of individual Jews in Livorno proved crucial. When an emissary from Tripoli arrived in 1749 and presented letters signed by the rabbis of Algiers and Tunis, the parnasim decided to accept them on the testimony of “some individuals of [our] holy congregation” who “recognized the signatures.”37 In 1750, Moshe Haim ha-Kohen, a merchant from Macedonia, arrived in Livorno and explained that he had suffered shipwreck on the Black Sea, had lost his possessions, and women and children had been rescued from drowning by “the Turks” only to be taken captive. He was now making the rounds to ask for help to pay for their liberation. Fortunately for him, in Livorno there were merchants who had once lived “in Salonika and the Levant” and knew Moshe Haim ha-Kohen and his family and testified on his behalf.38 Verifying the credentials of Ashkenazi emissaries from Eastern Europe could also prove complicated. In 1771, two emissaries from Poland, Reuben Judah Lip and Yair Levi, arrived in Livorno with a letter from the Jewish community in Brody, dated October 1765, requesting help after an epidemic that had claimed many lives in Podolia, Ukraine, and Volhynia. A note at the end of the letter (which was in Hebrew) explained: “Since the text of this letter and the signatures were all written in Ashkenazi script we had all of it transcribed into Rashi script, so that you can read it more easily.”39 Apparently there was no problem in this case. Twenty-four years later, however, another emissary, Israel Pollacco from Poland, provoked the suspicion of the scribe of the community in Livorno when the latter noted a strange uniformity of all the signatures in a document carried by the emissary, and his doubts became even greater when he noticed that, on the other hand, the signatures of some of the same individuals looked quite different in a second letter presented by the emissary. Pollacco explained that the signatures had been simplified so that the Italian rabbis could read them, but the parnasim in Livorno had their doubts. The initial suspicion was sufficient to raise a whole series of other questions, so that the emissary was asked to appear repeatedly in front of the parnasim to

83

84

Agents of Philanthropy

clear up contradictions of his supposed mission (we do not know how the case was resolved in the end).40 Sephardic emissaries from the Holy Land visiting Ashkenazi communities in Germany likewise encountered problems when their hosts found it difficult to verify their documents, sometimes blaming the difference in Sephardic and Ashkenazi Hebrew handwriting. When Haim Joseph David Azulai visited communities in southern Germany in 1754, he ran into this problem on several occasions, even though, as he claimed in his travelogue, he was carrying “almost three hundred” documents.41 Once, when his trustworthiness was questioned yet again, he took all the documentation that he was carrying with him and challenged the community leaders in the city of Bamberg: Is the view of your eyes plastered? All these documents, in Hebrew, Spanish, and Italian! And your eyes see all the signatures from Hebron and Istanbul and the rabbis of Italy, and the signature of the ambassador of the king of France, and the signature of the head of the bishops in Jerusalem: is there anybody who could forge all this in different handwritings and languages?42

In Fürth, a community elder examined Azulai’s credentials and concluded that they appeared to be in order, but he added cautiously that this might only be the case “because the Ashkenazim are not experts in the handwriting of the Sephardim.”43 When Azulai hoped that in a large community like Frankfurt on the Main someone would surely recognize the signatures from Italy or those from Istanbul, he was disappointed again. The parnasim of the community informed him that they were certainly inclined to trust him but that they were unable to verify his credentials and needed to first contact Baron Diego de Aghilar in Vienna—who acted, it appears, as an intermediary between the Ashkenazi communities of Northern Europe and the Sephardic communities of the East—to inquire about the shaliah and his mission. Eventually, a package with mail for Azulai arrived from Verona, including a recommendation from the rabbinic court of the Ashkenazi community in that city, signed not only by the rabbis but also by “Jewish and gentile merchants and notables, each in their own language” who were “known among the gentile merchants of Frankfurt” as well. This time, his hosts were swayed and Azulai

Agents of Philanthropy

reported with satisfaction that “they accorded me great favor and kindness and honor in Frankfurt,” where he stayed on for a total of three months.44

Trouble with the Emissary: The Case of David Ashkenazi In 1737, Rabbi David Ashkenazi left as an emissary for Jerusalem to Persia.45 By 1740, he was on his way back when he passed through Baghdad where he received the funds collected there as well as those from Kurdistan. From Baghdad he sent a letter to Istanbul requesting that a letter of recommendation be forwarded to the Jewish communities in Aleppo and Damascus, which he intended to visit before returning to Jerusalem. In their response, the Istanbul Officials complained to their emissary that he had failed to clarify in his correspondence how much money he had actually collected in Persia, what commitments the Baghdad community had made for future contributions, and how much money he had already dispatched to Istanbul. In fact, they added, no money had been received yet, even though the emissary had begun his mission three years earlier. Despite their grievance, the Istanbul Officials confirmed that they would send the requested letter to Aleppo. The leaders in Istanbul were clearly not pleased with their emissary. By not corresponding with them on a regular basis and by failing to convey crucial information he was undermining the trust upon which the philanthropic network was predicated. (In fact, according to a letter from March 1742 they had still not received any of the money Ashkenazi had collected.)46 Nonetheless, the Officials gave Rabbi Ashkenazi the benefit of the doubt and sent the requested letter in support of his mission to Rabbi Laniado, their contact in Aleppo.47 By May 1742, David Ashkenazi was in Aleppo and the Officials in Istanbul had finally received the funds and the account book of Rabbi Ashkenazi’s shelihut. Their disappointment was palpable in their letter to their representatives in Jerusalem: Regarding the issue of the shaliah R. David Ashkenazi who is now in the city of Aleppo, having raised everything that was owed from the great city of Baghdad, and he has also raised the contributions from Kurdistan: We thought he would collect a substantial sum to ­alleviate

85

86

Agents of Philanthropy

some of the debts that have emerged again in Istanbul, and in the end all he sent us was 1,800 kuruş. He sent his pinkas with his account of income and expenses and since we [do not] know the conditions that you agreed on with him we could not understand the account properly; he also still has to collect the allocations and contributions from Aleppo and Damascus and their environs. . . . When he arrives in peace in the holy city, review with him the account accurately and send us a copy to Istanbul.48

After five years on the road, collecting funds from Persia and Kurdistan as well as Baghdad, one of the major urban Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, 1,800 kuruş was clearly far less than what the Pekidim had hoped for. (Around the same time, Nisim Berakha had collected almost 2,800 kuruş in Rumelia.)49 Not only did the final result fall short of their expectations, the Officials in Istanbul also faced the problem of not being informed on a regular basis by their emissary about the progress of his mission and apparently were even unaware of the precise arrangements that had been made regarding Ashkenazi’s compensation or expenses by the officials in Jerusalem. A series of letters from February 1743 demonstrates that the Pekidei Kushta had been, if anything, too trusting when they gave their emissary the benefit of the doubt. In a detailed account they sent to their appointee in Jerusalem, Meir Benveniste, we learn that David Ashkenazi had been caught defrauding them: Regarding the issue of the shaliah R. David Ashkenazi: I reviewed the accounting and what he did. . . . Worst is that the officials in Baghdad sent a shaliah to Kurdistan who traveled throughout Kurdistan and collected 386 kuruş there. And the said R. David took from that shaliah 72 kuruş for his own use, and the remainder the officials forwarded to us, and they paid 10 kuruş to the other shaliah according to the conditions [of his mission]. It turns out that R. David committed fraud in two ways: first, he included the money collected by the other shaliah in his own account and he was paid his own commission [on that inflated basis]. Second, he concealed the 72 kuruş that he took from the [other emissary for his private use]. You will receive the sentence from the rabbis of the Holy City [Jerusalem], ratified by the rabbis of Istanbul. . . . He must return the 72 kuruş and the percentage that he took of the 386 kuruş.50

Agents of Philanthropy

In another letter, sent on the same day to the Pekidim in Jerusalem, the Istanbul leaders specified that Rabbi Ashkenazi was to take a ­public oath so that, “if he is hiding something else, God forbid, it shall come to light in time, and he shall return whatever he has stolen. We assume that no God-fearing person who wants the best for Jerusalem will cover for him. . . . No other shaliah must do anything like this, because the path that the emissaries have taken will lead to the loss of all hope for Jerusalem, God forbid.”51 These letters illustrate that not only were there unauthorized emissaries or impostors visiting the communities of the diaspora and collecting money without permission—a problem addressed by furnishing the emissaries with extensive documentation—but that even an official emissary could not always be trusted. Long distances and the fact that sheluhim often spent years on the road meant that the exchange of information was difficult, and lack of communication could provide occasion for suspicion and, indeed, the opportunity for fraud. When in doubt, the Pekidei Kushta could do little more than wait for the emissary to complete his mission. Yet, the letters regarding the fraud committed by Rabbi Ashkenazi also demonstrate the mechanisms by which the Istanbul Officials maintained their own authority and ensured the proper functioning of the network: they made sure to review the account book and, in addition to the information provided by the emissary, they also maintained channels of communication with rabbis and secular leaders in other communities, as here in the case of Baghdad. If a conflict arose and they detected a problem in the emissary’s books or, as in this case, information provided from elsewhere showed that the emissary had manipulated his accounts, the Pekidim had recourse to the rabbinic legal system. In the example cited here, though it was the court in Jerusalem that determined how the emissary was to restitute the embezzled funds, the sentence evidently had been forwarded for approval to the rabbinic court in Istanbul, reaffirming the centrality of the Jewish leadership in the imperial capital. Beyond trying to repair the damage done by the dishonest emissary, the Officials in Istanbul and their representatives in Jerusalem could also make sure to chastise him in public, ensuring that the emissary would not again be dispatched on a similar mission, and deterring o ­ thers who may have thought they could get away with fraud.52

87

88

Agents of Philanthropy

Given the possibility of fraud and embezzlement, exchange of information between the Pekidim in Istanbul, the communities in the ­diaspora, and the leadership in the Holy Land was crucial to ensure that the philanthropic network operated smoothly and to avoid problems that could arise from miscommunication or outright deception. In the case of another emissary, Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona,53 the Istanbul Pekidim thought it necessary to inform the officials in Jerusalem: The Pekidim in Livorno noted in their account of the money they gave to the said R. Jacob 40 pieces from Livorno, 16 from Pisa, 50 from Florence, 58 from Siena, 15 from Monte San Sabino, for a total of 179 pieces, so that if he for some reason has not included them in the account of his mission that he showed to you make sure to recover them from him.54

Occasionally, emissaries were wrongly suspected of embezzlement, a charge that threatened to undermine their personal reputation and to damage their entire mission. In the early 1600s, for example, Rabbi Yedidiah Galante of Safed was accused in Venice of having misappropriated funds designated for the Land of Israel. He had no choice but to appear in front of the Levantine synagogue and, carrying a Torah scroll, take a public oath that he had not acquired any money from the Erets Israel fund other than what had been recorded in his pinkas. An ensuing investigation of the account books vindicated the emissary and the community leaders of Venice decided to confirm his innocence and had a public document to that effect drawn up, which was signed by the parnasim of Venice and endorsed by nine rabbis.55 This incident demonstrates that suspicions could easily arise and that only a public vindication could restore the damaged reputation and honor of a shaliah, which was the precondition for the success of his mission.

Manipulating the Network: Simon von Geldern As the example of a particularly colorful figure roaming the Jewish world in the mid-eighteenth century shows, all precautions notwithstanding it was still possible to manipulate the philanthropic network of shelihut. Simon von Geldern, the son of the prominent banker

Agents of Philanthropy

and court Jew Eliezer Leser in Düsseldorf (and great-uncle of Heinrich Heine), had abandoned his studies at the Frankfurt yeshiva at age  15, spending much of his life as a traveler and adventurer—the police records in Paris in 1758 referred to him as “rabbi,” but also as “­aventurier.”56 In May 1751, he arrived in Safed where he earned a reputation as someone from a wealthy family who had left everything behind to live in the Holy Land; he stayed long enough, until November that year, to obtain a glowing recommendation from the Safed rabbinate and left Palestine as what the sources call a shaliah le-‘atsmo (an “emissary for himself”). Equipped with his letters of introduction from Safed, Geldern went to Egypt, where he visited Alexandria, Cairo, and Rosetta (Rashid) before returning to Safed in August 1753. After obtaining another recommendation from the city’s rabbis, he set out again the following month: this time, his travels led him to Alexandria, then to Izmir and Istanbul and on to other communities in the Ottoman Balkans; he visited ­Vienna and communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia; he went to Prague and on through southern Germany to Frankfurt, then on to the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, and to London. Upon his return to the continent, he visited Paris, Metz, and numerous other communities in France, and then set out on a tour of Jewish communities in Germany, from Mannheim in the south to Hamburg in the north. From there, he went to Copenhagen and, after returning from Denmark, he continued on to Berlin and eventually back to Vienna. According to his travelogue, he was received well most everywhere, collected numerous recommendations from the leading rabbis throughout Europe, and only encountered problems when he visited the Sephardic communities in Holland and England which, as he writes, “have a rule that they do not help any Ashkenazi: a great cruelty.”57 His visit to Italy on this occasion did not go so well and Simon von Geldern returned to the Holy Land from Livorno in 1756. After a short stay in Jerusalem, however, now carrying a rabbinic recommendation from there as well, he was already back in Italy in 1757 and continued, through France, to Amsterdam where he published in print the collected letters of recommendation that he had obtained in his years as a shaliah le-‘atsmo.58 Even though none of these letters said as much, he boldly declared on the title page of this pamphlet: “Holy letters and

89

90

Agents of Philanthropy

recommendations from the rabbis of the Land of Israel and the rabbis from abroad, singing the praises of the hakham ha-shalem, the rabbi our teacher Simon von Geldern, and requesting on his behalf to help and assist him and return him to his home, the holy city of Safed . . . , especially from the Erets Israel funds (kupat Erets Yisra’el).”59 In order to promote his case he did not hesitate to denounce the ill-treatment suffered by the Ashkenazi immigrants to the Holy Land at the hands of the Sephardic establishment, and equipped with his recommendations—authentic letters, it seems, but misrepresented as authorizing him to receive money from the funds set aside for the Land of Israel as if he were an official emissary—von Geldern was successful in obtaining donations that were duly noted in the account books of the Ashkenazi communities, for example in Venice. The Ashkenazim of Amsterdam even pledged to send him a fixed sum for a period of ten years.60 The case of von Geldern shows that despite the elaborate system established by the Pekidei Kushta (who had already been operating for a quarter century when the adventurer from Düsseldorf roamed the cities of Europe), recommendations from the most prominent rabbis could be obtained by an individual who, according to von Geldern’s own admission in his travelogue, was far from being a pious scholar. Not only could he hope to obtain help from dozens of communities and individuals: it was also possible, with the help of rabbinic recommendations from Cairo to Copenhagen accumulated over several years, to receive funds specifically collected for the Land of Israel and earmarked for disbursement to the emissaries from the Holy Land.

“Address the Jewish People in Sweet Language” Establishing trustworthiness was only the first step for an emissary, of course. All emissaries needed to convince their hosts of the importance of their mission and create a rapport with potential donors. When problems arose, they sometimes displayed a surprisingly assertive and even aggressive attitude, which, in reality, could not quite conceal their powerlessness. Tensions arose when communities and emissaries disagreed on the proper use of funds collected for the Holy Land, as the different holy cities in the Land of Israel competed with one another

Agents of Philanthropy

and with other charitable needs that arose in the diaspora communities themselves. In 1730, the Jewish community of Corfu—an island off the Greek coast then under Venetian rule—received an agitated letter from Raphael Israel Kimhi, an emissary from Safed who was in V ­ enice at the time. Kimhi wrote that he had learned that there had once been a benevolent society in Corfu, called Sha‘arei Tsiyon, which had collected money for Safed and Hebron. The society’s leaders used to forward its contributions to an intermediary in Venice but when they failed to receive an answer acknowledging the funds, they had decided to redirect the endowment of the now defunct society to meet the needs of their own community. Kimhi was furious: Who has given authorization to change the endowment for the Land of Israel, to which the Land of Israel has already acquired a right, to the charitable needs of the city? . . . Who has allowed you to abolish this endowment altogether, away from the Land of Israel and for the charitable needs of the city? When we [in Safed] are paying debts and ten percent interest every month, which comes to 120 percent every year, you take away our money and eat the fruits of our endowment!

What is more, Kimhi had also heard about another endowment in Corfu for the Holy Land, and he requested that its funds be sent to Venice at once. “And if you do not send me a response and the money [soon], . . . I will have to take it upon myself and travel to your place . . . and then do not tell me that I multiplied your expenses [because of the need to pay for the emissary’s travel].” He added another threat: if the community did not forward the requested funds, “I have the authority to confiscate any property from Corfu that I find anywhere and confiscate and appropriate it for Safed.” That may well have been an empty threat and despite Kimhi’s assertive and harsh language, there was only so much he could do to force the community in Corfu to comply. Perhaps his most compelling warning appeared at the end of his letter: if he did not receive a satisfactory answer, “I am obliged to do anything in my power, and to inform the rabbis of the holy city of Safed about this matter.”61 In the absence of any direct power of coercion, the threat to blemish the good name and reputation of the community among the rabbis in the Holy Land was probably the emissary’s sole weapon.62

91

92

Agents of Philanthropy

In the late 1740s, the Istanbul Officials wrote to the deputies charged with organizing the fund-raising effort in Salonika, Aharon and Samuel Amarillo and Benveniste Gattegno, because they had heard troubling news from their emissary, Jacob Ashkenazi de C ­ orona, who was making the rounds in the communities of the Balkans.63 According to the information they had received, certain Jews in Salonika who enjoyed consular protection, under one of the capitulation treaties between the Ottoman Empire and European powers,64 were refusing to contribute their share for the para payment in support of Jerusalem. This went against an agreement that the community of Salonika had reached with the Jewish merchants of European origin—the francos— in 1730 in which the latter had committed themselves to contribute to the community’s charitable expenses, including the collection of funds for the Holy Land.65 These beratlıs, as the foreigners under consular protection were known in Ottoman Turkish, were typically merchants of Italian origin, primarily from Livorno, and belonged to the wealthy elite of Jewish society in many cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Complaints about their “secular” behavior, their adoption of Western, European fashion, and their tendency to evade taxation by the local community were frequent throughout the eighteenth century. In this case, the Officials in Istanbul asked the Pekidim in Salonika “to speak with these people, that they should not withdraw from the public, since we are all the descendants of one man [Abraham].” They also suggested that they would contact the ambassador (elçi) in the capital and ask him to write to the consuls, advising that “the exemption of the beratlıs is only for whatever relates to the imposts for the king and the rulers, such as the poll tax (haraç) and the like, but not whatever is related to the Jewish religion (la-dat ­ha-yehudit).”66 After visiting Serres, Skopje, and Kastoria, where certain individuals had also refused to participate in the fund-raising drive, the emissary Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona asked the Pekidim in Istanbul to involve the Ottoman authorities to force the reluctant benefactors to pay their dues. Though they had been willing to appeal to the ambassadors in the capital in order to remind the francos that they were obliged like any other Jew to pay taxes imposed by the community, the Istanbul Officials were taken aback by de Corona’s bold request: “This is not the [right] way . . . , to denounce (moser) individuals to the nations of

Agents of Philanthropy

the world for the benefit of Jerusalem.” It was better, they suggested, “to show the stick but not to use it.”67 The Officials in Istanbul understood that, ultimately, they were in no position to force the cooperation of other communities in the Jewish world, and they recognized that the threats and harsh language apparently employed by their emissary, Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona, were likely counterproductive. In the spring of 1750, the Pekidim wrote to the shaliah that the community leaders in Larissa had received complaints about his behavior, not about the contributions that he was requesting but “about the harshness of [his] language.” This, they warned, was bound to cause damage, as Larissa was “the main city of Rumelia.” They admonished the emissary that “it is necessary to address the Jewish people with sweet language, especially when it comes to pledges and donations,” and they noted that it was necessary “to speak to their hearts.”68 In a separate letter addressed to Elijah Hodali of Larissa, the Istanbul Officials apologized for the rude behavior of Jacob Ashkenazi and explained: “What this emissary is lacking is that he does not communicate with sweet language . . . but please do not refuse to accept him for our intention is for the sake of heaven. . . . Enclosed we send you the letter to our emissary . . . which is open so that you can read it . . . and you will see how we admonished him.”69 The case of Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona demonstrates once more the role the Pekidim in Istanbul played as the central node in a complex network of exchanging information and as mediators between conflicting interests. When the beratlıs of Salonika refused to pay the tax imposed by the Jewish community to help collect funds for Jerusalem, the Istanbul Officials heard about it from their emissary and, given their presence in the imperial capital, they were in a position to seek the assistance of the European ambassadors in the city; by the same token, though, they refused to involve the Ottoman authorities. Even though the Istanbul Officials themselves often sent admonishing letters reminding the communities of the diaspora of outstanding payments, a clear etiquette had to be observed. They recognized that an emissary who lacked the proper diplomatic skills was likely to do more harm than good: thus, in order to appease the community leaders in Larissa—and demonstrate that they were the ones in charge—the Istanbul Officials chose to share with them their written rebuke of the emissary.

93

94

Agents of Philanthropy

The Istanbul Officials were not the only ones aware of the damage that could be caused by an emissary who behaved improperly. Thus, Haim Joseph David Azulai attributed the problems he experienced during his visit to southern France in the late 1770s to the bad taste left behind by the previous emissary’s visit. In Carpentras, Rabbi Moshe ben Michael, with whom Azulai had earlier maintained good relations, complained that “the emissaries consider [us] as village folk, and in the city of Carpentras they eat and drink as if they were in the garden of Eden.”70 Elsewhere, Azulai explained that if he was not treated the way he had hoped for, it was on account of a previous shaliah, Haim Rahamim Bagiaio, who had proven a great burden for the community when he took everything he found in the Holy Land fund, the contributions for thirteen years, “and even then was not satisfied and took as an advance payment a huge sum, so that it would take ten years to pay the debt, and after that they had imposed a heavy yoke on the individuals [in the community].”71 In fact, raising money for the Jews in the Holy Land meant a significant burden for the communities in the diaspora, something the Pekidim in Istanbul were well aware of, and even large and relatively wealthy communities were struggling to meet their commitments. Thus the Istanbul Officials noted, in a letter they sent to Jerusalem in 1744, that “revenue had declined everywhere.” Still, they added, We cannot blame anyone, for there are iniquities and poverty everywhere and they cannot give a single coin; what is more, they are very aggravated by so many emissaries from all the holy cities who arrive within a few days one after another, and this is why all of them together have closed their hands and do not give anything.72

Even in Istanbul itself, expenses had risen constantly, so that by the end of 1743, the community was faced with outstanding debts of 55,000 kuruş owed to non-Jewish merchants, 60,000 to Jews (“the orphans and widows and other members of the covenant”), and 131,000 to h­ ekdeshot. Tax revenue from the gabella on meat and cheese was no longer sufficient to meet the expenses for paying government taxes, make contributions for the Holy Land, and disburse charity. The community leaders first proposed a new gabella on wine and sugar but when the rabbis objected, they agreed to increase the existing taxes

Agents of Philanthropy

on meat and cheese instead.73 In Livorno too, in 1742, the community found that it had exhausted its charitable funds due to the many requests for support and still left many families in need, and the ­parnasim agreed to hold a special fundraiser to bring in additional money.74 In Amsterdam, by the mid-eighteenth century the declining finances of the Sephardic community forced it to depart from the rule in its statutes from 1639 that had called for granting unlimited assistance to all Jewish paupers who were of Spanish-Portuguese extraction.75

“We Do Not Want You to Waste Money on Emissaries” If one considers the cost involved in dispatching and hosting shadarim, as well as the ever-present concern about possible impostors and the tensions between the not always politic emissaries and their sometimes reluctant hosts, it is hardly surprising that there were attempts throughout the eighteenth century and in many different communities to regulate and limit these visits. When the leaders of the Sephardic community of Bordeaux received a letter regarding the mission of Rabbi Haim Moda‘i of Safed in the summer of 1764, they convened a meeting at the home of Benjamin Gradis, decided to award 700 livres “and nothing else” for Safed, and determined that the emissary should refrain from visiting the city. If he decided to show up anyway, they would not reimburse him for his travel expenses and lodging, and a letter explaining this to him was signed and mailed.76 Only a few weeks later, however, Moda‘i showed up in Bordeaux nonetheless and the community leaders met again. They now reversed their earlier decision: “Given the grave circumstances in which our brothers, the inhabitants of Safed find themselves, and given the fact that there have not been any emissaries from that city in many years, it is appropriate that we give this some consideration (quelque égard).” They decided therefore to award 1,200 livres from the general charity fund to Moda‘i for his mission and, in addition, to reimburse him for all the expenses he had incurred since his arrival in Bordeaux.77 Haim Moda‘i—a rabbi and member of the Istanbul Officials, as we saw in Chapter One—was chosen in 1762 as emissary for Safed to Europe for a mission that lasted four years. During this time, he

95

96

Agents of Philanthropy

visited Izmir (1762), Venice (1763), Bordeaux (1764), London (1765), Amsterdam (1765), and Prague (1766), and while he was in London, he sent a letter to the Spanish-Portuguese community of New York.78 Haim Moda‘i’s shelihut came in the wake of the devastating earthquake that had destroyed Safed in 1759 and killed 160 Jews and left five synagogues and other public buildings in ruins. When the homeless refugees began to return two years later, after having obtained the authorization from the governor to rebuild their destroyed synagogues and reestablish their community, they were still burdened with the crushing debts from before the earthquake and faced the double challenge of reconstructing their lives while paying off their old debt and tax obligations. The heart-rending description of the suffering experienced by the Jews of Safed as they desperately searched the rubble of the city to dig out their dead, as well as the financial hardships they had suffered since, could hardly fail to engender empathy among the Jews in the diaspora.79 It is worth noting, however, that the Bordeaux community ultimately responded far more generously to the personal visit of the emissary than it had after its initial reading of the letter of shelihut. Moda‘i’s visit illustrates the importance of the physical presence of the emissaries in the communities of the diaspora, and his personal intervention in Bordeaux certainly made a huge difference: if the community had allocated 700 livres for Safed in response to the letter, it now set aside funds that were originally designated for other charitable needs and raised its contribution to 1,200 livres, in addition to covering all the emissary’s expenses during his visit in Bordeaux.80 A good emissary thus had the possibility to significantly improve the overall success of the fund-raising for the Land of Israel, something that the Pekidim in Istanbul understood well. As they noted in a letter from the middle of the eighteenth century, “in every city whose allotment is 10 florins per year, if an emissary comes to visit, with the sweetness of his words, he raises 100 florins from the community and from individuals.”81 As important as the emissaries were for the philanthropic network, the expenses involved were certainly significant. In addition to the percentage that went to the shaliah upon completion of his mission, the communities were generally expected to foot the bill for his travel expenses and for hosting him. A few examples, from Livorno and

Agents of Philanthropy

­ ordeaux in the eighteenth century, show that a fairly significant porB tion of the funds raised by the community in support of the Holy Land was needed simply to defray the costs of the emissary’s visit. When Yom Tov Algazi and Jacob Le-Beith Hazan visited Bordeaux in 1773, they received 1,500 livres for Jerusalem and 200 livres for travel and food. Often, however, the percentage needed to pay for expenses was even higher: Jacob Corona, in 1761, collected 600 livres for Jerusalem and also received 200 livres for his travels. In 1768, Rahamim Begayo (Bagiaio) and Isaac Zeevi raised 1,100 livres for ­Hebron and were awarded 350 to meet their expenses.82 The situation in Livorno was not very different and the award for travel usually exceeded 10 percent of the donation to the holy city and could reach as much as 20 percent. To give just a few representative examples: Raphael Kimhi, in 1732, received 250 pieces of gold for Safed and 35 for his expenses; Abraham Zeror, in 1739, 300 for Hebron and 50 for travel; Abraham G ­ edalia, in 1747, 150 for the same city and 30 for travel; Mas‘ud Bonan, in 1749, obtained 300 for Tiberias and 50 for his own expenses; Mordecai Rubio and Abraham Israel received 500 for Jerusalem in 1751 and were promised 40 on their way back to Palestine (in 1753); and Haim Joseph David Azulai, in 1753, got 450 for Hebron and 50 for his expenses. Haim Moda‘i collected 500 for Safed and 100 for the cost of his travel, in 1763, and the following year, Elijah Israel obtained 500 for Jerusalem and a more modest 40 for expenses.83 A city like Livorno also provided funding to help emissaries destined to North Africa or to Germany and only passing through, with individual sheluhim receiving from 15 pieces (for example Haim Abraham Sornaga, who went on a mission for Jerusalem to North Africa in 1748) to more sizeable amounts like the 70 pieces awarded to Abraham Barkat, also of Jerusalem, on his way to the Maghreb in 1762.84 Those who sent out the emissaries in the first place shared the wariness of the communities in the diaspora about the high costs involved in dispatching a shaliah, but they also realized that often they had no alternative. In 1686, the rabbis of Safed sent a letter to Rabbi Moshe Zacuto in Mantua, complaining that they had expected the city was going to establish a regular, yearly payment for Safed and would thus spare them the expense of sending a shaliah, but their hopes had been

97

98

Agents of Philanthropy

disappointed: “the gate of your beneficence has been closed to us, because there has not been an emissary to visit you and to inform you about our many afflictions.” Thus, they decided to once again send an emissary in order to renew the contributions for Safed from Mantua.85 Two years later, when another emissary from Safed—Solomon ­Ayllon—was visiting Italy, he contacted the community of Mantua by letter but remained in Venice himself and Mantua forwarded its contributions there.86 In 1728, the first emissary dispatched to Europe under the auspices of the Istanbul Pekidim, Moshe Israel, wrote from Venice to the community in Corfu, which he had intended to visit personally. Explaining that in order to save the additional expense of traveling to the island, he requested that the funds collected since the visit of the previous shaliah fifteen years earlier be forwarded directly to ­Venice. Israel sent another, private letter, in Ladino, to Jacob Aboab de ­Fonseca, a doctor and prominent individual in the Corfu community, asking him to help with his request.87 In the early nineteenth century, an emissary in Italy on behalf of the holy city of Safed, Abraham ben Hason, decided not to go personally to raise funds from the community of Acqui Terme (Piedmont) and requested, while he was in Turin, Rabbi Matityahu Segal of Alessandria della Paglia to write on his behalf. When the community pledged only fifty francs, which the emissary considered little and which was much less than what it had given the previous shaliah, he regretted not having gone in person and worried that the rabbis of Safed would accuse him of neglecting his duty: after all, each emissary was expected “to go himself and speak and tell about the troubles and the oppression” suffered by the Jews of the holy city.88 Given the high cost of shelihut and the large portion that went to the emissary rather than benefiting the Holy Land at large, as well as the increasing frequency of the calls of (sometimes troublesome) sheluhim, some communities attempted to restrict the visits of emissaries and to organize the fund-raising differently. As early as 1629, the Italian congregation on the island of Corfu wrote to Jerusalem with a request to discontinue sending emissaries to their community, explicitly complaining about the waste involved. “We do not want that you waste money on the emissaries and give them a third [of the money collected]. . . . We will send every year all the funds that are collected

Agents of Philanthropy

in the Jerusalem account and all the donations pledged by individuals of our community to the Pekidim in Venice or [directly] to Syria.”89 (As we have seen, several emissaries in the eighteenth century did indeed forego a visit to Corfu and contacted the community in writing, though others still went there personally.)90 Other communities determined that a certain number of years had to pass between visits from emissaries from the same city. The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam informed the emissary Abraham ben Asher in 1741 that the required ten years from the visit of the previous emissary had not yet passed and that they therefore did not owe any contributions.91 The community of Bordeaux too attempted to limit the frequent visits of sheluhim, as we saw in their initial reaction to Haim Moda‘i’s visit in 1764. In 1782, the community’s leaders decided on the occasion of the visit of Raphael Isaiah Azulai of Tiberias to award him 600 livres “and nothing more . . . , not for his sojourn nor for anything else.” They determined that in the future they would collect 60 livres each year for Tiberias and make sure to forward their donations to Amsterdam or some other appropriate location. Should another emissary from Tiberias visit Bordeaux in the future, he would not receive any support for his travel and receive the funds for Tiberias only if those had accumulated for several years.92 A few years later, in August 1785, they adopted an even stronger policy: in order to “avoid the considerable travel expenses that these communities [in the Holy Land] had to disburse every ten years” when they sent their emissaries to collect the funds for the Land of Israel, they proposed to “remit annually to the officials in Amsterdam the sum that shall be fixed for each of these congregations [Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias], as well as the private donations of charitable individuals.”93 Despite the attempt to institutionalize the fund-raising, though, emissaries continued to visit Bordeaux in the following years—and continued to be well received. In October 1787, Solomon Hazan of Safed was in town and, since no emissary from that city had visited since 1775, he was awarded the 660 livres that corresponded to the eleven years of collected donations (which evidently had not been sent to Amsterdam), and, “out of consideration for the circumstances in which this community finds itself,” another 340 livres was added for Safed and 100 livres for Hazan’s travel expenses.94 Thus,

99

100

Agents of Philanthropy

the personal intervention of an emissary continued to produce remarkable results: by visiting Bordeaux himself, the emissary had increased the contribution for Safed by over 50 percent and even received additional funds to defray his own expenses. Livorno likewise began, in the 1750s, to award funds to visiting emissaries on the condition that no more requests be made, either in person or in writing, from the same city for a period of usually ten, at times twelve, years. When Mordecai Rubio and Abraham Israel passed through Livorno returning from their mission to Europe in 1753, the community gave them 500 pieces and money for travel expenses, adding that for a period of twelve years, “no amount will be made available for any extraordinary rescue and help, apart from what is being collected [on a regular basis].”95 In 1757, when Salomon Shalem received 400 pieces for Tiberias (plus 50 for travel), Livorno insisted that, “for the period of the next ten years . . . our holy congregation shall be free and exempt from any extraordinary contribution.”96 The same was stipulated in the wake of Haim Moda‘i’s visit in 1763, and when two other emissaries from the same city, Safed, did in fact present themselves in Livorno in 1767, the parnasim rejected their request and the proposal to allow them at least to hold a public fund-raising in the synagogue failed to gain the necessary votes as well.97 Around the same time, one of Livorno’s frequent interlocutors, Baron Diego de Aghilar, a prominent Portuguese court Jew in Vienna, likewise noted his criticism of shelihut and the waste involved in sending emissaries everywhere. In a letter to Livorno, in 1750, he complained about the fact that of all the money collected by the emissaries, after accounting for their share of the profit and their travel expenses, only about half actually reached the Holy Land. (As we saw in the example of Nisim Berakha’s account above this estimation was no exaggeration.) Instead, Aghilar suggested, it would be better if the communities remitted a certain sum each year to the Officials in Istanbul, and for larger communities like Livorno to collect the donations from the smaller cities in their region and then send them on to Istanbul.98 Livorno tried to implement such a change in 1774, but it does not appear to have met with much success. In December that year, the community approved a resolution that, in accordance with an old established practice, money would be raised for the holy cities of the

Agents of Philanthropy

Land of Israel each year on the second day of Passover and remitted to the Officials in Istanbul, so that “they need not dispatch any emissaries to this city in order to ask for help.”99 Since sheluhim continued to arrive in Livorno as before in subsequent years, though, it appears that this attempt to eliminate their visits failed. Moreover, the regular fund-raising on Passover does not seem to have reliably generated the kind of donations that were needed: when Ephraim Navon of Hebron was in Livorno in 1793, he was awarded 600 pieces, but inasmuch as not enough money had accumulated as a result of donations pledged during the Passover holidays since the visit of the previous emissary, Abraham Azulai of Jerusalem in 1790, the balance had to be covered from other community funds.100 In light of the ongoing success of many emissaries who managed to raise significantly more money than the communities of the diaspora were collecting on their own, it is not surprising that the rabbis of the Holy Land and the Pekidim in Istanbul continued to defend the institution of shelihut against its detractors. In the early eighteenth century, Moshe Hagiz of Jerusalem argued vigorously against proposals to abolish the practice of sending sheluhim and to centralize the fund-raising for the Jews in Palestine in the hands of specially appointed officials in the major communities of the diaspora—proposals, it seems, that were already discussed at the time. According to Hagiz, some Jewish leaders in Europe were arguing that the coming and going of the emissaries only served to create the impression among their Christian neighbors, as well as the state authorities, that the Jews were wealthy and could afford to sustain their brethren in faraway Palestine. ­Collecting large sums of money and sending them abroad contradicted, in fact, the principles of mercantilist politics in eighteenth-century Europe, and fund-raising for the Jews of Palestine was indeed prohibited for a period in parts of the Habsburg Empire in 1723.101 According to Hagiz, the critics of shelihut recommended the appointment of officials (apotroposim) who would oversee the collection of funds and forward them to Palestine on a regular basis, “and thus they would need no more emissaries, and would not have to send one emissary after another, and even the sending of fund-raising letters would no longer be necessary, since the apotroposim will ensure the well-being of the Land of Israel.”102 For Hagiz, such proposals

101

102

Agents of Philanthropy

were anathema. To him, the emissaries fulfilled a crucial role not only by fund-raising but also educating the public about the importance of the Holy Land and the proper relationship between the Jews in the diaspora and the spiritual center of the Jewish world in Jerusalem. Nonetheless, Hagiz acknowledged that much of the opposition to ­shelihut and the perception of waste or even corruption was the fault of the emissaries themselves. “The shaliah should not try to raise money from the communities for his own benefit, neither a small nor a large amount,” he admonished, “so that [the people in the diaspora] recognize and know that the purpose of the shelihut is not gathering funds that are not for the purpose of redemption [of the Land of ­Israel].” In reality, though, Hagiz admitted “we are guilty, for most of the emissaries go out for their own benefit.”103

Emissaries on the Road When Haim Joseph David Azulai visited Paris in the winter of 1777–78, he was impressed by the city, which “is beautiful, and everything can be found here, though everything is expensive, except for prostitution which is cheap and blatant.” A “wide and long” bridge, the Pont Neuf, spanned the Seine River, he reported, and “there is never a moment in the twenty-four hours of the day that one does not find on this bridge a white horse, a priest, and a harlot.”104 Azulai, born in Jerusalem in 1724, was the author of dozens of books of Jewish law, commentaries, and collections of sermons, as well as a unique, encyclopedic bio-bibliographical study of rabbinic works in print and manuscript, which appeared under the title Shem ha-Gedolim in Livorno in 1774. Azulai served twice as an emissary for the holy city of Hebron, and he took advantage of his extensive travels to look for rare books and manuscripts everywhere he went. In Pfersee, close to Augsburg in southern Germany, he encountered to his great excitement a manuscript of the entire Babylonian Talmud bound in one volume, copied in France in 1342—to this day, the oldest (almost) complete manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud known.105 The Hida, as he is known by his acronym, also wrote a detailed travelogue of his two missions to Europe—1753 to 1757 and again 1772 to 1778—which

Agents of Philanthropy

he most likely never intended to be published and which provides a unique glimpse into the world of the emissaries of the eighteenth century and the Jewish world they encountered.106 Something that stands out in Azulai’s travelogue is that he was not only interested in a “Jewish” space, and pursuing rare books or holding learned discussions with local rabbis were not his only pastimes. He also appeared as a tourist, eagerly exploring the cities he visited and touring the sites they had to offer. His favorite place was Amsterdam—“of all the cities that I visited I did not see a city as beautiful,” he noted.107 While he was in Venice, he climbed the Campanile of St.  Mark’s and enjoyed the panoramic view of the city.108 Azulai speaks of a new promenade by the sea in Nice and he toured an ancient temple in southern France.109 In Pisa, he went to see the leaning tower and the doors of its cathedral, as well as, on the second day of Sukkot, the observatory, and he visited the zoo in Florence.110 While in Paris—“a  very large city, and they say that there are 950 streets, 50,000 carriages, and more than a million people”—Azulai went to see the royal palace in Versailles, accompanied by a Christian who had taken an interest in him: “And when the King passed by together with the important ministers, I recited the blessing for the King.”111 In Istanbul, at the conclusion of his first trip, he visited some of the famous imperial mosques and the bazaar and later, “to make a separation (u-lehavdil ),” several of the old synagogues in the city.112 The rhetorical device of lehavdil is telling, as Azulai implied a clear dichotomy of space—Jewish versus gentile—at the same time that he was comfortably exploring both. He employed a similar rhetorical device when he hastened to add after his description of the splendid display of the crown jewels in the Tower of London: “But behold, the days will come . . . and our eyes will see . . . the Messiah of the Lord, lighting up and illuminating like the sun seventy-fold, crowned with the crown of crowns.”113 During his visit in Istanbul, Azulai witnessed the investiture of Mustafa III as the new sultan and went to see the royal procession. Again, he added, “May the Lord grant us the merit to distinguish and that we may see eye to eye the Messiah of the God of Jacob, crowned with the crown of crowns.”114 Conspicuously absent from Azulai’s account are descriptions of the countryside and of the varying landscapes he encountered. Nowhere

103

104

Agents of Philanthropy

does he stand in awe of the beauties of nature: forests, mountains, and rivers only appear as obstacles to the progress of his voyage, and his view is an entirely urban one—perhaps a reflection of the urban culture of Ottoman Jews. Azulai visited more than monuments of art and architecture on his way, however. He was particularly curious about scientific and technological novelties and very interested in displays of knowledge. He speaks with much enthusiasm about the royal natural science collection in The Hague, he went to see the medical school in Padua and describes in great detail what he learned there, and he visited a silk factory in northern Italy.115 If Azulai was interested in displays of knowledge—technological and scientific knowledge in addition to rabbinic scholarship— that is not to say that he shared the mindset of the contemporary maskilim, the adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment. In fact, as we will see in the following chapter, he dismissed the validity of secular ­science where it seemed to contradict rabbinic tradition. Nonetheless, ­Azulai was eager to learn and venture beyond the confines of rabbinic knowledge. No less interesting about Azulai’s sightseeing is that he engaged in sightseeing at all. This seems to squarely contradict the traditional notion of bitul torah, that every moment spent on anything other than the study of Torah (or anything that can be legitimized as enabling the study of Torah) was a blameworthy waste of precious time. Rabbinic literature from the period, in fact, was full of admonitions against wasting time on things other than study.116 Azulai, however, did have time for leisure and tourism. He should not be seen as a harbinger of modernity, but his travelogue does challenge the notion of a clear divide, or opposition, between rabbinic and secular notions of time and space. As financially rewarding as taking on a shelihut could be for a successful emissary, he also had to contend with the difficulties and dangers of travel. Azulai’s travelogue is full of details that give a sense of the kinds of difficulties, mishaps, and dangers that awaited a traveling emissary. When Azulai was returning from his first mission in the 1750s, for example, pirates boarded his ship on the way from Livorno to Turkey. They took all the money he had deposited with the captain and searched everyone on the ship, though Azulai was fortunate that they did not find a bag with 500 gold ducats—a very considerable sum

Agents of Philanthropy

of money—that he had hidden on his body.117 During his first sojourn in Amsterdam, he was almost run over by a wagon and then slipped on the icy street; outside Harwich, England, he needed to relieve himself and climbed over a stone wall, only to sink into a heap of mud and excrement until he was drawn out by the coach driver and his own assistant.118 In Avignon, he experienced a flood when the Rhone inundated a great part of the city.119 On their way between Nice and northern Italy, he and his assistant crossed the mountains through the Colle di Tenda (the 1,871-meter-high Tenda pass, connecting Nice and Turin), descending with great difficulty when they and their pack animals sank into the deep snow and they needed to hire “four gentiles” to help them.120 During his second trip, in the 1770s, near ­Ancona, Azulai’s carriage overturned though he and his assistant were unharmed; in southern France, they traversed a forest—“a place ready for calamity”—where, they learned, robbers had just an hour and a half before thrown a person into deep water where he had drowned.121 Travel was not only replete with dangers, however, but also caused challenges for someone intent on keeping Jewish law. Observing the Sabbath was particularly hard when traveling overland in the company of non-Jews. Setting out for Egypt on his second mission, Azulai and some other Jews camped outside Al-Arish during the Sabbath while their caravan was moving on. On Saturday in the afternoon a local Bedouin shaykh began to harass the group, demanding protection money, and was not particularly impressed when they offered him some raisins, explaining that they were not allowed to handle money on the Sabbath. They managed to keep him waiting until after nightfall and finally handed him a considerable sum of money. Then they left, rode for some eight hours through the night to finally catch up with the caravan before dawn just when it was getting ready to move on for another day’s travel.122 Continuing the journey on a ship from Alexandria to Tunisia, Azulai found himself in distress again: the captain of the ship “made special rules” and gave orders that he had to ask permission anytime he wanted water, and he prohibited the sailors to even speak to Azulai. Not having enough water for the ritual washing of hands, for the duration of the journey he had to eat less than the minimum that would have required him to wash his hands and say grace after meals. In addition, he was distressed by the stormy sea,

105

106

Agents of Philanthropy

constantly afraid of pirates, and worried by a leak that the sailors had trouble plugging. All of this came at the steep price of 100 kuruş for the passage.123 Compared to other emissaries, of course, Azulai was lucky and lived to tell the tale. The annals of shelihut are replete with emissaries who fell prey to highway robbers or pirates, suffered freak accidents, or simply succumbed to illness and the exhaustion of travel. Abraham Ya‘ari, in his monumental Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, noted that no less than ten percent of the approximately 850 emissaries the names of whom he was able to establish had died in the course of one of their missions.124 One example was Immanuel Hai Ricchi, who was born in Ferrara and immigrated to Safed in 1718. Ricchi spent a large part of his life as an “emissary for himself” (shaliah le-‘atsmo), first when he had to abandon Safed following an epidemic that had cost the life of his daughter and later when he visited the large Sephardic communities of Izmir, Salonika, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and London to sell his books and raise money to pay off the debts he had incurred in order to publish them. During his return from Safed to Italy, just two years after he had first settled in the Holy Land, his ship was attacked by pirates and all passengers were taken as captives to Tripoli; Ricchi was lucky that he and his family were released after a local Jewish notable paid a ransom. Years later, after he had successfully completed his book-selling and fund-raising trip, Ricchi suffered a shipwreck en route from London to Livorno off the Spanish coast and was forced to stay for fifty days in the country that had expelled its Jews over two centuries earlier.125 After moving back to the Land of Israel in the 1730s, he was forced to leave again after a period of only three years to raise money for a yeshiva in Jerusalem and to sell his books. As he was returning from a successful mission, he was assaulted and killed by highway robbers outside ­Bologna.126 We should not assume, though, that Ricchi or other emissaries were singled out by pirates or highway robbers because they were Jews. Travel was dangerous for everyone in the eighteenth century and Jews could sometimes be the perpetrators as well: in Livorno, for example, Mas‘ud Benisti, a Jew, and his Muslim accomplice Sa‘id Ebencaliffa (Ibn Khalifa) were convicted of killing and robbing one night in May 1749 a wealthy Algerian Muslim who was on his way back from the hajj to Mecca.127

Agents of Philanthropy

Whereas Haim Joseph David Azulai distinguished, in his travelogue, clearly between the Jewish and the gentile worlds as practically separate entities, he did not suggest that all non-Jews were necessarily hostile. When traveling through the Tyrol he declared that they were “haters of the [Jewish] faith,” and that one morning, after spending a night in a non-Jewish inn, when the owners discovered that he and his assistant were Jews, they “wanted to swallow us alive in their anger, for in their eyes it is a sin to shelter one of the children of Israel.”128 Speaking of France, he noted that “the French have good manners and are cheerful and they treated us with honor, kindness and much benevolence.”129 International travel also implied numerous encounters with nonJewish authorities and a variety of laws and restrictions against the presence of Jews in various towns, primarily in Central Europe (no such restrictions were in place in Ottoman lands). In Trento, for example, a policeman came to see Azulai shortly after his arrival at a local inn in the center of town, informing him of a law requiring every Jew in the city (including those just passing through) to wear a special sign, and the fine for not complying with the law presumably was a steep 100 Reichsthaler. When Azulai noted that he was a “citizen of Jerusalem,” unaware of this law, the policeman replied, “Who allowed the Israelites into Jerusalem, so that they come and defile it?,” but after much back and forth the rabbi finally got away with paying a bribe of 13 gold pieces.130 It is interesting to see how Azulai in this instance was far from a helpless and passive victim of anti-Jewish prejudice but managed to negotiate with the local policeman and defend himself. A different problem arose when he encountered English customs. As he carried a large number of Dutch guilders with him he was afraid they might confiscate the foreign currency. When they searched him, however, and heard the sound of coins, he produced a small bag with ­English money and they let him go, not having discovered the much larger amount of Dutch currency that he had been hiding under his shirt.131 The danger an emissary would find himself in if he were recognized as a Jew, as a foreigner, or specifically as an emissary who might be carrying money, came to the fore when rabbinic authorities discussed whether it was permissible for a shaliah to dress as a gentile. Rabbi Haim Ya‘akov, a native of Izmir who himself was an emissary for Safed between 1718 and 1728, presented various opinions on the matter and

107

108

Agents of Philanthropy

ultimately sided with the more lenient view that allowed dressing as a gentile in such a case.132 Others, however, seemed to find it difficult to countenance masquerading as something they were not: consider the dilemma Haim Joseph David Azulai faced when he was in Alexandria, at the beginning of his first mission in 1753, and decided to go first to Tunis and from there to Livorno. He resolved “to get a confirmation letter from the imperial consul that I am a resident of Livorno: two Jews will go and testify that my daughter is married in Livorno. I received [the document], but all this may be to no avail, for dress and language are my witness that I am a Levantino. But perhaps it will help nevertheless.”133 It is not entirely clear from Azulai’s telling of this episode why he was seeking a document claiming that he was a resident of Livorno; perhaps he hoped that a letter of safe-conduct as a Livornese might help him in the event of an encounter with Christian pirates. What is interesting is that, in his mind, obtaining a fictitious letter of residence was entirely possible, but it does not seem to have occurred to him to “masquerade” as a European Jew. “Dress and language,” in his mind, made him recognizable as a Levantino, an Ottoman or Eastern Sephardic Jew.134

Contact Zones As rabbinic emissaries traversed various lands and continents representing the putative center of the Jewish world, their travels delineated a shared space that transcended geographic distance and tied Jewish communities in different places to one another and to the Land of Israel. At the same time, their extensive journeys also made the emissaries into agents of cultural exchange, mediating between different cultural practices and sets of cultural knowledge that they encountered as they interacted with Jews and non-Jews in a myriad of different contexts. Thus, the emissaries played an important role in facilitating the exchange of information and knowledge in what we might call the “contact zone” between different Jewish cultures and, indeed, between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Books, of course, were one important vehicle for transmitting and exchanging knowledge across geographic distance and over time.

Agents of Philanthropy

Throughout his travelogue, Haim Joseph David Azulai noted meticulously all the books he encountered and made copies of some rare manuscripts he found. If the Torah was the “portable homeland” of the Jews, then it was rabbinic literature that created a link uniting the various communities visited by Azulai. Material culture, cultural practices, language—all those varied considerably. Rabbinic learning—in print, in rare manuscripts, and in the personal encounter with other rabbinic scholars—provided a common frame of reference for the emissary from the Holy Land and the communities of the diaspora. Books also facilitated, however, encounters with “foreign” or dissonant (or “heretical”) knowledge. Looking back at his visit in Venice, Azulai gave a list of the many precious books he had encountered there. “And,” he concluded, “to distinguish from the light (u-lehavdil bein ha-or), I saw there the book Ari nohem, a treatise arguing that the Zohar was not by Shimon bar Yohai and his group . . . and the story of that man [Jesus], and matters about Sh[abbatai] Z[vi] . . . and the book of dreams by a faithful rabbi who had been misguided . . . and asked . . . whether one should eat on the [fast of] 9 Av,” presumably a reference to the still existing pockets of crypto-­Sabbateanism.135 ­Shelihut was thus one avenue of exchanging information. Azulai might have disapproved of Leone Modena’s conclusion that the Zohar—the classic of kabbalistic literature—had not been written by the first-­ century sage Shimon bar Yohai,136 but the important thing is that he was exposed to such kind of dissonant knowledge in the course of his travels and carried it with him. Emissaries were also an important factor in the exchange of news from the wider Jewish world. Such news included well-known controversies like the one involving Jonathan Eybeschütz, rabbi in Hamburg and suspected by some of being a Sabbatean. (Worries about the presence of secret followers of Shabbatai Zvi, the failed messiah who had created great messianic excitement before he converted to Islam in 1666, agitated quite a few rabbinic figures in the eighteenth century, who feared that Sabbatean teachings were infiltrating and undermining the world of rabbinic orthodoxy.)137 Azulai noted in his travelogue what a rabbi in Worms had told him about the Eybeschütz controversy, showing him some printed pamphlets about the case. Azulai was dismayed to hear about the public nature of this inner-rabbinic con-

109

110

Agents of Philanthropy

troversy and that it had even attracted the attention of the non-Jewish newspapers ( gazetas).138 His diplomatic skills were called for when he was confronted with a letter in support of Eybeschütz by the rabbis of Istanbul. When asked whether the letter was authentic he evaded a clear answer although, as he confessed in his diary, he had clearly recognized their signatures and handwriting.139 The, sometimes circuitous, road of exchanging news is illustrated well by a letter of another emissary, Moshe Israel, writing during his mission in Algiers in 1712 to Rabbi Jacob ibn Tsur of Meknès. In the letter, Israel told Ibn Tsur that he had learned of the passing of Rabbis Barukh Toledano and Judah ha-Kohen, both in Jerusalem. He heard this on his way, by ship, from Oran to Algiers during a stopover where he had met another Jew who was on his way, also by ship, from Algiers to Tetuan, and with whom he had spent the fast day of the ninth of Av. That person had been for two months in Tunis, during which time letters with the news had arrived from Jerusalem.140

Rabbi Azulai in Tunis When he set out for his second mission to Europe in the early 1770s, Haim Joseph David Azulai went first to Tunis, where he stayed for about eight months, before he continued his journey from there to Livorno. The Jewish community of Tunis in the eighteenth century sat at a crossroads attracting a wide range of travelers from elsewhere in North Africa and from across the Mediterranean, including many rabbinic emissaries.141 Thus Azulai noted in his diary: A few months before I arrived R. Bekhor Almosnino, the emissary for Jerusalem, was here and made a fool of himself and, because of our many sins, he became the subject of scorn and mockery. There are also many poor Ashkenazim who come [to Tunis] from all over, and among them one who came from Istanbul. He used to be a notable (gevir) but his fortune had turned. They wanted nothing to do with him because he was an ignoramus (‘a[m] ha-[arets]), so that I intervened on his behalf and they showed him some mercy.142

Azulai’s comment raises an issue of crucial significance for the emissaries from the Holy Land: elaborate documentation to ensure trust-

Agents of Philanthropy

worthiness notwithstanding, the reception of a visiting shaliah also depended a great deal on his bona fides as a rabbinic scholar. Azulai, by the 1770s, already enjoyed a reputation for his learnedness. According to his travelogue, his teacher had spoken highly of him during a visit to Tunis when Azulai was only fourteen years old,143 and by the time he himself arrived in Tunisia, many regarded him as an authority on Kabbalah and the teachings of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century mystic. Throughout his visit Azulai declined to discuss Kabbalah, presumably because he thought it inappropriate to share what was considered secret lore with a broader audience. When he took his leave in April 1774, however, a group of about four hundred people assembled to hear him speak, and “and on that day of my departure I expounded some interpretations according to the secret lore . . . of the Ari [Isaac Luria], and they were pleased to see that they had been right to assume that I knew of such matters.”144 Despite Azulai’s reputation as a scholar, he still felt the need to prove himself in his learned discussions with the rabbis of Tunis. In a typical example, Azulai remembered how he was studying one night with a Tunisian rabbi, Joseph Bosmut. Learning a section from the tosafot (the glosses written on the Talmud in medieval Ashkenaz), Azulai’s counterpart dismissed the passage as straightforward and not offering much to discuss, but Azulai went ahead and offered “four or five ways [of interpreting this passage], and he was stunned.” Azulai hastened to add: I know my limitations and lowliness in learning and wisdom . . . , but I implored the Lord, who takes mercy on all, that, for the sake of the honor of the Land of Israel, he may grant me wisdom and generosity, for they were saying that there were not any more true scholars in the Land of Israel and that they had seen emissaries who were ignoramuses, and even the good ones no more than simple talmidei hakhamim.145

It is clear from this anecdote that it was not enough for an emissary from the Holy Land to invoke the prerogative of representing the center of the Jewish world to garner the respect of his rabbinic colleagues in the diaspora. In fact, for the rabbis of Tunis the centrality of Erets Israel when it came to traditional learning was by no means certain,

111

112

Agents of Philanthropy

as they dismissed many an emissary as a mediocre scholar at best, and for Azulai, proving his scholarship was not simply a matter of personal pride but also of defending the honor of the Land of Israel and its ­rabbis. Moreover, the personal reputation of the emissary could not but have an impact on the success of his fund-raising mission. This also seems to lie behind the conflict between Azulai and another emissary he encountered in Tunis, Mordecai ha-Levi, a native of Jerusalem who had moved to Izmir and was now collecting money for rebuilding the Izmir synagogues destroyed in a fire. As Azulai soon discovered, Mordecai ha-Levi had made disparaging comments on the Hida’s book Sha‘ar Yosef, and he suspected that ha-Levi was to blame when an earlier commitment from notables in Algiers to support the publication of another book fell through. Ha-Levi, on the other hand, wrote to Izmir and complained that Azulai had caused his mission to flounder.146 In Azulai’s travelogue, Tunis appears as a hotbed of rabbinic learning, a highly competitive environment that was home to “almost three hundred Torah scholars” and where some fourteen-year-olds were already accomplished scholars.147 “Giving a sermon there is hard,” Azulai explained, “because they preach about subtleties (pilpul ), and everyone can challenge the preacher and he has to answer: how much embarrassment this causes!”—a clear indication that the preacher had to expect a learned audience.148 Azulai’s own host, Joshua ha-Kohen Tanuji, had been instrumental in advancing rabbinic scholarship and had imported a Hebrew printing press from Izmir. A contemporary Muslim traveler, the Algerian al-Wartalani, who was in Tunisia in the 1760s, had similar words of recognition for the learnedness of the Muslim scholars he encountered there. Yaron Tsur has suggested that the active support of rabbinic learning by Jewish notables in Tunisia and the competitive display of learning were likely influenced by a similar pursuit of Islamic religious scholarship in Husainid Tunisia, from the governors’ court on down.149 At the same time, competing notions of scholarship and scholarly excellence likewise become evident in Azulai’s travelogue. Thus he voices some criticism of the Tunisian rabbis who, as he tells it, were deeply influenced by Ashkenazi-style Talmudic inquiry “and all their interest lies in Talmud and Maharsha [Samuel Idels (Poland, 1555–1631), a famous commentator on the Talmud and tosafot], and the novellae and study

Agents of Philanthropy

ways of the rabbis of Ashkenaz [the tosafists and their interpreters], and a little bit of Maimonides. But they are no experts in the legal decisors (poskim) and the authors of responsa.” On another occasion, too, Azulai reproached one of his rabbinic interlocutors in Tunis that “he did not study the Beit Yosef [the sixteenth-century code of law written by the Sephardic rabbi Joseph Caro (1488–1575)] and other p­ oskim, and they spend all their days learning Talmud and Maharsha.”150 The visits of emissaries from the Holy Land, therefore, facilitated the encounter of rabbis who hailed from different scholarly traditions and subscribed to different notions of what rabbinic learning ideally entailed. The example of Azulai’s visit in Tunis demonstrates that such distinctions were significantly more complex than any dichotomous juxtaposition of “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardic/Mediterranean” rabbi­nic tradition might suggest,151 and his experience likewise rebels against any notion of the primacy of a center of rabbinic scholarship in the Land of Israel versus a periphery of diaspora communities. When Nahum Slouschz visited North Africa in the early twentieth century, he expressed just such a notion of center versus periphery when he claimed that “[a] large part of the Jewish populations of the interior of Africa owe the preservation of their Judaism” to the emissaries from the Holy Land, and that it was the sheluhim who were responsible for bringing “to the inaccessible corners of the earth greetings from Zion, news of all things Jewish, memories of the past and hopes for a glorious future.”152 This Zionist reading of the emissary as a rabbinic leader carrying Torah forth from Zion into the lands of exile, echoed by the scholar of shelihut Abraham Ya‘ari as well, is clearly at odds with the evidence from Azulai’s experiences in Tunis. Since Azulai was not actually dispatched to Tunisia but rather to Europe, he did not technically visit the community as a shaliah. Still, he reported in his travelogue: I received much honor, so that even some pregnant women would come to the house of the elder [Joshua Tanuji, where Azulai was staying], wanting to look at me. They would stand by the windows and would watch me from a distance, and I did not even notice. One Sabbath I was walking in the courtyard together with the elder, and I noticed that the women were behind me and grabbed the edges of my robe from behind to kiss them gently.153

113

114

Agents of Philanthropy

In Tunis, the emissary from the Land of Israel was more than a representative of the Jewish communities in Erets Israel engaged in fundraising: to many, he appeared as the embodiment of the Holy Land itself, and he seemed more of a holy man than an emissary on a philanthropic mission.154 The sanctity ascribed to many sheluhim from the Holy Land is also apparent in the fact that in North Africa, unlike in the Ottoman lands or in Europe, the graves of emissaries who passed away during their mission often became sites of pilgrimage. An example of this phenomenon was the grave of Rabbi Amram Divan, a ­shaliah for Hebron to Morocco in 1763 and again in 1773.155 David Hasin of ­Meknès composed a poem on the occasion of the emissary’s visit, and years later a lamentation when he learned of the emissary’s untimely death, outside Ouezzane in 1782.156 Divan’s burial site became a revered place for both Jews and Muslims and the destination for a thrice-annual pilgrimage, and in the city of Sefrou a benevolent society (hevrah) was established in the name of Amram Divan.157 D ­ avid Hasin of Meknès and other North African poets wrote numerous piyutim (­liturgical poems) in praise of visiting emissaries and in celebration of the Holy Land. In the 1830s, for example, Jacob Verdugo wrote poems in praise of two emissaries from Tiberias and Safed, and a poem in praise of the Holy Land when another visiting shaliah, Haim Ashkenazi of Safed, suggested that he compose a Hebrew text to an Ottoman Turkish melody that he liked.158 Again, it is important to remember that the encounter between the emissaries from the Land of Israel and Jewish communities in the diaspora was never a unidirectional relation between center and periphery. The reverence of the graves of sheluhim in North Africa is a case in point: on the face of it, this tradition reinforced the centrality of the Holy Land. At the same time, however, it actually inverted the relation between homeland and periphery as it converted a place in the  North African diaspora into a sacred space, a space that absorbed the sanctity of the Land of Israel and, in many cases, became a site of pilgrimage itself.159 Jews in the diaspora thus could appropriate the sanctity of the Land of Israel, as it were, to endow their own diasporic home with greater symbolic capital: whether in the form of a pilgrimage site springing up around the grave of a former emissary or in the form of a pious endowment to benefit the Holy Land, which

Agents of Philanthropy

allowed a donor in the diaspora to celebrate the importance and prestige of his community. The reverence shown to sheluhim like Azulai should not obscure the fact that in North Africa, no less than elsewhere, there existed tensions between the emissaries and the communities. We already have seen how the Tunisians received Bekhor Almosnino of Jerusalem with “scorn and mockery.” In the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hezekiah Joseph Covo, another emissary for Jerusalem, complained that the community in Sefrou in Morocco had failed to treat him with the respect that he thought was due a representative of the holy city of Jerusalem.160 Also when it came to the allocation of funds, the emissaries and the communities in North Africa did not always see eye to eye. In 1829, to give but one example, Raphael Bekhor Israel ha-Levi, shaliah for Jerusalem, reported in a letter to Rabbi Judah Elbaz that he felt cheated by the official in charge of the funds for the Holy Land in Sefrou: during his visit he had received twenty-five mithqal, or gold dinars, and had been informed that this was all the money that had been collected in the community. Subsequently, however, he learned that another emissary, Rahamim Gedaliah, who visited the same city just eight months later, had received the same amount: “how is it possible that the funds grew this much in just eight months?” he asked, and it turned out that he had been awarded only half the money available, with the remainder being withheld for the next emissary. Ha-Levi considered this to be an outrage, because “for a long time it had been established that each emissary who comes receives all the funds available.”161 Commonalities and differences in rabbinic learning only constituted one aspect of Rabbi Azulai’s encounter with the Jews of Tunis. His experience also illustrates the encounter of Jews from various cultural backgrounds, highlighting different bodily practices ranging from dress to food to personal deportment. Tunis itself was the home of two different communities, the indigenous Tunisians, or tuwansa, and more recent immigrants from Livorno, known as the grana, whereas Azulai as a rabbi hailing from Ottoman Palestine was somewhat of a cultural outsider. By 1710, the Livornese Sephardim had established their own community in Tunis, referred to as K. K. Portugezim, or the “Portuguese congregation,” in the sources, alongside the community of the

115

116

Agents of Philanthropy

autochthonous Tunisian Jews and Sephardic immigrants from earlier centuries.162 The Livornese Jews thus explicitly defined themselves as part of the Sephardic-Portuguese diaspora that emerged in the seventeenth century with centers in Livorno, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Bordeaux, and other places. Azulai’s travelogue does not dwell on the relations between the Tunisian and Portuguese communities in Tunis, but he does note that one day he wanted to visit the Portuguese synagogue (he calls it K. K. Legornezes) and that his host, the leader of the tuwansa, at first disapproved.163 The separation between the two communities was not always as clear-cut, however: Azulai mentions, for example, Isaac Lumbroso who, “though he is Livornese, was also the rabbi of the Tunisians and taught Torah among [all] the Jews” (he was invested as rabbi of both communities in 1741).164 Still, tensions between the two communities were not infrequent, just as there had been tensions between the Sephardic exiles and the local, Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of North Africa in the wake of the Spanish expulsion in 1492.165 Azulai reports an incident that illustrates the kind of culture clash that could occur upon the encounter of acculturated Western Sephardim from Livorno with a very different environment in Tunis. Once, as he tells it, Azulai was approached in the middle of the night by Moshe Tanuji, the son of the leader of the tuwansa, Joshua ha-Kohen Tanuji, at whose house Azulai was staying during his visit: “My father says that there are here some Livornese [Jews] who belong to the Freemasons,” the younger Tanuji informed a startled Azulai, only to continue and ask: “‘Is it permitted to kill them?’” “When I heard this,” Azulai writes, “I stood up, trembling, saying to him: ‘You ask me about laws dealing with life [and death] while I am lying in bed? Quick, I tell you to tell your father that obviously it is forbidden to kill them. At this point, we do not know of any sin in this matter.’”166 The Jews of Livorno and the Livornese Jews in Tunis thus lived in a very different cultural world than the tuwansa. The former were culturally oriented toward Europe, and the presence of Jewish freemasons in Tunis testifies to the integration of the Livornese Jews into their eighteenth-century European context. In fact, European visitors to eighteenth-century Tunis noted the Western dress of the grana, for example the French consul de Saint-Gervais, who observed in 1733

Agents of Philanthropy

that the Livornese Jews were wearing European-style hats and wigs.167 The European orientation of the Livornese Jews was also apparent in a takanah signed by rabbis Tayeb and Lumbroso in 1741, which stipulated that Jews hailing from Christian countries would join the “­Portuguese” community whereas Jews from the lands of Islam would be part of the tuwansa community (perhaps the reason why Azulai was hosted by the latter). This regulation, while the result of a conflict within the Tunisian community, created a new pattern of identification: an external distinction of cultural difference between European Jews and the Jews of Islam was superimposed onto a community structure already divided between grana and tuwansa. Azulai did not have a direct stake in the tensions separating Livornese and tuwansa in Tunis, yet he, the rabbi from Ottoman Palestine, seemed to feel more cultural affinity with the Livornese than with the Tunisians. As a traveler and visitor, Azulai observed the customs and practices of the Tunisian Jews with the judgmental gaze of an outsider. He described the community leader Joshua Tanuji’s home as a luxurious palace, “outside the ghetto, . . . a majestic court made of marble stone,”168 but his account of Tunisian customs, especially table manners as he observed them in Tanuji’s home, was anything but flattering. To begin with, he noted with surprise that women never sat at the table and did not take their meals together with the men. He continued his observations: They eat with their hands and feet and all the fat would cover their hands. The elder [Joshua Tanuji] would lift up a fatty piece of meat and swallow it, holding it in his hand. He cleaned his hands in a towel resting on his knees, and the towel (mitpahat) became like a slaughter­house (beit ha-mitbahayim).

Tanuji was in the habit of chewing tobacco and spitting it out in front of his guests: “I was distressed by this,” Azulai confessed. “I told them: good manners are ‘void currency’ in your land, and I must not use ‘void currency’ in your land, for what will I do when I get to Livorno,” a place of good manners and refinement.169 Earlier, when first arriving in the port of Sousse, on Tunisia’s eastern coast, Azulai complained about the food served in the home of a community elder, Moshe W ­ azan (“for each one some six or seven liters” of couscous),

117

118

Agents of Philanthropy

and he noted that “in my honor they went all around town to find a spoon.”170 Food and table manners, like dress, are of course important cultural symbols. By distinguishing between Tunisian table manners and his own practice (he ate using a spoon, according to the Ottoman custom),171 Azulai drew a boundary between himself and his hosts. He did so, moreover, by citing Livorno as a model of refinement that he clearly regarded as superior. Azulai’s description of Tunisian Jewry bears many similarities to the representation of North African Jews by European travelers, Jewish and Christian alike, such as Samuel Romanelli, a Jew born in Mantua who joined the circle of Jewish Enlightenment figures in Berlin after spending time in England, Morocco, and Holland. In his book Masa‘ ba-‘Arav printed in 1792 in Berlin, Romanelli wrote about the festive meal on the occasion of a circumcision: [They] sit in a circle on the ground and a big basin full of couscous is set in the middle. Each man digs into it from his side with his hand, takes a handful, rolls it in his hand, and throws it into his mouth. ­Having no napkin to clear their hands, they rub them on their shoes, on their weapons, or on the wall.

He added that only after the men finish do the women enter the room and have their meal.172 That Azulai, the rabbi from Ottoman Palestine, described the bodily practice of the Tunisian Jews in similar terms as a Jewish visitor from Italy, and that he himself, as a Levantino, voiced his preference for the “refinement” of Livorno, illustrates that the dichotomy between “European” and “non-European” Jews is quite misleading. Early modern encounters were more complex than a clash between “West” and “East,” just as the emissaries’ mission and the Istanbul-centered network of philanthropy defy any simple dichotomy of center and periphery within the early modern Jewish world.

Th re e   Ideological Foundations

In 1707, Rabbi Moshe Hagiz of Jerusalem arrived in the city of Amster­ dam, home to the largest Jewish community of Western Europe at the time. There, he was soon confronted with a blunt challenge not only to the practice of supporting the emissaries from the Holy Land but, indeed, also to the very legitimacy of the continued Jewish presence in the Land of Israel following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: I ask your honor to have the kindness and let me know how to understand, in your estimation, the measure of sanctity of the Holy Land nowadays, and whether there is any merit in dwelling there. . . . Moreover, I have been told that those who dwell there are in fact transgressing God’s commandment, who sentenced that this Land should be desolate and that none of the children of Israel should be dwelling in it, and this being the divine will it would seem that those dwelling there are impertinent and deserve punishment rather than support, which they receive constantly on account of all the emissaries. . . . Tell me, what is the reason for all the travails and hardships that the emissaries talk about in their letters, and where does this come from? And if all these travails [that we hear about] are true, then why is it that they don’t leave that Land? How come they do not have enough to sustain themselves with all the money we send them, from our lands and from everywhere in the world, through the emissaries?1

This series of provocative questions appeared in the beginning of Hagiz’ 1707 book Sefat Emet. As he was wont to do, he antagonized most everyone with a sizzling polemic against the Portuguese-­ Sephardic communities of Western Europe, first and foremost that of

119

120

Ideological Foundations

Amsterdam. Hagiz enveloped his passionate defense of the centrality of the Holy Land and the importance of supporting the emissaries who were sent forth from the cities of the Land of Israel in a sweeping indictment of a community that, he charged, was lax in observing rabbinic tradition and overly concerned with its material comfort and place in its non-Jewish environment. The leaders of Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Sephardic community were so incensed that they decided to ban Sefat Emet, requesting that everyone who owned a copy surrender it to one of the members of the ma‘amad, the governing board of the community.2 Hagiz, who was born in 1671, left his native Jerusalem at age 22 to seek funding for the once prestigious Beit Ya‘akov yeshiva, established by the Vega family of Livorno. The yeshiva was headed by Moshe Hagiz’ father, Jacob Hagiz of Fez, and then by Moshe Galante. Funding eroded when its Livornese benefactor, Raphael Vega, passed away, followed by Galante’s death three year later, in 1689. About the same time, Moshe Hagiz’ brother-in-law, Hezekiah da Silva—both were married to daughters of Rabbi Raphael Mordecai Malki, with whom Hagiz had a tempestuous relationship that turned outright hostile after the death of Hagiz’ wife in 1693—went to Amsterdam as an emissary. There, da Silva secured a donation from Jacob Pereira in the enormous sum of 41,000 florins for the establishment of a yeshiva in Jerusalem, under da Silva’s leadership, and another yeshiva in ­Hebron (as well as 25,000 florins for a yeshiva in Amsterdam).3 Hagiz, in the meantime, sought to renew the funding for the Beit Ya‘akov yeshiva, an endeavor that led him first to Rosetta, in Egypt, and then to Livorno. In Rosetta he obtained a commitment from the wealthy philanthropist Abraham Nathan, who promised 30,000 reales to establish a new yeshiva in ­Jerusalem to be led by Hagiz, with the funds to be invested in Livorno, Amsterdam, or Venice. Hagiz, however, was double-crossed by his ­rivals in Jerusalem, including, it seems, his former father-in-law, and he found his hopes crushed when his enemies succeeded in convincing Abraham Nathan to end his cooperation with Hagiz. A few years later, in 1703, Hagiz appeared in Venice, where he became friends with Rabbi Samson Morpurgo, his ally in many of the controversies he would be involved in later, though Morpurgo was

Ideological Foundations

more restrained and reasoned than Hagiz.4 While in Italy, Hagiz remarried, in Verona. After further travels that led him back to Jerusalem and to Prague for several months, Hagiz arrived in Amsterdam in the beginning of 1707 where he penned his polemical Sefat Emet.5 As it turned out, Sefat Emet was just the opening salvo of a series of battles throughout the first half of the eighteenth century waged by Rabbi Hagiz and his allies against what they considered heretical ideas and a dangerous decline of rabbinic authority. Just a few years after the publication of Sefat Emet, Hagiz attacked the crypto-Sabbatean Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon, who was in Amsterdam at the time, and he accused the city’s chief rabbi, Solomon Ayllon (himself a former emissary for Safed6), of supporting Hayon and of being a closet Sabbatean himself. As a result of this second controversy, Hagiz was expelled by the community from Amsterdam altogether and eventually relocated to Altona, where he later published another, less controversial book on shelihut, Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei (1738). Hagiz is mostly known as a polemicist leading the fight against the Sabbatean heresy in Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century. His was a prominent voice in campaigns against individuals such as the Italian kabbalist Moshe Haim Luzzato and Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz in Hamburg, both of whom were accused of harboring Sabbatean beliefs. Thanks to the biography published by Elisheva ­Carlebach,7 this part of Hagiz’ career and his extensive polemical writings are well documented. Hagiz’ writings on the Land of Israel and the importance of shelihut, which must be understood as part of his larger campaign on behalf of what Carlebach called an early Sephardic “Orthodoxy,” have not received the same attention but are important for being instrumental in establishing the ideological foundations for the philanthropic network on behalf of the Jews in the Land of Israel. What is particularly interesting about Hagiz’ work is that he makes his case in the context of his confrontation with the peculiar conditions of the Western Sephardic communities in early modern Europe. His writing was therefore more than an appeal to the empathy of fellow Jews for their impoverished brethren in the ancient homeland. It was a rally­ing cry for reinventing Jerusalem and the Land of Israel as the center of Jewish life and part of a broader struggle to fend off the challenges that early modernity posed to rabbinic authority.

121

122

Ideological Foundations

Hagiz was not the first, to be sure, who felt the necessity to defend the value of a continued Jewish presence in the Holy Land and the necessity of the communities in the diaspora to provide material support. In fact, solidarity with the Jewish yishuv in Palestine and a pan-Jewish commitment to the welfare of the Jews in the Land of Israel could never be taken for granted: they were contested values that needed to be built, maintained, and propagated. As the defensive writings of Hagiz and others suggest, one should not assume that the Jews of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, or North Africa were only waiting for an opportunity to assist the Jews of the Holy Land. The network of support for the Jews in the Land of Israel required a sustained effort on the part of the rabbinic leadership in Palestine and its allies abroad to convince the Jewish communities of the diaspora of the legitimacy and urgency of this philanthropic endeavor. The obstacles that had to be overcome were not only technical and logistical, due to the slow pace of travel and exchange of information—issues that we encountered in previous chapters—but also ideological: why, many Jews in the diaspora asked, was it wise to commit precious resources and send them to the Land of Israel, when each community itself had to deal with its own poor already? Why, they wondered, was it necessary for Jews to live in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine—in the absence of the Temple and in a period of divinely decreed exile from the Holy Land—if it caused so much suffering and misery? Two works printed in the seventeenth century in Venice were designed to address precisely these kinds of questions: in 1631, an anonymous treatise called Horvot Yerushalayim described in considerable detail the afflictions that befell the Jews of Jerusalem during the twoyear reign of Muhammad ibn Faruh (1626–27), which had left the community with an astronomical debt. Anticipating objections from his intended readers, the author prefaced the account by explaining why the Jews could not simply abandon Jerusalem in order to escape the burden of their debts.8 Whereas this early text focused on a series of practical considerations—though it also emphasized the religious importance of a continued Jewish settlement in the Holy City—a book by Nathan Shapira, an emissary on behalf of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem, presented an ideological defense of the sanctity of the Land of Israel and the virtue of its Jewish resi-

Ideological Foundations

dents on the basis of Kabbalah. His book, Tuv ha-Arets, printed in 1655, presented a comprehensive collection of kabbalistic traditions regarding the Holy Land, particularly the teachings of Isaac Luria, Moshe Cordovero, and Abraham Azulai, which set the tone for many subsequent tomes published in the eighteenth century and even in the nineteenth century.9 Acknowledging the apologetic aspect of his endeavor, Shapira noted that he wrote his book in order to “close the mouth of those who speak lies and ill about the Land [of Israel] and its inhabitants.”10 It would therefore be a mistake to assume that the philanthropic enterprise of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries simply emerged in response to economic circumstances in the Land of Israel. Rather, it represented a project that required ideological legitimization and the philanthropic effort from the beginning was wrapped in a broader desire to reaffirm rabbinic tradition in the face of several challenges that appeared in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: Sabbatean messianism and crypto-Sabbatean beliefs, on the one hand, and early Enlightenment and secularization on the other hand. Such conflicts were particularly acute in the communities of the Western (“Portuguese”) Sephardic diaspora, the communities that were the intended readers of Horvot Yerushalayim and the destination of Nathan Shapira’s mission in the 1650s, and it was here that the debate about the creation of a philanthropic network for the Jews of the Holy Land received a new impulse with the provocative yet influential work of Moshe Hagiz.

Amsterdam, the New Jerusalem It is not clear whether the defiant questions presented to Moshe Hagiz that he cited in Portuguese at the beginning of his Sefat Emet, the remainder of which is in Hebrew, represented an actual challenge to the visiting rabbi or whether Hagiz used this text as a literary device, as a foil for his own polemic. It seems more likely that Hagiz was responding to a position actually voiced by some in Amsterdam since otherwise it is not clear why the text would have appeared in Portuguese (which Hagiz referred to as la‘az, “vernacular,” or ha-lashon ha-sefaradi, “the

123

124

Ideological Foundations

Sephardic language”).11 Be that as it may, it was particularly distressing to Hagiz that his counterparts in Amsterdam were marshaling the Bible itself as a proof text to challenge the commitment to the welfare of the Jewish yishuv in the Holy Land. “From what I understand from some scholars (alguns Eestudantes),” Hagiz cited his interlocutor, the city of Jerusalem should have the same status as any other city nowadays, for in any place that we address God, he must respond to us as if we were in the Holy Land, as it is confirmed by the passage [Exodus 20:21] ‘In every place that you will call my name, I will come to you and bless you’ (Em todo lugar que nomeares meõ nome, virey a ti, y te bedizirey).12

Hagiz felt compelled to refute an argument that, he claimed, was based on a wrong understanding of the Hebrew original of the verse, which literally read “in every place where I cause My name to be mentioned (azkir et shemi) I will come to you and bless you.”13 According to Hagiz, the “vernacular Jews” (lo‘azim) were confused because they “translated the word azkir as if it read tazkir [i.e., wherever you mention God’s name],” and they therefore mistakenly believed that God was as near to them in the diaspora as he was to those dwelling in Jerusalem. Hagiz criticized those so-called estudantes, intellectuals with no knowledge of Hebrew who arrogated to themselves the right to make their own judgments on the basis of the biblical text alone, and an (erroneous) vernacular translation of the biblical text at that. Instead, he suggested, it was the rabbis who were the ones to provide the only authentic reading of tradition. In response to the challenge, Hagiz explained that the verb azkir, which appears in the first person in the verse, refers in reality to the high priest through whom God himself speaks and who pronounces the divine name on the Day of Atonement. This is only possible in the Temple, of course, and thus the verse suggests the exact opposite of what the “vernacular Jews” believed: rather than affirming God’s being equally present everywhere, the verse actually reinforces the uniqueness of Jerusalem and shows that the divine presence is still attached to the place of the Temple in Jerusalem.14 Hagiz’ interpretation of the verse that served him to refute the challenge presented to him in Amsterdam was in line with Rashi’s classical commentary.15

Ideological Foundations

In fact, the Judeo-Spanish translation of the Bible published in Ferrara in 1553 for an audience of former conversos in the Western Se­phardic diaspora had also translated the verse in the spirit of the classical commentary by Rashi, true to its declared intention of offering a translation of the Bible palabra por palabra de la verdad hebrayica, that is, according to the traditional rabbinic understanding of the text. It thus rendered the verse as reading “en todo lugar que faré enmentar a mi nombre,” which was precisely the way Hagiz wanted it understood. Christian versions of the Bible, however, followed the Latin Vulgate, and thus various Spanish versions read “en todo lugar en que n ­ onbren mi nonbre” or “en todo lugar que menbrar ami nombre.”16 This suggests, incidentally, that Portuguese Sephardim in Western Europe likely perused such Christian translations of the Bible, not only those that were designed to reeducate the former conversos in the spirit of the rabbinic tradition. This is, then, what was at stake for Moshe Hagiz in Sefat Emet: defending the centrality of the Land of Israel was part and parcel of defending the authority of rabbinic tradition against the critical voices he encountered among the Sephardim of Western Europe. Based on their own understanding of the Bible, they defiantly questioned the foundations of a continued Jewish presence in the Holy Land that depended for its very existence on the benevolence of wealthy communities like the one in Amsterdam. Hagiz’ strategy was to prove his opponents wrong by, first, exposing how they relied on an erroneous (or Christian) reading of the biblical text and, second, by admonishing them to submit to rabbinic authority as the only valid arbiter of Jewish tradition. It is therefore not surprising that Hagiz did not immediately turn his attention to the question of the sanctity of the Holy Land but used the first three chapters of Sefat Emet to reaffirm the authority of rabbinic tradition and the validity of the Oral Torah. “You must, to begin with,” he admonishes his imagined audience right at the outset of his book, “listen carefully and hear and believe the words of the Sages . . . for the house of Israel is built and founded upon them.”17 Making an argument common in this kind of apologetic literature, he states that whoever doubts a single word of the rabbinic tradition is bound to ultimately reject God himself.18 He closed this section dedicated to his defense of rabbinic tradition by taking another swipe

125

126

Ideological Foundations

at the Western Sephardim living in places such as Amsterdam and London, where they enjoyed an unprecedented degree of toleration and where rabbinic authority appeared clearly under siege. “Because of our sins,” Hagiz lamented, “there are many of those . . . who, because they live in lands where they enjoy freedom together with wealth . . . have thrown off the yoke of the Sages from their backs . . . and they want to be free for sexual transgressions and the like.”19 Perceiving what seemed to him like a serious breakdown of the traditional order, Hagiz recommended that his audience turn to three books that would enlighten and lead them to the path of rabbinic Judaism: he singled out Immanuel Aboab’s Nomología O Discursos L ­ egales (1629), a defense of the validity of the Oral Torah but displaying at the same time a broad understanding of both Talmud and Kabbalah as well as of Latin and secular learning; Menasseh ben Israel’s Conciliador (1632), a work in which the famous Amsterdam rabbi and book publisher sought to explain and resolve what appeared to be contradictions in the Bible, a text that earned him respect for his erudition among Christian Hebraists as well; and the Spanish translation of Judah haLevi’s Kuzari published by Jacob Abendana in 1663, a gem of medieval Jewish thought that offered a polemic against Christianity, Islam, and philosophy. Written in Spanish, still the language of high-brow literature for Western Sephardim at the time, these works were examples of the flourishing apologetic literature directed at an audience of former conversos and defending the universe of rabbinic tradition against the challenges of critical voices that questioned the veracity of the Oral Law and the authority of the rabbis as the sole arbiters of interpretation. Faced with challenges associated with such famous names as Uriel da Costa and Spinoza, with the aftermath of Sabbatean messianism and crypto-Sabbatean tendencies in the early eighteenth century, with signs of acculturation and secularization, and more generally with the difficulties of integrating a population of former conversos into a community guided by rabbinic tradition, seventeenth-century Amsterdam saw the proliferation of a great number of such apologetic treatises.20 Hagiz’ Sefat Emet should be seen as fitting into this particular context, as did his later and better-known works such as Mishnat Hakhamim, published in 1733.

Ideological Foundations

The fact that Hagiz penned his polemic in Hebrew, ostensibly addressing an audience of “vernacular Jews” for whose benefit he recommended three books of rabbinic apologetics available in Spanish, raises the question of for whom he really wrote Sefat Emet: the imagined reader who had presented his challenge in Portuguese hardly would have been able to read Hagiz’ lengthy response in Hebrew rabbinic prose. It appears that Hagiz wrote his treatise as a reference book for other rabbinic emissaries who needed to be equipped with tools to refute the challenges to their mission they were likely to encounter, especially among the Sephardim of the West. Hagiz admitted that not all emissaries had been up to the challenge: “Because of our sins, all the [emissaries] think about is to move on [to their next destination], not to admonish, teach, and remove the stumbling block from before the people in the communities [they visit] . . . and all they want is to gather the money necessary to address their needs and to maintain the yishuv [of the Jews] in the Land [of Israel].”21 Sefat Emet, then, was supposed to provide an ideological foundation for the project of shelihut and to equip emissaries with the ammunition to defend their cause. Whereas Hagiz praised the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire that were willing and eager to listen to the teachings of the rabbinic emissaries and heed their words, he accused the Sephardim of Amsterdam not only of challenging the foundations of shelihut, but of undermining the authority of the emissaries as representatives of the rabbinic tradition. In Ottoman lands, according to Hagiz, the Jewish communities assisted the emissaries “with abundance and great honor,” and “if [the shaliah] sees something in the city that is not right he will correct it, and there will be nobody to reply to him: this is how it is done here . . . and we will not depart from our bad custom even if [the prophet] Elijah came, which is what they would say in [Amsterdam].”22 In reality, of course, the Ottoman communities were not always as receptive to the emissaries and their entreaties as Hagiz suggested, nor was the community in Amsterdam as hostile as he made it out to be. It is clear, in any event, that for Hagiz the philanthropic network of shelihut was about more than raising money in support of a besieged Jewish community in Palestine: it was part and parcel of his broader claim to a pan-Jewish rabbinic authority that transcended the particular

127

128

Ideological Foundations

traditions and concerns of individual communities and posited the primacy not only of the rabbinate in general, but of the rabbinic tradition embodied by the scholars of the Holy Land in particular.

Confronting the Critics of Rabbinic Authority What were the challenges emissaries from the Land of Israel could expect to face upon their arrival in Amsterdam and other Western Se­ phardic communities, according to Hagiz? And how did he respond, how did he make the case for shelihut in the face of the skepticism he encountered? On the most fundamental level, Hagiz’ (imagined or real) interlocutors questioned that the Holy Land continued to provide the central reference point for Jewish communities all over the world: “What is the Land of Israel to us, now that the Lord has already removed us from there and we do not have a Land of Israel any longer?”23 In their view, the importance of the Land was historical but irrelevant to the present—and it was precisely this notion that Hagiz argued against when he emphasized the importance of solidarity with the Jews in the contemporary Land of Israel. What is more, for many critics in the diaspora, Jerusalem was not only identified with a remote past and had lost its centrality for the present: it had been replaced by new centers of Jewish life elsewhere. “Everyone in his city says, peace is upon me, for this is Jerusalem to me, and I live in tranquility and free of worries, without the yoke of Torah. . . . How do the worries of Jerusalem concern me?”24 In Hagiz’ view, the lack of solidarity with the Jews of the Holy Land was tied to a decline in the commitment to rabbinic tradition and law, the “yoke of the Torah.” Resistance to shelihut was expressed—in Hagiz’ rendering, that is—as an objection to the emissaries and the rabbinic culture they represented: Why do you come, to gather money so that the rabbis can drink their coffee and chew their tobacco and write down everything that occurs to them and make it into a book, and make it part of the religion of Israel, and then they come to have it printed and distribute it among us, to empty our homes?25

Elsewhere, Hagiz noted that “nowadays some people . . . say: the

Ideological Foundations

Land [of Israel] is good, but it is a golden dish full of scorpions, [in reference to] the rabbis who live there and . . . smite and punish according to the law.”26 The criticism of shelihut was thus tied to skepticism of the pursuit of rabbinic learning and the authority of the rabbis interpreting and extending the norms of Jewish law. In the passage cited above, the rabbis of the Holy Land were accused of spending their time in idleness—“drink[ing] their coffee and chew[ing] their tobacco”—while at the same time contributing to ever-expanding demands and restrictions of Jewish law: “everything that occurs to them” became a binding part of the Jewish tradition. The skepticism of many former conversos in early modern Amsterdam regarding the authority of rabbinic learning, and by extension the notion of the Oral Torah in general, is indeed well documented and did in fact lead in some cases, as Hagiz worried it would, to a rejection of the fundaments of rabbinic Judaism tout court. Thus Uriel da Costa, to cite a famous example, had openly defied the rabbinic foundations of the Jewish community after he arrived in Amsterdam from Portugal and reverted to Judaism: I had not been there many Days, before I observed, that the Customs and Ordinances of the modern Jews were very different from those commanded by Moses: Now if the Law was to be strictly observed, according to the letter, as it expressly declares, it must be very unjustifiable for the Jewish Doctors [i.e., the rabbis] to add to it Inventions of a quite contrary Nature. . . . The modern Jewish Rabbins, like their Ancestors, are an obstinate and perverse race of Men.

Da Costa’s intellectual journey eventually led him to question not just the authority of rabbinic tradition but the divine character of the “Law of Moses” itself: Some time after this, as Age and Experience are apt to occasion new discoveries to the Mind of Man . . . I began to question with myself, whether the Law of Moses ought to be accounted the Law of God, seeing there were many Arguments which seemed to persuade, or rather determine the contrary. At last I came to be fully of [the] ­Opinion, that it was nothing but a human Invention, like many other Systems in the World, and that Moses was not the Writer; for it contained many Things contrary to the Law of Nature.27

129

130

Ideological Foundations

A few years after Hagiz’ visit to Amsterdam, in 1712, three members of the Portuguese community in Amsterdam were excommunicated when their “Karaite” worldview was discovered. Like the actual Karaites, they rejected the validity of the rabbinic Oral Tradition and sought to refashion Judaism into a religion of reason, devoid of “superstition” and freed from the obligation to observe the commandments.28 Elsewhere in the port cities of the Western Jewish diaspora too rabbinic tradition was being criticized. Rabbi Jacob Emden of Altona denounced those who “deny God in his heaven. They say to God, leave us. Who is the Almighty that he should enslave us? And what good will it do if we pray to him, while he is hidden by the dark clouds? And some deny his very existence and make the world a lawless place . . . and they argue that everything happens by chance.” Others expressed a longing for religious reform, as when Abigaill Levy Franks of New York wrote to her son that she “heartly wish[ed] a Calvin or Luther would rise amongst us . . . for I dont think religeon consist in idle cerimonies and works of superoregations.”29 As these examples show, Hagiz responded to a very real problem, certainly as far as the large urban communities of the Atlantic seaboard were concerned. Writing his book, as I have suggested, as a manual to be perused by rabbinic emissaries to refute the various challenges they were likely to encounter, Hagiz may have exaggerated the dangers of freethinking “heretics” (or “epicureans,” as the rabbis liked to refer to their critics), but he was addressing a situation that was pervasive enough. Still, there is a problem with taking Hagiz’ polemics as a mirror of social reality and concluding from his critique of the Amsterdam community, as some nationalist historians of the mid-twentieth century did, that the Jews of Western Europe at the time were already suffering from what Jitzchak Baer called a “process of decomposition” (Zersetzungsprozess) in the early eighteenth century.30 Abraham Ya‘ari, in his study of shelihut, likewise took Hagiz’ testimony as a sign that “the winds of assimilation (ruhot ha-hitbolelut)” were undermining the commitment to the welfare of the Holy Land.31 The first to criticize this interpretation was Jacob Katz, who suggested that the attitudes denounced by Hagiz “were sporadic rather than consistent and serious convictions as is borne out by the fact that they did not find written expression and were not disseminated at

Ideological Foundations

that time.”32 As Daniel Swetschinsky argued more recently, with regard to Amsterdam, “the extraordinary nature of the religious tensions [in early modern Amsterdam] may never cease to attract scholarly and lay curiosity; yet, when all is said and done, it is the generally smooth reintegration of the New Christians into a traditional Jewish community more than the quarrelsomeness of a few individuals that deserves our attention.”33 In the end, the lay leadership of the Amsterdam Portuguese community, so maligned in Hagiz’ Sefat Emet (and even more viciously in his anti-Sabbatean polemic a few years later) actually shared the values of the Jerusalem rabbi. Like Hagiz, both rabbinic and lay leaders in Amsterdam sought to combat heresy, especially of the rationalist sort (though, it is true, Chief Rabbi Ayllon himself was a cryptoSabbatean34), and denounced individuals who openly flaunted rabbinic law. The Portuguese community made ample use of the herem, or ban, to enforce its authority,35 and its rabbis chastised wayward members of the congregation in their sermons.36 Hagiz condemned Portuguese Sephardim in the West who wanted to “throw off the yoke of rabbinic law to indulge in sexual transgressions” and who “shave their beards, wear foreign wigs and ‘abound in customs of the aliens [Isa 2:6].’”37 Although there is ample evidence from elsewhere in Western and Central Europe of Jews adopting the latest fashions, none other than the Amsterdam community’s lay leader­ship itself made repeated attempts to outlaw the shaving of the beard as a transgression of religious tradition, reiterating a prohibition of the practice (apparently with little success) in 1657 and 1686; it also asked the rabbis of the city to address the issue in their sermons.38 Moreover, the clean-shaven faces of men that appeared to Hagiz as a telltale sign of declining morals and exaggerated acculturation were long a common sight not only among the Portuguese Sephardim of the Atlantic seaboard but also in Italy. In early eighteenth-century Italy, a respected rabbinic scholar such as Moshe Hefez-Gentili was depicted in a portrait that appeared in his Melekhet Mahashevet (Venice, 1710) clean-shaven and with ample locks: a scholar from the prominent Italian Jewish Hefez-Gentili family into which Hagiz married when he wed Venturina, daughter of the late Asher Hefez-Gentili, in 1703. As Elliott Horowitz has shown, in the “largely beardless eighteenth century,” the “major geographic distinction governing the status of the

131

132

Ideological Foundations

beard” was that between the Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, and Europe.39 With the importance attributed to the beard in Lurianic Kabbalah, Hagiz was not the first emissary from the Holy Land to be taken aback when confronted with the clean-shaven Jews of Europe: Nathan Shapira, an emissary of the mid-seventeenth century, had appended a treatise against the shaving of the beard to his book published in Venice in 1660 denouncing the partaking of gentile wine. Hagiz’ criticism of the Sephardic communities of Western Europe therefore was tied to a broader campaign to defend the authority of rabbinic tradition, but it also resulted from the cross-cultural encounter of a rabbi from Ottoman Jerusalem visiting one of the largest cities and a bustling center of trade and finance on the Atlantic seaboard. The heated rhetoric of Hagiz’ polemic obscured the fact that the Sephar­dic community of Amsterdam itself continued to be, throughout the eighteenth century, a religious center and the focal point for a far-flung network of communities in Western Europe and across the Atlantic, providing its sister communities from Hamburg to Curação to New York with books, religious objects, and rabbinic personnel.40 At the same time, the community looked repeatedly to the Holy Land and to the communities of the Ottoman Empire to recruit its rabbis, as when it enlisted, in 1760, the help of the Pekidim in Istanbul to recruit a rabbi for the Amsterdam community, expressing an interest in Haim Joseph David Azulai and Yomtov Saban, both from Palestine, and Haim Abulafia of Salonika.41 In the end, all three refused and they hired Rabbi Solomon Salem. (Azulai would later worry that his declining the invitation to serve in Amsterdam might damage his shelihut in that city in the 1770s.)42 Also with regard to the donations from Amsterdam for the welfare of the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, reality was a far cry from Hagiz’ denunciations and Amsterdam continued to be one of the main centers of fund-raising on behalf of the Land of Israel throughout the century (and even asserted exclusive control over the network in Western Europe in the 1820s). Hagiz claimed, for example, that since 1691, when Hezekiah da Silva had visited, eighteen years had passed until, “after so many years, two emissaries arrived last year [i.e., 1706], one after another, and how much trouble and how many complaints were raised against them.” In the end they only managed

Ideological Foundations

to raise a meager amount, “and the [donor] communities think that with the little that they gave to them, the sons of Jerusalem have been redeemed and liberated.”43 In reality, however, several emissaries from different cities in the Holy Land had visited Amsterdam in the years following da Silva’s mission, for example Shimon bar Jacob (1696 and 1706), Abraham Rovigo and Jacob Hazan (1705)—those three were mentioned by Hagiz himself 44—as well as Jacob ha-Levi (1699) and Shimon Gomes Pato (1700). In 1712, only five years after Hagiz published his Sefat Emet, the community of Amsterdam donated what appears to have been the largest sum ever awarded to a single shaliah—none other than Rabbi Abraham Yitshaki, Hagiz’ teacher and mentor in Jerusalem.45 What is more, throughout the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century, it was precisely wealthy Sephardic benefactors in the West who endowed yeshivot and supported rabbinic learning in the Holy Land—the Pereira endowment obtained by Hezekiah da Silva is a case in point; it was only from the second quarter of the eighteenth century on that individuals from the Ottoman capital Istanbul established similar endowments.46

Encounters in Western Europe Haim Joseph David Azulai’s travelogue, in which he extensively documented his visit to Western Europe, provides a window on to the encounter between the emissaries from the Holy Land and the Sephardic Jews of the West. His description defies the binary opposition of tradition versus secularism, commitment to the Holy Land versus civic integration into Western societies. Instead, the Sephardic communities of the West, though highly acculturated, were also clearly committed to pan-Jewish philanthropy and to the Holy Land. In April 1774, Azulai reached Livorno to embark on his mission to Italy and Western Europe. He spent the usual forty days in quarantine in the port of Livorno and then set out on a fund-raising tour that led him through northern Italy, France, and Holland. A large portion of his mission occurred among Portuguese Sephardic communities, including Bayonne, Bordeaux, and Amsterdam. The environment in

133

134

Ideological Foundations

which Azulai found himself among the Sephardim of Western Europe was rather different from what he had experienced during his visit in Tunis, where not coincidentally much of the description in his travelogue was taken up by accounts of scholarly debates with other rabbis. Still, the emissary was generally well received throughout his sojourn in Western Europe as well. Arriving in Amsterdam in 1778, for example, Azulai noted: “God gave me favor and they bestowed upon me great honor. . . . They provided me with padrinos from among the great, wealthy and important of the congregation, from among the nobility of the nation (de la nasyon).”47 Azulai was not always satisfied with the material support that he received for his mission, but his critique was still a far cry from the polemical attacks of someone like Moshe Hagiz. Thus, on one occasion, Azulai wrote about a gathering organized by one of the community leaders in Amsterdam: I was at the home of Se[ñor] Isaac ibn Dana and he assembled a large group, some fourteen people, from among his relatives and friends. We were there some three hours smoking and drinking tea and having refreshments and I talked about the Land of Israel. . . . And I said to them: I am distressed because of you, for if you think that all this [his representation of the Land of Israel] is exaggerations and lies, how can you consider yourselves God-fearing and scholars of Torah (­talmidei hakhamim)? And if you think that this is the truth, why are your sealed hearts not torn open and your compassion roused? And if you say that the times are bad for you, why do you spend money on the theater and on your [other] diversions?48

Azulai pointed out that the wealthy elite among the Amsterdam Se­ phardim seemed to have time and money for secular pastimes such as attending the theater, but he also appealed to them as people who regarded themselves “as God-fearing and scholars of Torah.” This was precisely the foundation of shelihut in Western Europe: despite ubiquitous signs of secularization, these Western Jews saw themselves very much as part of a wider Jewish world, with which they engaged, among other ways, through the mediation of the emissaries. Azulai did not entirely trust the commitment to Jewish law among the Amsterdam Sephardim, however, and throughout his first stay in Amsterdam, in the 1750s, he avoided visiting the homes of community

Ideological Foundations

notables for meals on Saturdays as he was suspicious of how strictly they followed the rules and restrictions regarding the use of fire and the prohibition of cooking food on the Sabbath.49 In fact, it was only while visiting the Sephardic communities in Western Europe that he ever voiced concerns regarding the observance of the Jewish dietary laws, something that never came up during his travels in Italy or the German-speaking lands. While in Bordeaux, for example, Azulai was anxious about an invitation to dine with Benjamin Grades, because he was “worried on account of the dishes as well as the maids who were doing all the cooking.”50 Also in Bordeaux, Azulai was asked to rule in a controversy regarding ritual slaughter (shehitah), involving a ritual slaughterer (shohet) who had been declared unfit by the city’s rabbi, Jacob Attias, and several competitors, including someone who was a relative of the rabbi. With the support of several other rabbis, Azulai determined that the shohet who had been declared unfit by the community rabbi was in fact qualified, whereas Attias’ relative “was not able to produce a single knife [that would meet the halakhic requirements for the ritual slaughtering] in five days.”51 Two decades later, he noted during a visit in Toulouse that he avoided eating any meat because “there was a shohet from Bordeaux and I did not trust his shehitah [i.e., that the meat he slaughtered was kosher].”52 Prominent in Azulai’s description of the Western Sephardic communities in Holland and in southwestern France was the degree of social and cultural integration of these communities into their Christian environment, defiance of rabbinic law in public, and the presence of individuals who declared that they did not believe in the Oral Torah and rabbinic tradition. Crucially, however, these signs of secularization did not by any means translate into a weakening of ties to the Land of Israel among these communities, and Azulai appeared to understand this well. Especially the sections of Azulai’s travelogue that deal with his sojourn in Bordeaux and Bayonne provide the image of a community undergoing a radical process of civic integration and secularization in the 1770s. Invited to a celebratory meal following a wedding (sheva‘ berakhot) in Bordeaux, Azulai found that most of the guests were Christians belonging to the nobility of the city, a clear indication of the social status of the Sephardic merchant elite in this city in southwestern France. The following day, Azulai noted in his diary that the

135

136

Ideological Foundations

son of the community elder Jacob Raphael, whose mother was a Catholic, had been sent off to Amsterdam to undergo circumcision and that there he had since become a well-known philosopher.53 ­Elsewhere among the Portuguese Sephardim of Western Europe ­Azulai also came across signs of the adoption of cultural values and social practices from Christian society: during his sojourn in London, for example, Azulai’s fund-raising mission faltered when he learned that the leading Sephardic families had left the city for their country estates.54 At the same time, Azulai was also confronted with ideological challenges to rabbinic tradition and, in fact, to the integrity and uncontested nature of traditional knowledge. Azulai told the following anecdote about his visit to Bayonne: The elder, Se[ñor] Isaac, and Se[ñor] Jacob Levi, the parnas, took me to the Jardines of the citadel. . . . They showed me a piece of stone that had been sent from Spain to the Academy in Paris, and it had once been wood and by virtue of some chemicals had become stone. I said to the elders that I did not believe this. . . . An Ashkenazi hakham [who was with them] said: I saw in some book that there is a bird that grows on a tree. They began to laugh. But I told them that this is indeed so, according to the Shulhan ‘Arukh, Yoreh de‘ah, section 84, and they should have some belief, so that our perfect Torah not be less than the gentile sages who testify on a stone that it is wood. And they knew that they were caught in their own net, and they were speechless.55

The incident illustrates well the different worlds Azulai and his hosts in Bayonne seemed to inhabit: for the latter, secular knowledge and the discoveries of science were naturally part of their cultural horizon. When an Ashkenazi rabbi, one of the interlocutors representing the universe of traditional knowledge, cited a passage from the code of Jewish law, the Shulhan ‘Arukh, which mentioned a “bird that grows on a tree,” they laughed dismissively. For Azulai, on the other hand, the scientific explanation of petrified wood seemed just as unlikely to him as the bird growing on a tree seemed to the Bayonne community leaders. To him it was obvious that one was supposed to have faith in an assertion that appeared in the Shulhan ‘Arukh, however strange it might seem, because traditional knowledge could not be wrong. Though Azulai claimed that he left his counterparts “speechless,” it

Ideological Foundations

is clear that the rabbis and the lay parnasim were speaking a different language, as it were, and that their cultural reference points were ultimately irreconcilable. The discourses of tradition and secular, scientific knowledge were bound to collide. It seems that skepticism of rabbinic tradition was far-reaching among the Sephardim of Bordeaux and was by no means restricted to individuals on the margins of the community. Azulai noted with dismay in his travelogue that, “because of our many sins, in the T[almud] T[orah] [in Bordeaux] they only study the text of the Bible, and they do not want that [the children] study [the classical commentary by] Rashi because he cites midrashim and the interpretations of the ­Rabbis; and even Maimonides they do not want [to study].”56 In Bordeaux in late 1777, Azulai encountered community leaders whose orthodoxy was questionable. On one occasion, he “went to see the gabai of the community, Solomon Lopes, who does not believe in our Rabbis [i.e., in rabbinic tradition], and it seems to me that he is a philosopher and he is swollen with pride.” Later Azulai commented on Lopes’ wife who, he claimed, had never undergone ritual immersion, and he described Lopes himself, the head of the Bordeaux community, as the “son of a scoundrel, a villain—if villainy was ever forgotten in the world he could restore it on account of his foolishness.”57 Azulai’s remark on the wife of Solomon Lopes calls to mind a conflict half a century before Azulai’s visit that illustrates the operation of the network that linked Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and the Holy Land. In February 1727, the ma‘amad of the Bordeaux community convened to discuss two letters that had been received recently: one from Safed, asking the community leaders to “go to the bathhouse to find out who are the women who are failing to fulfill their obligation [of ritual immersion], and to send the names of the transgressors to the scholars and the rabbi [of Safed].” This certainly seemed an outrageous demand, but another letter had been received from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, which declared that the ma‘amad of Amsterdam had approved the request received from Safed, “in particular with regard to forwarding the names of the presumed transgressors.” The ma‘amad of Bordeaux clearly took the matter seriously but decided, “unanimously and according to the great zeal that we have for the observance of our holy Law,” to have the matter investigated d ­ iscretely

137

138

Ideological Foundations

and internally and, if a woman was found to have neglected the laws of family purity, to approach the husband in the hope of finding a remedy. The document mentioned nothing about reporting the names of the offenders, as had been requested by Safed.58 One wonders how the rabbis of Safed learned of the allegedly rampant disregard for the laws of family purity in Bordeaux in the first place. Most likely it had been a rabbinic emissary visiting the place who had relayed the information back to Safed. Once the rabbis in the holy city had decided to intervene, they contacted Amsterdam, which facilitated communication between Palestine and southern France and the approval of whose community authorities was deemed appropriate to substantiate the demand. It was a remarkable case of the rabbinic leadership of a small Jewish community in the Holy Land trying to exert halakhic oversight over a diaspora community in a faraway land, putting into practice Moshe Hagiz’ claim to the centrality of the Land of Israel and its rabbinic authorities. In reality, of course, nothing could be accomplished without the mediation of Amsterdam, and thus the very effort to assert the centrality of the Holy Land came at the expense of needing to rely on the services of Amsterdam, which functioned as the metropole of the Western Sephardic world. The Bordeaux ma‘amad itself, for its part, promised to ensure the observance of the laws of family purity and affirmed its commitment to halakhah, but it also chose to ignore the part of the request that defied its autonomy and independence most egregiously and thus not to forward any names to the rabbis of Safed. How, then, were emissaries like Azulai received in these communities where some of the leading figures openly defied rabbinic orthodoxy? One day in Bordeaux, Azulai went to meet Abraham Gradis, one of the wealthiest members of the Sephardic-Portuguese community in Bordeaux—he left behind a fortune of ten million livres when he died in 1780.59 Azulai described him as “a man of great wealth worth several millions, a philanthropist toward the gentiles and the kingdom. . . . He is one of the greatest heretics and does not believe in the Oral Torah and eats forbidden foods in public.”60 Yet, Azulai noted that Abraham Gradis, “showed us great honor” and preferred to describe the gardens in Gradis’ estate, “which feature a large pool with running water and with fish, and the pleasures of the world to

Ideological Foundations

come, mostly flowers and trees from America,” rather than dwell on the heterodoxy of his host.61 In his testament from May 9, 1780, Abraham Gradis made sure to include a bequest in support of the poor of the city of Jerusalem.62 Azulai was also received well when he arrived in the 1750s in Bayonne: “Less than two hours [after his arrival] the good and honest Se[ñor] Isaac Nunes Tavares and his son-in-law, my dear friend Se[ñor] Samuel Alesandro Fernandes, as well as some of the parnasim, came to fetch me with a carriage and took me to their home, and after about an hour the entire community came to see me.” The visit was a success: “The community acted exceedingly in terms of honor and in terms of their donations, more than their share.”63 Similarly, when Azulai arrived the first time in Bordeaux, in 1755, he was “a little worried how I would enter this city and where I would go.” The reception accorded to him quickly allayed any fears: he was carried through the city on a chair, “and behind me, on foot, several of the notables of the community. . . . They greatly honored me and the notables and the  heads of the community came to my door from early morning and the coming and going did not stop day and night, until midnight, as long as I was there.”64 Thus communities like Bayonne and Bordeaux continued to be part of the regular circuit of rabbinic emissaries traveling to Western Europe even though some of their leaders openly defied rabbinic authority. In fact, they sometimes exceeded the expectations of the emissaries and showered them with great honor, even though, it would seem, the sheluhim represented a rather different world: the world of rabbinic tradition. Ronald Schechter has recently challenged what he calls the “myth that the Portuguese [in southwestern France] were principally secular people” and argued that, “the portugais were scarcely less separated from their Gentile neighbors than were their brethren in Alsace, Lorraine, and Metz.”65 Azulai’s experience in the region shows that a remarkable degree of acculturation and, in fact, social inclusion at least among members of the elite, as well as open declarations of skepticism vis-à-vis the rabbinic tradition, were indeed a reality, but that did not mean the Portuguese Sephardim felt any less a part of the Jewish world. This was certainly the impression on the outside, as when a Christian observer noted, about the same Abraham

139

140

Ideological Foundations

Gradis who was “one of the greatest heretics” according to Azulai, that he was “a very good Israelite, very observant, who never fails to keep the Sabbath.”66 The case of the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne was peculiar, of course. Like their sister communities in Hamburg or London, and like the metropoles of the Western Sephardic world, Amsterdam and Livorno, these communities had been established by former conversos who had abandoned the Iberian Peninsula and eventually reverted to Judaism. But unlike those other communities, the Portuguese “New Christians” of southwestern France were only openly recognized as Jews in 1723, up to which point the royal privileges, or lettres patentes, had always referred to them as marchands portugais, or “Portuguese merchants.” In the seventeenth century, the conversos of southwestern France were the ones most likely to become r­ enegados, returning temporarily or even permanently to live as Catholics in Spain, a phenomenon no doubt related to the proximity of the Iberian Peninsula and the economic interests of the Portuguese merchants in southern France, but also indicative of a persistent uncertainty regarding religious identity within this community.67 In the eighteenth century, however, the Portuguese merchants of Bordeaux began to build a formal community structure, with the record book of the “Jewish nation” of Bordeaux beginning in 1710, over a decade before the official recognition as Jews. Still, as late as 1753 there was a case of a “Portuguese” couple to be married by a Catholic priest before having another ceremony performed by a rabbi, a vestige of the converso heritage.68 In light of this background, the high degree of acculturation and social inclusion of these communities was probably less surprising than the ultimately successful (re-)integration into the world of normative Judaism, a road traveled also by the communities established by former conversos elsewhere in Western Europe. By the eighteenth century, then, more remarkable than the widespread defiance of certain rabbinic norms or the occasional, public challenge to rabbinic tradition was the thorough integration of the Portuguese diaspora into the wider Sephardic and, indeed, Jewish world. Bordeaux now provided support in emergencies suffered by Sephardic communities as far away as Izmir and Bosnia, its rabbis supervised the production of kosher wines exported to Germany, Holland, and England,69

Ideological Foundations

and, as we have seen, it became an important part of the philanthropic network of shelihut. When, in May 1773, the city of Bordeaux needed to be defended during a peasant revolt, the Bordeaux Jews made sure to consult two visiting emissaries from Jerusalem, Yom Tov Algazi and Jacob le-Beit Hazan, and requested “that it may be permitted for them to take up their arms on the Sabbath, if they are so instructed by the [city] magistrate.” The emissaries allowed this.70 In this example too we see clearly both the social inclusion of the Portuguese Jews in Bordeaux coupled with a desire to observe Jewish law and to receive the endorsement from the emissaries of Palestine as representatives of rabbinic tradition.71 Participation in the philanthropic network to support the Jewish communities in the Holy Land was one way for the Western Sephardic communities established by former conversos to rebuild bonds of solidarity that integrated them into the wider Jewish world. The relative secularization at least of the well-to-do elite in these merchant communities, and even the outright rejection of rabbinic orthodoxy, did not translate into a diminished sense of belonging to a pan-Jewish community, which was expressed through the establishment of material ties to communities abroad and, in particular, in the Holy Land. Recording their deliberations regarding the support for visiting emissaries, the language chosen by the Bordeaux ma‘amad was indicative of their desire to establish the reputation of their community as part of a larger philanthropic enterprise: “having the desire to also participate in this good work,” they wrote in 1750 in response to a request on behalf of the city of Tiberias; “to provide proof of our sensitivity toward their misfortunes, as well as of our generosity,” reads their rationale to support two emissaries from Jerusalem in 1773; and four years later, on the occasion of Haim Joseph David Azulai’s visit: “wanting to come to their rescue and to provide their emissary with proof of the high regard we hold for him and of our munificence toward our brethren.”72 Whereas the rabbinic emissaries tried to link a sense of pan-Jewish solidarity to the centrality of the Land of Israel and to rabbinic orthodoxy, for the Sephardim of the West participation in the philanthropic network, while reinforcing Jewish identity and belonging to a wider Jewish world, could substitute for an otherwise at times tenuous link to rabbinic tradition.

141

142

Ideological Foundations

In Defense of Orthodoxy As the emissaries interacted with individuals and communities outside the Land of Israel, they also cast themselves as defenders of rabbinic orthodoxy. In a responsum, Haim Joseph David Azulai explained that in Rome some cantors, “who are maskilim and also understand the grammar of the holy tongue,” had recently begun to change the pronunciation of certain words in public prayers: if the time-honored practice of the Italian liturgy had been to say, for example, nakdishakh ve-na‘aritsakh, they had switched this, according to their understanding of the correct Hebrew form, to nakdishkha ve-na‘aritskha. Azulai determined, relying in part on what was the established practice in Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as among the Sephardim of the East more generally, that the old practice was correct and should not be changed.73 As late as the nineteenth century, however, the question divided the Jewish community of Rome and an emissary visiting at the time, Raphael Meir Panijel, was asked to issue a ruling. Like Azulai, he invoked the example of the Sephardim in Jerusalem and warned that changing the established practice was wrong.74 There are numerous other instances in the history of shelihut when emissaries used the prerogative to deliver a public sermon to admonish their hosts for what they deemed to be violations of rabbinic tradition. Occasionally they would also publish pamphlets denouncing what they considered to be particularly pressing transgressions, from Nathan Shapira, who wrote a treatise against the consumption of nonJewish wine while he was in Venice in 1660, to a booklet against riding the railroad on the Sabbath that was printed in Calcutta in 1874.75 Sometimes communities accepted what the emissaries had to tell them, and sometimes they did not. In this regard, there was no difference between communities experiencing the challenge of secularization and assimilation in Europe and those that were deeply committed to the rule of Jewish law in principle. To cite but one example from nineteenth-century Yemen, Rabbi Yehiya Qorah of San‘a noted in his book Maskil doresh: “Behold, the people coming from Erets Yisrael and the likes to our places; we cannot tolerate their views and they likewise cannot tolerate our views, and we consider them fools and so were we in their eyes.”76

Ideological Foundations

One might distinguish, however, between emissaries engaged in maintaining rabbinic tradition in a context in which the rule of halakhah remained unchallenged at least in principle, even if it was defied in social practice, and those who became entangled in the struggle to defend the primacy of rabbinic tradition against the challenge of secularization, skepticism, and heterodoxy in eighteenth-­ century Western Europe. In her pathbreaking biography of Moshe Hagiz, ­Elisheva Carlebach has suggested that the Sabbatean controversies of the eighteenth century and the organized rabbinic opposition against Sabbatean “heresy” spearheaded by Hagiz can be seen as marking the beginning of modern rabbinic orthodoxy. Citing Jacob Katz’ definition of rabbinic orthodoxy as a distinctly modern phenomenon and as “a defensive reaction to challenges from within Jewish society, or from the larger society beyond it,” Carlebach argued that if Moshe Sofer and his campaign against religious reform marked the beginnings of orthodoxy in the Ashkenazi world in the nineteenth century, the example of Moshe Hagiz showed that, “at least for Sephardic Jews, the foundations of organized rabbinic reaction were laid a century earlier.”77 Though Katz himself disagreed with this analysis,78 David Ruderman has recently taken up Carlebach’s suggestion and argued that orthodoxy, as a modern phenomenon, did in fact emerge “in the eighteenth century under the conditions of a beleaguered rabbinate” and that the differences between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, pace Katz, are “a matter of degree, not of substance.”79 As Jacob Barnai has shown, Sabbatean messianism in the late seventeenth century was spread by Sabbatean emissaries, letters, and pamphlets, which catalyzed the development of early modern communication networks linking the different parts of the Jewish world.80 Ruderman sees the organized network of rabbinic opposition to the lingering ­Sabbateanism of the eighteenth century as an equally momentous development, demonstrating the emergence of a “consciousness of an early modern Jewish rabbinate transcending specific geographic areas and cultural zones” and marking the beginnings of rabbinic orthodoxy in the Sephardic world and cutting across the cultural boundaries within the Jewish world at large.81 Haim Joseph David Azulai, who had no problem interacting with potential donors who openly defied rabbinic law, likewise found himself involved in one of the controversies that emerged in the Jewish

143

144

Ideological Foundations

world of the late eighteenth century and provoked an organized rabbinic response. Together with other emissaries from the Holy Land, he joined the Italian rabbinate in their fierce response to a challenge that had arisen against their authority in the 1790s. In 1796, Azulai signed an open letter that was printed in a pamphlet published in Hamburg in refutation of a rumor that had appeared in a newspaper in nearby A ­ ltona, Altonaischer Mercurius, on April 8, 1796. According to the news item, a synod of Italian rabbis had convened in Florence and decided on a series of reforms: the Sabbath rest would be moved to Sunday, restrictions on work during the Jewish holidays would be abolished, Jews would be allowed to use a razor to shave off their beards and married women no longer would have to shave their heads, and the consumption of pork would be permitted.82 The community in Livorno had learned about the scandal through a letter that arrived from Helsingør, in Denmark, and immediately sent a letter to Florence to inquire what was going on. They raised the suspicion that a certain Yoel Cohen, a Jewish convert to Christianity living in Rome, might be behind the hoax and noted that the case had greatly agitated the Keilot del Nord, the Jewish communities of Germany and Denmark.83 The response among the Italian rabbinate was swift: letters were written to Northern Europe, and Italian rabbis and emissaries from the Holy Land were mobilized and their forceful and uncompromising denunciation of any kind of religious reform was publicized in a Hebrew and German pamphlet that appeared in Hamburg. The defenders of tradition in Livorno must have been pleased to see that, at the end of June 1796, the newspaper Alter Kurier aus Ungarn (Budapest) published a series of letters signed by the community leader Abraham Ambron and the rabbis of Livorno, including an endorsement from Azulai, in Italian and German, in which they denounced the false allegations of these religious reforms. The Kurier made a point of informing its readers, in a footnote, that “this fabrication was initially the proper work of those corrupt French (der sittenverderbenden Franzosen), who sought, through this trick, to introduce the unholy desire for innovation (Neuerungssucht) and revolution among the Hebrew nation.”84 In response to the fake news of radical reforms—which were never specified in the pamphlet published by the Italian rabbis, lest their readers get any wrong ideas—Haim Joseph David Azulai explained:

Ideological Foundations

“Far be it from the people of Israel to change even the smallest detail,” echoing the words of the Livorno rabbis who wrote in their own letter, published in the same pages: “The remnant of Israel will never be so foolish . . . to reject even the smallest [vocalization] point of the [letter] yod of God’s laws.” The letters of two other emissaries who were in Italy at the time, Barukh Saporta of Safed and Ephraim Navon of Hebron, likewise were included.85 Though they responded to a false rumor, these rabbis obviously took the challenge seriously. They provide an example of an emerging rabbinic orthodoxy, a rabbinic response to the open rebellion against rabbinic tradition that emerged out of the most diverse quarters, from neo-Sabbateans to maskilim to individuals, like said Yoel Cohen, who abandoned Judaism altogether.86 At the same time, the ruckus caused by the Mercurius news item in the mid-1790s was a good example of the intersection of several overlapping networks in the eighteenth century, with emissaries from the Land of Israel playing an important role.87 Another intriguing case of an eighteenth-century shaliah defending tradition and orthodoxy, this time against the challenge of enlightened rationalism, was Haim Isaac Carigal (1732–77) who spent much of his life on the road, twice as an emissary for the Jewish community of his native Hebron and a third time probably as an independent emissary to support himself. He was finally appointed as rabbi in Barbados, where he served during the last three years of his life. In 1773, Carigal spent several months in Newport, Rhode Island, which was then one of the leading communities in North America, established by Jews from the Dutch Indies and home to a synagogue inaugurated ten years before Carigal’s visit, in 1763. Carigal’s sojourn to Newport has become famous because of the cordial relationship he developed with Ezra Stiles, the Protestant theologian who was a regular correspondent of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and who later went on to become the president of Yale College, a position he held until his death in 1795. In his diary, Stiles recorded his numerous encounters with the rabbi from Palestine between March and July 1773. The two men discussed questions of Hebrew grammar, Stiles inquired about the rabbi’s understanding of certain passages in the Bible, and they spoke about Kabbalah; Stiles and Carigal continued to exchange letters after the latter had left Newport and moved to Barbados.88

145

146

Ideological Foundations

The diary also gives a biographical sketch of Carigal’s extensive ­travels, providing a good example of the far-flung philanthropic network of emissaries from the Holy Land in the eighteenth century. According to Stiles’ record, Carigal’s first mission, between 1754 and 1757, led him to Egypt, Izmir, Istanbul, Edirne, and Salonika, and then further east to Aleppo, Damascus, Urfa, Baghdad, and Isfahan. Upon his return, he left almost immediately on a second mission, again on behalf of the community in Hebron, traveling for two years (until 1759) throughout Europe, including Livorno, Florence, Rome, Bologna, Milan, Padua, and Venice in Italy; and then Vienna, Prague, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Metz, and finally Amsterdam and London.89 We know from the minutes of the ma‘amad of the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux that he also visited that city, in January 1759.90 Subsequently, he ended up going to Curação, then the most important of the Sephardic-Portuguese communities in the Caribbean, where he served as the community rabbi while its designated rabbi was away in Amsterdam completing his studies. According to Carigal, at the time there were only three rabbis in the New World, one each in Jamaica, Surinam, and Curação, but none in North America. It was during his third trip that Carigal made the acquaintance of Ezra Stiles when he visited, between 1768 and 1774, Marseilles, Paris, London (where he stayed two and a half years), Jamaica (one year), Philadelphia, New York, Newport, and Surinam, before finally settling in Barbados.91 Stiles spoke of his rabbinic friend in affectionate terms. He described Carigal, “a large Man, neat and well dressed in the Turkish Habit,” as “a Man of great Modesty and Candor, and most remote from a disposition to obtrude his own Assertions without being ready to offer the Reasons.” According to Stiles, “He . . . said he wished well to others besides his own Nation, he loved all Mankind.”92 In other words, Carigal appears from the pages of Stiles’ diary as an open-minded individual, learned in rabbinic tradition but also guided by reason and interested in the world around him, as a humanist “lov[ing] all Mankind.” According to Stiles, Carigal not only attended a sermon he delivered in his church, but also told him he had visited the Christian churches of Jerusalem as well as other churches during his extensive travels, including St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London.93

Ideological Foundations

Contacts between emissaries and Christian theologians like the one between Carigal and Stiles were not uncommon. Christian millenarians, for example, displayed an interest in Rabbi Nathan S ­ hapira, emissary for the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem and author of the influential work Tuv ha-Arets, which laid out the idea of the sanctity of the Land of Israel and its kabbalistic significance. Christian theologians did more than seek the opportunity to meet the emissary and learn about the Jews in the Holy Land. While he was in Amsterdam, Shapira received a donation to his mission from Protestant millenarians in England and Holland. A pamphlet, An Information Concerning the Present State of the Jewish Nation in Europe and Judea. Wherein the Footsteps of Providence preparing the way for their Conversion to Christ, and for their Deliverance from Captivity are Discovered, published in 1658 probably by the Protestant theologian John Dury, reported on Shapira’s visit and the information he had provided on the Jews of the Holy Land.94 Shapira was not the only shaliah who discovered, perhaps to his great surprise, the sincere interest displayed in Jewish literature and knowledge by Christian Hebraists in Western Europe. Even as irascible an individual as Moshe Hagiz established a cordial rapport with Christian Hebraists in Germany; he seemed to take pride in his friendship with the Christian scholar Johann Christoph Wolf in Hamburg—the author of the massive bibliographical work Bibliotheca Hebraea—and referred to him, in his Mishnat Hakhamim, as “the great scholar, praised for his complete mastery of all subjects. . . . Professor Doctor Johan Christoph Wolf, may the Lord in his mercy lengthen his days.”95 Haim Joseph David Azulai too made the acquaintance of Christians who displayed an interest in Judaism, particularly in the teachings of Kabbalah, and enjoyed the company of the shaliah from the Land of Israel. In Paris, Azulai became friendly with a Christian member of the Académie des Sciences, a certain Monsieur Fabre,96 with whom he met several times, who took him to Versailles and to the National Library, and whom he even visited in his home. Fabre was not the only Christian who sought out Azulai’s company in Paris. The emissary notes with some surprise: “also among the gentiles, the sages of Edom, I have acquired a name.”97 One day, for example, a certain Marquise de Crau came to visit Azulai, telling him about her interest

147

148

Ideological Foundations

in Kabbalah, which had been sparked by the Ba‘al Shem of London (the kabbalist and alchemist Haim Samuel Falk), and ended up donating one louis for Hebron.98 Despite his ability to converse at ease with Stiles, Rabbi Carigal can also be seen as another representative of an emerging eighteenth-­ century Sephardic orthodoxy. On the holiday of Shavuot 1773, Carigal delivered a sermon in the Newport synagogue, which he gave, according to Stiles, “in Spanish” (or perhaps in Ladino), an indication that Spanish or Judeo-Spanish continued to function as a common language that held the greater Sephardic diaspora together in the eighteenth century. The sermon was subsequently translated into English by Aaron Lopez, the leader of the Newport community, and was printed in Newport in 1773. In his sermon, Carigal formulated a strong response to Enlightenment rationalism, following in the footsteps of scholars who had defended rabbinic tradition against its critics in communities established by former conversos in places like Amsterdam and London. Carigal’s critique echoed other defenders of rabbinic tradition earlier in the eighteenth century, such as Jacob Emden in Altona and David Nieto in London, but predating the heated debates of the 1780s, for example the clash between Netanel Posner and Rabbi ­Raphael Cohen in Altona or the controversy following the publication of Naphtali Herz Wessely’s Divrei Shalom ve-Emet and the responses it spawned by rabbis such as Ezekiel Landau of Prague and David Tevele of Lissa.99 Half a century after Hagiz’ anti-Sabbatean campaigns, ­Carigal’s sermon illustrates an increasingly interconnected Jewish world, in part the result of the activities of itinerant emissaries, where a rabbi from Hebron visiting the communities of the Caribbean and North America saw the need to address the mounting challenge of rational, Enlightenment critique of rabbinic tradition that was making itself felt in the communities of the Atlantic seaboard and in Western and Central Europe. Delivered at the festival that commemorates the revelation of the Torah at Sinai, much of Carigal’s sermon predictably dealt with the importance of studying the divine law. He opened his remarks with a favorite passage of rabbinic ethical teaching: “My son, if there arise within thee an evil desire, the best remedy you can get to subdue it, is to proceed directly with it to the sacred colleges, (synagogues or

Ideological Foundations

houses of instruction:) Where, if that desire should be stone, it would be consumed.”100 In fact, he argued, Such is the force of truth, such the efficacy inseparable from the sacred study, that even when the meditation is applied solely for curiosity and ostentation, or even when the wicked intention may be used only for the purpose of finding something to censure, yet its excellence & perfection is so great, that the critics themselves soon find their malevolent dispositions subdued . . . and gradually opening the eyes of their understanding, acknowledge their error, and admit the unconquerable impression of truth.101

Carigal then proceeded to identify three types of such “critics” and to expose the error of their ways: “There are many that think themselves fit to be legislators,” he began, “and looking upon tradition with contempt, invent such laws and religion as suit them well.”102 Those individuals—the ones Feiner calls “fashionable Jews” in his recent study of secularism in eighteenth-century Jewish society103—reject the supreme authority of the rabbis and community leaders and live their lives according to their own tastes and desires, putting their individualism above the authority of rabbinic tradition. “There are others,” Carigal continued, who, forgetting they have, from their infancy, heard from their parents and masters the results of some disputes, fancy that if they comprehend some part of one single mystery, it is owing to their great capacity, and that the whole proceeds from their refined sense; and very erroneously conceive that tradition is entirely superfluous and unnecessary; and that their vast understandings and singular ingenuity are sufficient to penetrate the most concealed mysteries of the divine writings.104

More dangerous than those who find justifications for their deviant behavior or simply choose to ignore the traditional strictures, then, are those who reject the validity of tradition altogether, believing that human reason must take the place of tradition. Not surprisingly, Carigal considered this approach a serious threat to the integrity of rabbinic authority; the challenge, however, was not new and had been dealt with by rabbis in places like Amsterdam since the midseventeenth century.

149

150

Ideological Foundations

Of particular interest is the third kind of “critic” that Carigal described in his sermon, anticipating the maskilic project of subsequent decades, which advocated the reform and modernization of the Jewish religion: Other critics there are that are still worse and more prejudicial enemies, who being concealed adversaries, make other people believe they are very religious, and firm believers of traditions, and under a cloak of the greatest sanctity, defile the fundamental principles of the law. . . . They say that the supreme Being having endowed those of a clear under­ standing with sufficient capacity to penetrate and comprehend his precepts; we must conform to them with all exactness so long as we see that the primitive reasons exist: But there having been such great alterations of age, climates, situations, and other circumstances, it is to be supposed that the original reasons of some precepts may have ceased; and consequently the obligation of conforming ourselves to such institutions (tho’ originally divine) must naturally cease. Several reasons might be given to refute those opinions as both false and heretical.105

Carigal attacked here what became an important idea in the ­Haskalah: that the rationale of divine commandments is accessible to human reason. As he understood very well, the ultimate consequence was that if divine commandments had a purpose that could be understood through reason, reason could also identify practices that had become obsolete because of changing historical circumstances. While rationalizing biblical or rabbinic law may have seemed liked an apt defense of Jewish tradition in the face of the European Enlightenment, it ultimately threatened to undermine the integrity of tradition from within. It is important to note that for Carigal, this third kind of critic was the most dangerous threat to tradition: he seemed to recognize that this was a different kind of challenge than the deviant behavior of individuals defying rabbinic authority or even the privileging of reason and dismissal of tradition by others. The reform of Judaism from within— the project of the maskilim—necessitated, for him, a particularly vigorous response, and it is this response that marks Carigal’s position as orthodox, rather than simply “traditional.” The primacy of reason also informed the other types of criticism that undermined the validity of tradition. The third type, however, was particularly dangerous as it rested on the assumption that tradition itself, though of divine origin, was subject to historical change. It was this historicist approach to di-

Ideological Foundations

vine revelation that appeared most destructive to Carigal, anticipating the major battle lines between modernity and anti-modernity, or reform and orthodoxy, in nineteenth-century European Judaism. That the challenge of historicism was not an accidental element of Carigal’s text became clear when he opened a second line of thought, later in his sermon: “The Calamities we have endured,” he explained, “have not been casualties or accidents.”106 Rather, historical events, and the historical experience of the Jewish people including their current exile, had to be understood from the perspective of the divine law and as the result of a dynamic of reward and punishment in relation to the observance of God’s will. However, Carigal warned, there have not been wanting some critical men, who, because they know something of the ancient histories, think they are able to penetrate the natural cause of the rise, increase and decline of empires and republics. This they dare to utter, not thinking at the same time, that such public commotions & revolutions are effects proceeding from the council of the divine creator.107

Delivering his sermon in revolutionary America, Carigal was certainly aware of the momentous events around him. Yet he forcefully rejected the primacy of historical thinking, the desire to find the “natural causes” explaining the rise and fall of empires or the vicissitudes of Jewish history, which were always the result of divine providence and could not be properly understood through human reason. All the more so, a historicist understanding of Jewish tradition and law, subjecting their provisions to an analysis of historical change, was misguided and dangerous. Interestingly, though, in his own response to the challenge, Carigal employed the language of Enlightenment himself and he could sound a bit like Moses Mendelssohn in his defense of Jewish tradition: In the precepts of the Decalogue is exhibited an epitome of the divine LAW, consisting of the fundamental principles of religion, both respecting our faith or belief in the ONE SUPREME BEING, the creator of the universe, and respecting the institutions of morality. Those precepts in respect of the Deity and morality are entirely out of the present question; it being indubitable that neither of them can be subject to the least change or alteration in any time or place. The

151

152

Ideological Foundations

moral, part of its own nature, would be constant and permanent and of unchangeable obligation, even without the additional circumstance of having been dictated by the divine wisdom and authority.

Thus, Carigal suggested, “morality” was universal, unchanging, and indeed independent of divine revelation. He concluded that “one, who will keep the moral law with exactness, not only because it is consistent with reason, but because it is a divine and unalterable institution, there will be no doubt that he will also observe all other ­precepts.”108 Carigal’s was ultimately a conservative message, a clear and vigorous defense of tradition, with the rabbis as the only arbiters of its interpretation and rejecting the significance of historical change for the proper understanding of Jewish tradition. Carigal represented, then, another example of what can be called the new Sephardic orthodoxy of the eighteenth century. His sermon—as well as its reception, including its translation into English and publication in print—indicates that the ideas of an incipient Jewish Enlightenment were already being discussed in Sephardic communities as far away from the putative centers of Haskalah as Newport, and by a rabbinic emissary from Ottoman Palestine who was able to talk to his audience by co-opting the vocabulary of eighteenth-century discourses on religion and morality. Again, notions of “center” and “periphery” (Erets Israel and the diaspora, or, for that matter, Berlin as the center of Haskalah and the margins of Jewish modernity elsewhere) fail to capture the transnational, even global interconnectedness of the eighteenth-century Jewish world. In any event, Carigal’s response anticipated a central element of modern rabbinic orthodoxy, resisting the rise of historicist thinking (and historicist interpretations of Jewish tradition) and rejecting the very notion of historical change and innovation. “The new,” as Moshe Sofer would famously declare in the nineteenth century, “is prohibited by the Torah.”

The Case for Israel According to a recent study of Carigal’s sermon, one of its goals was to promote a sense of unity and identity within the small community of Newport, consisting of a mix of former conversos and Ashkenazi

Ideological Foundations

immigrants, divided between loyalists to the Crown and supporters of the revolution. “Carigal insists that the identity that unites all of the community . . . is that of Rabbinic Judaism that supports the Jewish community in the Holy Land.”109 Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, in the eighteenth century not everyone was convinced that the contemporary Land of Israel could indeed be regarded as the center of the Jewish world. The emissaries learned that they had to defend the very notion of the sanctity of the Holy Land as well as its enduring centrality for Jews every­where, and authors like Moshe Hagiz set the tone as they made their impassioned case for Israel. In doing so, Hagiz and others relied on a rich tradition dealing with the sanctity of the Promised Land and the relation between the Land of Israel, the Jewish people, and the Torah. In order to advance his case, Hagiz used a wealth of sources but did so carefully and selectively, and his argument staked out a clear position in three debates that had been conducted among rabbinic commentators for generations: he emphasized the physicality of the Land versus the spiritualization of the concept of Erets Israel; he defended the benefit of living in the Holy Land versus the danger involved in dwelling in a sacred space, in a “land that devours its inhabitants” (Num 13:32); and he understood immigration to the Land of Israel as a positive commandment, against the opinion that the obligation of settling the land no longer applied after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The core of Hagiz’ argument can be seen in his interpretation of the biblical verse, “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth (‘afar min ha-adamah)” (Gen 2:7). Is it not obvious where the dust came from, Hagiz wondered along with earlier commentators, so why did the Torah have to mention min ha-adamah explicitly? What did this apparent redundancy mean? Hagiz cited the explanation in the midrash Bereshit Rabbah, suggesting that the phrase “from the earth” meant that man “was created from the place of his atonement,” l­inking “earth” and “atonement” on the basis of the verse “Make for Me an altar of earth (mizbah adamah)” (Gen 20:21). He then continued to explain that God, when he created man, knew that mankind would eventually pursue evil and that the Jews, for whose sake the world was created, were going to be an obstinate people defying the divine ­commandments. “This is why the Lord, blessed be he, chose to give

153

154

Ideological Foundations

them the Holy Land which was sanctified as soon as he determined to create it, so that because of its holiness they shall overcome the evil desires of their hearts, and he provided the medicine before the illness.” Thus God created man with dust from the earth—“from what earth? From the place of his atonement, that is to say, with the dust of the holy earth, which is the Holy Temple . . . which was to be the instrument to atone for Israel and for the world.”110 Hagiz’ reading of this verse encapsulates his overall argument: the emphasis on the “dust” of the “earth” as a reference to the site of the Jerusalem Temple indicates the importance of the physical, geographic space, and that the sanctity of the land was determined even before it was created clearly suggests that its holiness is inherent and eternal, independent of the vicissitudes of changing historical circumstances. The importance of the physicality of the land is even clearer when we juxtapose it to the spiritualizing interpretation found, for example, in the writings of the medieval kabbalist Isaac of Acre, who wrote: The secret of “outside the Land” and of “the Land of Israel” is that . . . “The Land” (eretz) does not signify the earth of dust (i.e., the geographic land), but the lump of dust (i.e., the human body) in which souls dwell. “The Land” is the palace of the souls; it is flesh and blood. The soul that dwells in earth (ba-aretz) which derives from Jacob’s seed certainly dwells in the Land of Israel. Even if the soul dwells outside the Land (i.e., geographically), the Shekhinah (the presence of God) will rest upon it since it is definitely in the Land (i.e., the earth) of Israel.111

As opposed to this reading, for Hagiz the Land of Israel—in particular the site of the Temple in Jerusalem—is important not as a symbol but as a physical reality, and it continues to be essential in ensuring the continued existence of the Jewish people and, indeed, the world, by offering atonement. In fact, the land still performs this function even at present, the destruction of the Temple notwithstanding: it is the land itself that is holy and atones for the sins of Israel. “The Land itself will serve as the altar of atonement for Israel,” Hagiz explained in Sefat Emet. “Even today in our exile, the Land still is stricken on behalf of its children [the Jews] who are outside the Land”: the desolation of the contemporary Land of Israel (and the suffering of its inhabitants) are nothing less than the result of the atoning function of the land.112

Ideological Foundations

Hagiz, then, polemicized against the spiritualization of the Land of Israel. As Moshe Weinfeld has argued, this trend of spiritualizing the land (or the city of Jerusalem) was already noticeable toward the end of the Second Temple period, though—unlike in Christianity—“the physical land and physical Jerusalem continually served as a base for spiritual symbols.”113 The detachment of the spiritualized Erets Israel from the actual, physical land became increasingly more pronounced in the literature of Kabbalah, and, in the words of Moshe Idel, “most Jewish mystics have preferred to concentrate upon literary symbols of the supernal center, in lieu of direct contact with the geographical ­center. . . . The growing interest in the mystical meaning of the Land of Israel, or of Jerusalem, for that matter, was a symptom of a weakening of the tendency to live there.”114 Hagiz wanted to counter this trend; while he embraced kabbalistic elaborations on the sanctity of the Land of Israel, he was also adamant in his emphasis on the enduring importance and centrality of the physical, geographic land. Nothing could have been farther from his understanding of the Holy Land than the spiritualization found, for example, among Hasidic writers of the eighteenth century like Menahem Nahum of Tchernobil: “Even though the physical Eretz Yisra’el exists, its essence is a spiritual matter, namely, the life force coming from God. . . . In every house of worship and study, the life force of Eretz Yisra’el is emanated from God. . . . One who stands in the house of worship or study, and prays in words suffused with thought is indeed in Eretz Yisra’el, that is, in the life force of the creator.”115 Thus, when Hagiz denounced the blurring of the difference between the Land of Israel and the diaspora, as in the discussion of Exodus 20:21 (“In every place where I cause My name to be mentioned I will come to you and bless you”) mentioned above, Hagiz was not only responding to Sephardic Jews in Western Europe who were comfortably at home in Amsterdam or London. He was also responding to a long-established trend in rabbinic and, in particular, kabbalistic literature that had created a rich imagery of the Land of Israel but had also increasingly detached the physical reality of the land from a spiritual, symbolic meaning that came to overshadow, if not replace, the attachment to the actual geographic place. Hagiz’ reading of the Land of Israel as atoning for Israel’s sins likewise provides an important commentary on the debate over the mean-

155

156

Ideological Foundations

ing of the sanctity of the Land in rabbinic literature: “R. Eleazar said: Whoever is domiciled in the Land of Israel lives without sin, for it is said in Scripture, And the inhabitant shall not say, ‘I am sick,’ the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity [Isa 33:24]. Said Rabina to R. Ashi; We apply this [text] to those who suffer from disease.”116 What is the disagreement between Rabbi Eleazar and Rabina? According to the interpretation offered by Yom Tov Shlomo Algazi (1680– 1756), Rabbi Eleazar believed one who commits a sin in the Land of Israel can expect to be forgiven because the holiness of the place provides atonement, whereas Rabina expressed the opposing view according to which one who transgresses a divine commandment in Israel cannot be forgiven because he has sinned “within the palace of the king” and cannot be forgiven without suffering.117 This tension between the Holy Land as a place of spiritual fulfillment and as a place of fear in the face of its special sanctity permeated much of the literature on the Land of Israel and led some authors to caution against the desire to immigrate and establish oneself in Palestine. At the turn of the nineteenth century, for example, Rabbi Rafael Verdugo (1747–1822) of Meknès, Morocco, followed his explanation of the virtues of the Land of Israel with a stern warning that one who wished to live there needed to be prepared spiritually and cautioned that “one who sins inside the palace of the king . . . is unlike one who sins outside the palace of the king. . . . [Therefore] it is not suitable to live in the land that was chosen and is subject to [God’s] oversight except for one who serves the Lord completely and is careful in his deeds and studies Torah, but if not it is not good for him to live there.”118 Hagiz certainly recognized the special responsibility that came with life in the Holy Land, but his conclusion was radically different: “Every­one who lives in the Land of Israel is fulfilling the will of our father in heaven and is considered a righteous one (nikra tsadik), for the Lord loves him, because he was worthy to live within his palace, as it says ‘the land spewed out its inhabitants’ [Lev 18:25], and since we see that they [the Jews living in the Land of Israel] have not been spewed out, this is the proof that they are in fact righteous.”119 The biblical warning in Hagiz’ reading, then, is not a warning at all but proof that the contemporary inhabitants of the Holy Land must be considered righteous.

Ideological Foundations

Drawing on both kabbalistic and halakhic arguments, Hagiz demonstrated the continuing centrality of Jerusalem and the Holy Land and its special place in the world. Following the teaching of Lurianic Kabbalah, Hagiz noted that the “origin of all the conduits of abundance and of blessing and of the acceptance of prayer are precisely by way of the Land of Israel,”120 which is, in the words of the seventeenthcentury kabbalist Abraham Azulai, underneath the window which is in the middle of the dome of heaven. And this window is square, narrow above and wider below, and its measure above is . . . like the measure of the Temple, for it is entirely underneath the window, and in the middle of the depth of the window in the dome [of heaven] it is the measure of the holy city of Jerusalem, and the measure of the window at the bottom . . . is the measure of the entire Land of Israel, and all the Land of Israel is underneath it.121

The access to heaven being above the Land of Israel, whose air is free of contamination by the forces of evil, all prayers uttered by Jews every­ where in the diaspora have to pass through this “window,” by way of the Land of Israel.122 When sending a letter in support of the Jerusalemite emissary Jacob Ashkenazi to Livorno in August 1758, the Officials for the Land of Israel in Istanbul invoked precisely this image: money was needed to rebuild an old synagogue that had been damaged in Jerusalem by the strong storms of the previous winter, “so that our brothers in Jerusalem may conduct their prayers. . . . As you know well, all the tefilot [prayers] that are said in hutsa la-arets [outside the Land of Israel], in order to be received they must be joined (se deven a­juntar) with those of the Holy Land, and therefore it is imperative that we have our holy congregation in Jerusalem.”123

The Poor of My City, the Poor of Your City In his book Sefat Emet, Moshe Hagiz explained: From time to time, to achieve atonement for the children of Israel in exile, God inflicts his anger on this Land and its inhabitants, and the emissaries go out so that the rest of Israel share in the affliction of the inhabitants of the Land of Israel. . . . For those inhabitants of the

157

158

Ideological Foundations

Land of Israel are called “the poor of your city” (‘aniyei ‘irkha), as opposed to the poor of any other city, as it [erroneously] appears to the vernacular Jews (lo‘azim), their community leaders and scholars.

Supporting the emissaries gives Jews of the diaspora the opportunity to partake in the merits of the Holy Land and gain atonement for their sins, a unique quality of the Land of Israel.124 The passage illustrates well how Hagiz legitimized the claim that the Jews of the diaspora needed to provide material support for the Jewish communities in the Holy Land, in particular in Jerusalem. He acknowledged that the Jews of Palestine frequently suffered from oppression and needed to turn to their brethren abroad for support; in reality, however, they were burdened with this suffering in order to atone for the sins of the entire Jewish people and the emissaries that they dispatched went out to ensure that the Jews abroad accepted their share of the difficulties suffered by those in Palestine. This argument was gaining currency only in the eighteenth century and represented one of the novel claims in Hagiz’ writings—a good example of the innovative nature of his incipient Sephardic orthodoxy. In the seventeenth century, individuals certainly made contributions to support the Torah scholars and the poor of the Holy Land, but they did so as an act of personal piety. The idea that the Jews of the Land of Israel were atoning for the sins of the Jews elsewhere and that they represented an elite guarding the Jewish bond to the Holy Land—and that the philanthropic contributions were therefore an obligation for the Jews of the diaspora—began to find expression only toward the end of the seventeenth century and was employed, for example, when the Jewish leaders of Venice admonished the community in Corfu for neglecting to forward its contributions in support of the Holy Land in a letter from 1731: “The scholars and the poor of the Land of Israel continuously endanger their lives in order to perpetuate the [Jewish] presence in the land of beauty, even as we are in captivity, so that the soil [of the Holy Land] atone for our people.”125 The idea of collective atonement was invoked, and extended, by Jacob Shealtiel Ninio, an emissary for Tiberias in Italy in the 1840s. In one of his sermons he explained that at first it might seem contradictory to refer to private individuals from the Land of Israel raising money for

Ideological Foundations

themselves as “emissaries on their own behalf ” (shaliah le-‘atsmo): if they were not sent by one of the communities in Palestine, how could they be called “emissaries”? Ninio explained that “the people outside the Land support the people in the Land of Israel, so that all the residents of the Land of Israel become emissaries (sheluhim) of the people who live in exile, and this is why one calls anyone from the Land of Israel a shaliah, as if to say: you are our emissary, and through your hand we will have forgiveness; we partake of your learning and your prayers.”126 Ninio thus brought the argument full circle: the emissaries from the Land of Israel, properly understood, were not actually emissaries dispatched by their communities in Palestine in order to request donations, but were emissaries on behalf of the Jews in the diaspora, collecting their dues, as it were, in exchange for the spiritual services the Jews in the Holy Land rendered to the Jewish people at large. When Hagiz argued, in the passage cited above, that the “inhabitants of the Land of Israel are called ‘the poor of your city’ (‘aniyei ‘irkha)” he was referring to the ruling in the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, Shulhan ‘Arukh, which defined the priorities to be observed when disbursing charity: “And the poor of one’s household take precedence over the poor of one’s city, and the poor of one’s city take precedence over the poor of another city, and the residents of the Land of Israel take precedence over those who dwell outside the Land.”127 Hagiz’ claim that the “vernacular Jews,” or lo‘azim, a term he used in reference to the Portuguese Sephardim of the West, had misunderstood the ruling as referring literally to “their city”—Amsterdam, for example—was of course disingenuous. It seems quite obvious that the phrase “the poor of your city” in the Shulhan ‘Arukh did refer to precisely that—the poor of one’s own city—and the main issue was the interpretation of the following phrase, determining that “the residents of the Land of Israel take precedence over those who dwell outside the Land.” In reality, Hagiz was presenting a new and rather radical interpretation of the maxim found in the Shulhan ‘Arukh: according to him the very phrase, “the poor of your city,” should be understood as referring to Jerusalem rather than any other city, for Jerusalem was the symbolic home of all Jews, and therefore all Jews were bound by a special obligation to this city. What Hagiz did not mention, however, was that authorities preceding the Shulhan ‘Arukh, in particular the

159

160

Ideological Foundations

medieval scholar Maimonides, had ruled differently and that the question of how to interpret the passage in the Shulhan ‘Arukh itself, as it applied to the disbursement of charity for the poor of one’s home city in the diaspora versus the poor of the Land of Israel, was by no means settled in the eighteenth century. The phrase ‘aniyei ‘irkha appears in the Babylonian Talmud, though in a discussion of who should take preference when giving out a loan: the poor have preference over the rich, one’s relatives over other people in one’s city, and the people of one’s city over the poor of another city.128 The Sifrei, a collection of midrashim, talked about this principle in the context of caring for the poor and added the following phrase: “and in your land, the residents of the land have preference over the residents outside the land.”129 For Maimonides—to the surprise of later interpreters130—it was not clear that “land” (erets) was necessarily a reference to the Land of Israel, and thus he only stated, in the rules of charity in his extensive law code, the Mishneh Torah: “one’s relative takes precedence over everyone else, and the poor of one’s household take precedence over the poor of one’s city, and the poor of one’s city take precedence over the poor of another city.”131 The author of the Shulhan ‘Arukh, Joseph Caro of Safed, however, chose to add the phrase from Sifrei to the list of preferences in the distribution of charity, thus determining that not only did the poor of one’s city have preference over those of another city, but also those of the Land of Israel over others living elsewhere. Despite Hagiz’ contention, it was by no means entirely clear how to apply this passage in the Shulhan ‘Arukh. It was just as plausible to argue that the poor of one’s own city (wherever that happened to be) always had precedence, and that only when it was a matter of establishing a priority for the poor of a city other than one’s own, one might claim that the Jews in the Holy Land should have precedence over those living elsewhere. What is more, there are examples that suggest that during Joseph Caro’s own time (he passed away in 1575) some people were clearly following Maimonides’ interpretation suggesting that the “land” of the ruling in Sifrei did not necessarily refer to the Land of Israel: a responsum by Caro’s contemporary and colleague in Safed, Moshe Mitrani (d. 1580), talks about an individual living in Syria who had established an endowment (the text uses the Islamic term, waqf ) for the benefit

Ideological Foundations

of his descendants. In case there should be no more offspring from his family, the income from the endowment was to benefit “the poor of Syria,” and only then, “if there are no more poor in Syria,” not a likely scenario, “it will be for the poor of the Land of Israel.”132 At the turn of the eighteenth century, the prominent Italian rabbi and physician Samson Morpurgo of Ancona, also addressed the question of “the poor of your city” in one of his responsa. He reached a conclusion that was clearly at odds with the position presented so forcefully by Hagiz in Sefat Emet. Morpurgo discussed the case of a Jewish community that, mindful of the crushing poverty in its midst, had decided that no one was allowed to send charitable contributions exceeding the sum of seven scudi to anyone outside the city. One individual who had since moved to the city, however, had habitually made charitable contributions outside the city, in particular by giving money for the poor in the Land of Israel. He claimed that he had not been aware of the rule, that he was a guest and that it therefore did not apply to him anyway, and that the Jews of the city were ignorant people (‘amei ha-arets) and could hardly be given preference over the people of the Land of Israel. In his response, Morpurgo sided unambiguously with the community: the community ruling (haskamah) was valid and the individual in question was bound by it. What is more, he cited the opinion of the seventeenth-century Polish rabbi Yoel Sirkes who held that “The poor of your city have preference over the poor of another city, even if the other city is in the Land of Israel, and there is nothing that comes before the poor of one’s city, except for the ransom of captives.”133 After discussing several different opinions, Morpurgo concluded that it was “forbidden to send [the contributions] outside the city, for they have preference even without a haskamah [to this effect].” Regarding the claim that the people of his city were ignoramuses and thus should not receive preferential treatment, Morpurgo cited the opinion of ­Maimonides to the effect that the more learned had priority only if one had to decide between two competing claims within the same category (a scholar in one’s own city would have preference over an ignoramus in the same place), but this did not apply when the choice was between the poor of one’s own city and those of another city, even if that city happened to be in the Land of Israel.134

161

162

Ideological Foundations

It is clear, therefore, that Hagiz was offering an audacious reinterpretation of the ruling in the Shulhan ‘Arukh, at odds with other rabbinic authorities, reading the phrase “the poor of your city” despite its literal meaning as a reference to Jerusalem, the real home city of all Jews, and thus establishing an uncompromised priority for the charitable claims of the Jews in the Land of Israel and in Jerusalem in particular. Hagiz was not alone, however, and the claim that pan-Jewish solidarity with the communities of the Holy Land was a collective responsibility and a legal obligation rather than an individual act of piety gained currency in the eighteenth century. One of the most prominent rabbinic emissaries of the period, Haim Joseph David Azulai, echoed Hagiz’ thinking and presented a similar argument in a responsum in which he addressed a question similar to the challenge Hagiz had addressed before him: “What is the authority of the people of the Land of Israel to send emissaries to all the people of the exile (benei ­ha-golah) and to expropriate the poor of their cities (leafko‘ei me-‘aniyei ‘iram)?” Azulai clarified that the emissaries did not in fact take away any money that had been set aside for the local poor and then presented a lengthy argument in support of the institution of shelihut for which he marshaled support from both legal and kabbalistic literature. Azulai set out by citing the phrase from Sifrei, “the residents of the Land of Israel have precedence over the residents outside the Land.” He acknowledged the opinion of Yoel Sirkes in Bayit Hadash, which had been cited approvingly in Morpurgo’s responsum, but rejected the reasoning because the Talmudic dictum that established the preference for the “poor of your city” appeared in the context of making a loan, not a discussion of charity. He then went on to invoke several traditions to demonstrate the sanctity and virtue of the Land of Israel: he again cited the Sifrei on Deuteronomy, which said that the settlement of the Holy Land (yishuv Erets Yisra’el) equals all other commandments, even at the present time when the Temple lies destroyed; he invoked ­Nachmanides, who maintained that settling the Land of Israel was one of the 248 positive commandments of the Torah; and he referred to Kabbalah, for example the tradition according to which prayers in the Holy Land ascend to heaven directly, unlike those in the diaspora. In conclusion, Azulai argued, settlement in the Land of Israel was a supreme value and one who wished to partake in the merit of settling

Ideological Foundations

the Land could do so by supporting Jews who already lived there. Like Hagiz before him, Azulai also invoked the opinion of Maimonides that the calculations upon which the Jewish calendar was established at present were only valid and legally acceptable as long as there continued to be a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, where a court once gathered to hear witnesses who had sighted the new moon in order to declare the beginning of a new month. He also cited an opinion in the Talmud that allowed one to have a contract drawn up even on the Sabbath in order to purchase property in the Land of Israel from the hands of a non-Jew (Gittin 8b), illustrating just how central and important the ancient rabbis considered a continued Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.135 Also like Hagiz, Azulai noted that according to the kabbalists, the Jews of the Holy Land were suffering at the hands of the non-Jews through no fault of their own but rather in order “to atone for all the sins, public and private, old and new, of all of Israel.” Azulai emphasized that the Jews in the Land of Israel were particularly righteous and pious, and “one does not find the kind of sins such as shaving of the beard and side locks, or [the drinking of] non-Jewish wine, and sexual transgressions, and laughter and comedies . . . and practically all of them are praying in public [i.e., with a minyan].” Given the suffering and difficulties of Jewish life in contemporary Palestine, moreover, he argued that one should consider the Jews in the Holy Land as “­captives,” and even according to the opinion of the Bayit Hadash, Azulai pointed out, the ransom of captives had preference over disbursing charity to the poor of one’s city.136 What emissaries like Hagiz and Azulai were defending was a significant expansion of a philanthropic network that had gradually emerged in the early modern period and that reached its peak under the auspices of the Jewish leadership in Istanbul in the eighteenth century. Whereas the legal traditions upon which their case rested were ambiguous—note the different path taken by Samson Morpurgo, for example—the emissaries and their supporters often invoked kabbalistic lore about the virtue and excellence of the Land of Israel that had emerged particularly in Lurianic tradition (itself a creation of the sixteenth century). What they did, however, was to use these traditions not to advance an image of the spiritual superiority of the Holy Land

163

164

Ideological Foundations

(or even spiritualize the very notion of Erets Israel, as some contemporary thinkers were doing in Eastern Europe), but to advance the establishment of a tangible, material link between the Jewish communities in the diaspora and the physical Land of Israel. This phenomenon can also be observed in a passage that appeared in the first volume of the Me‘am Lo‘ez, the encyclopedic Bible commentary written in Judeo-Spanish by Jacob Huli, a native of Jeru­salem who later moved to Istanbul where he published, in 1730, the first volume of what became the magnum opus of Ladino literature. In the introduction to his commentary, Huli claimed that he was simply collecting a wide range of traditional sources, arranging them as a running commentary on the biblical text and making them thus accessible to a vernacular reading public of Ottoman Jews. In reality, Huli’s enterprise was far more creative than he admitted: apart from the fact that every anthology is always also a literary creation that involves the selection and rearrangement of sources, his translation at times deviated in small but significant details from the Hebrew (or Aramaic) original that he used.137 This was the case with a brief passage regarding the resurrection of the dead and the advantage of those who were buried in the Land of Israel, taken from Abraham Azulai’s Hesed le-Avraham but changed by Huli in one small yet telling detail. “We have a tradition in Kabbalah,” Abraham Azulai wrote, that the resurrection of the dead will happen forty years earlier in the Land of Israel than the resurrection outside the Land. But everyone who dies outside the Land and has a relative of his family there in the Land of Israel whom he is obligated to mourn, whether man or woman, that relative who is in the Land of Israel has the power to resurrect those who are outside the Land.138

The relatives in the Holy Land whose virtue could help family members buried in the diaspora were thus defined as those for whom one was obligated to observe the Jewish traditions of mourning and for whom one would say the mourner’s kaddish: one’s parents, spouse, siblings, or children. In Huli’s Ladino translation, this passage was rendered thus: But the one who is buried outside the Land, if he has someone from his family who was buried in the Land of Israel, man or woman, if he

Ideological Foundations

was in charge of giving charity to that person by sending annual support according to his ability (mandarle al año según su posibilidad), that family member has the power to cause his relative outside the Land to be received at the same time as the dead of the Land of Israel.139

Huli replaced the legal definition—one’s closest relatives for whom the laws of mourning applied—to a definition based on establishing a tangible, material bond through philanthropy.

Inverting the Hierarchy of Giving We can now return to Moshe Hagiz’ polemic against the Sephardic communities of the West. If we do not accept the link he suggests between acculturation and secularization on the one hand and a declining sense of pan-Jewish solidarity and commitment to the welfare of the Holy Land on the other hand, what was the significance of his intervention? Another aspect of his critique in Sefat Emet provides a clue. Hagiz juxtaposed the prosperity and freedom of the Sephardim in the West to the difficulties suffered by Jewish communities most everywhere else: “Why do all those inhabitants of Erets Israel and of the Otto­ man Empire, of Ashkenaz and of Poland, and those of the Maghreb, need to suffer iniquities in order to atone for their sins, except for one group at the end of the world [in Holland and England], and only on them forgiveness has been bestowed, through the freedom that they enjoy?” Surely the Jews of Amsterdam or London were not more righteous than those of other countries—it was enough to witness them “eat and drink and travel in their carriages, in gardens and orchards, despite the fact that the Holy Temple lies destroyed and most of their brethren, the children of Israel throughout their exile, are in pain and in trouble.” In reality, Hagiz explained, the Jewish communities elsewhere were suffering in atonement for their sins and would reap their reward in the world to come. “The Holy One, blessed be he, will only collect the debt from the one who is able to withstand the suffering and the punishment,” but surely the Sephardim of the West would never be able to handle the kind of pain suffered by “the inhabitants of the kingdom of Ishmael [the Muslim lands], Poland, and Ashkenaz,” and their material well-being was really a sign of their spiritual poverty.140

165

166

Ideological Foundations

What was at stake, then, in Hagiz’ polemic was the economic inequality that separated the prosperous communities of “port Jews” in the West from other parts of the Jewish world, including the impoverished Jews of Palestine, in the eighteenth century. At the time, the Sephardic communities of Western Europe were already anxious about the influx of poor Jewish immigrants, often Ashkenazi Jews from German lands and Eastern Europe. The rabbinic emissaries from the Holy Land appeared to them as just another set of itinerant poor who sought assistance from their better-off coreligionists in the West. According to Hagiz, the critics of shelihut in Amsterdam would say that “if the Messiah is to come to make the poor and the rich equal, he better not come at all.”141 Others allegedly maintained: “We will be very happy when the Messiah comes, for the sake of the poor, for there will be respite for them and for us, and we will not have to give any more charity to them.”142 The Amsterdam community famously excluded Jews who did not belong to the Portuguese Sephardic “nation” from the community and it devised ways of sending poor immigrants, Ashkenazi and Sephardic alike, on to other Jewish communities, but nowhere “closer than Italy or Poland” lest they return (and when that proved insufficient, to any port “beyond Italy, such as in Greece, Tunis, and Turkey”), and even to the Dutch overseas colonies in the Caribbean. Another destination for the unwanted poor who were encouraged to re-emigrate was, tellingly, Palestine.143 To many Amsterdam Jews, then, sending money to support the Jewish communities and to individuals in Palestine was no different than giving charity to the poor elsewhere, and dealing with the requests by sheluhim was simply another dimension of poor relief. Lofty rhetoric notwithstanding, as Bartal and Kaplan have shown, the holy city of Jerusalem became “a refuge for the rejected and unwanted” in the eyes of the Amsterdam community leaders.144 Moshe Hagiz resented the sense of superiority on the part of the Portuguese Sephardim in the West. For him, the donations by diaspora communities in support of the Jews in the Land of Israel were not a matter of charity that put the recipients of the aid in an inferior position vis-à-vis their benefactors. Instead, he sought to invert the hierarchy of giving. From the perspective of the wealthy donors in the diaspora, their generosity was a sign of the status and centrality of

Ideological Foundations

their own communities in the Jewish world—“this is Jerusalem to me,” they declared—and philanthropic giving enhanced their own position in Jewish society, not only locally but also, by patronizing institutions and individuals in the Holy Land, in the Jewish world at large. For the donors, their generosity meant that they chose to transform their economic capital into cultural capital,145 and the tension between philanthropists and emissaries was about competing claims to cultural capital as much as it was about money.146 Hagiz, on the other hand, advocated a different understanding of the philanthropic relationship. “According to the anthropologists, reciprocal giving creates solidarity and affirms relationships,” as Alan Kidd formulates it, whereas “the charitable relationship . . . is fundamentally unequal. The inequalities between donor and recipient are likely to be more or less permanent.”147 Hagiz saw the philanthropic ties between the Holy Land and the diaspora as a reciprocal relationship, with the Jews of the Land of Israel a spiritual vanguard on behalf of their brethren abroad.148 The Jews of the Holy Land considered receiving sheluhim and providing for the welfare of the communities in the Land of Israel an obligation the diaspora owed them, not a sign of its generosity and superiority. It was precisely this view of a pan-Jewish network of solidarity that plainly put the Land of Israel at the center, at the expense of self-assured communities like the one in Amsterdam, which accounted for the resistance encountered by emissaries like Moshe Hagiz. Wresting the Land of Israel from the biblical past and the messianic future and placing it at the center of the pan-Jewish community he imagined, Hagiz had to contend with the diaspora-centric reality of the Jewish world in which he lived. Yet it is worth emphasizing that Hagiz’ vision was neither transformative nor political, and his celebration of the centrality of the Holy Land did not undermine the validity of a continued Jewish existence in the diaspora. For Hagiz and the emissaries, rather like in the Hellenistic period, when the Temple was still standing in Jerusalem yet the majority of Jews lived outside the Land, accepting the centrality of Erets Israel and the continuity of Jewish life in the diaspora were not contradictory. As Erich Gruen observed for the case of the Second Temple period, “commitment to the community [in the diaspora] and devotion to Jerusalem were e­ ntirely

167

168

Ideological Foundations

compatible. That devotion had a public and conspicuous demonstration every year: the payment of a tithe to the Temple from Jews all over the Mediterranean. . . . Did the outpouring of cash for the Temple by Jews from Italy to Iran imply that the diaspora was reckoned as fleeting and temporary . . . to be endured until restoration to the Holy City?,” Gruen asked, and continued: “In fact, the reverse conclusion holds. The continuing pledge of allegiance proclaimed that the diaspora could endure indefinitely and quite satisfactorily. The communities abroad were entrenched and successful, even mainstays of the center.”149 In a similar vein, the philanthropic network of shelihut functioned as a vehicle to construct pan-Jewish solidarity anchored in the commitment to Jerusalem as the common center without ever calling into question the continued existence of a Jewish world beyond the Land of Israel.

Fou r  Solidarity Contested Ethnic Division and the Quest for Unity

When Haim Joseph David Azulai, emissary from the holy city of Hebron, arrived one Friday afternoon, on August 2, 1754, in Frankfurt on the Main by boat from Hanau, he had had enough. Ever since he had left Verona, in northern Italy, just over two months earlier, on May 29, 1754, he had faced a remarkably hostile reception among the Jews of the towns in southern Germany he visited. In the small town of Harburg, for example, where he had stayed with one of the community elders, he was told in the early morning hours by his host’s servant that it was time for him to finish his morning prayers in private and hurry to leave. Azulai insisted on going to the synagogue for prayers, especially since it was the first day of the new month, but his request was rejected. “After prayers,” he wrote in his travelogue, “I saw at the gate of the courtyard a cart that is used to take out the garbage, and the servant was pressing and urging: quick, get your clothes and your suitcase and get on your way.” Azulai at first refused to ride in that cart, but just as he went back to the house, they threw his luggage into the street and slammed the door in his face.1 His next call was the town of Öttingen. Even though the local rabbi gave his support to Azulai, the community elders were reluctant to help him. After they finally agreed to give him a small donation, they sent him on his way on Friday. Again, the promised carriage turned out to be a cart, which got stuck in the woods (“the fool did not know how to drive”) and the emissary barely made it to the next town before the onset of the Sabbath.2 On other occasions, the local communities did not even provide a carriage at all, or they paid the driver only for the first quarter of an hour, leaving Azulai to pay the rest.3 In Ebelsbach, he reports, “the Jews sent us to a gentile inn and did not

169

170

Solidarity Contested

give us a single coin,” and in Arnstein, the community leader, a certain R. Aharon, did not want Azulai and his assistant to enter the town at all and instead sent a carriage for them to move on.4 In part, the lack of hospitality was likely a result of the precarious legal and economic situation of many Jewish communities in ­eighteenth-century Germany.5 Many restrictions on the number of Jews and their economic activities were in place, and a social underclass of vagrant Betteljuden (“beggar-Jews”) posed a problem for the communities, especially because they were associated in the popular imagination with crime—though obviously any emissary would have been appalled to find that he was treated like an itinerant beggar. Throughout the eighteenth century, edicts and laws appeared in the German lands that banned the visit of Betteljuden and held the local community responsible if the ban was circumvented. As Azulai himself noted in his travelogue, the small-town communities he visited were often poor. Other local circumstances likewise created difficulties that prevented communities from providing generous support; in Harburg, for example, the Jews had just built a new synagogue in the year of Azulai’s visit (1754) and probably could not afford to make a contribution for the Jews of Hebron. Still, the lack of respect and honor shown to this representative of the Land of Israel (for which there was no parallel during Azulai’s visits in Tunis, Italy, or Western Europe) is a striking reminder that we should not take the solidarity of Jews with other Jews, and of Jewish communities in the diaspora with those of the Holy Land, for granted. By the end of his trip through Germany, Azulai was frustrated enough to draw his own conclusions about Ashkenazi Jewry: at one point he noted in his travelogue, when speaking about a certain Jacob Goldschmidt of Paris, that “he acted just like an Ashkenazi, all of whom are full of doubts and excuses.”6

Sephardim vs. Ashkenazim There was something else about the problems Azulai encountered in Germany, however, beyond the culture clash between a Sephardic emissary and his Ashkenazi hosts; the anxiety of small-town communities in the face of an itinerant Jew showing up at the gates of the city

Solidarity Contested

and requesting contributions for a faraway community, even if it happened to be in the Holy Land, or simply apprehension of a possible impostor. About a week after his arrival in southern Germany, a rabbi in the province of Ansbach explained to the emissary why his mission for the holy city of Hebron was met with so much reticence: “We have an agreement with the Officials in Istanbul,” the rabbi claimed, “who have agreed that we need not give to any emissary [even] a small coin, for everything will be for the poor among the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem.”7 Even in Frankfurt, where Azulai stayed for several months and enjoyed the hospitality of the city’s leading Jewish families, and where he collected a generous donation for this shelihut, the community scribe had at first noted in the emissary’s pinkas that the money was “for the Ashkenazim,” and only after Azulai pleaded with him, he crossed out the phrase and inserted “for the poor” of the Holy Land instead.8 The difficulties encountered by Azulai in Germany thus were part of a broader and ongoing competition over funds collected in the Ashkenazi communities of Central and Eastern Europe, a conflict that pitted the Sephardic communities of the Land of Israel against the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem and their supporters in the diaspora. Since the late seventeenth century, a controversy had been brewing about the allocation of funds collected among the Ashkenazi communities of Germany and Poland-Lithuania. Following the decline of Safed in the late sixteenth century, Jerusalem had become the main destination of Ashkenazi immigration and by the late seventeenth century it was reported to the rabbis of Venice that at the time “the entire Ashkenazi community, all of them, live in Jerusalem . . . and there are no other [Ashkenazim], except for two or three who live in Hebron, recent arrivals who are attached . . . to the Sephardic community.”9 Facing the burden of considerable debt, the leader of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, Rabbi Moshe ha-Kohen, left on a fund-raising mission to Europe in the 1680s, returning by way of Cairo. While he was there, at the end of 1691 or early 1692, a compromise was reached regarding the debts of the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem with the help of Muslim notables in the city as well as the Sephardic leadership in Jeru­ salem: part of the outstanding debt, owed to Muslim pious foundations (awqāf ), would be repaid immediately with the funds collected by ha-Kohen in Europe; future interest would be canceled and a third

171

172

Solidarity Contested

of the total debt would be forgiven; and the remainder was to be paid off within three years.10 In 1692, a letter from the rabbis in Cairo to the communities in Germany and Poland was printed in Venice, calling on them to collect money in order to help the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem pay the remaining debt and asking them to forward all money collected to Aaron V ­ olterra in Venice. The following year, in 1693, another letter by the rabbis in Cairo was printed in Venice. This time, they complained that it had come to their attention that emissaries from Hebron and Safed had gone to collect money set aside for the Land of Israel in the Ashkenazi communities of Germany and Eastern Europe. It was on this occasion that they inquired about the existence of Ashkenazim in any of those cities, determined that all of them were now living in Jerusalem, and forcefully endorsed a ruling of the Polish rabbis according to which all the donations “from Poland and Ashkenaz . . . will be for the K. K. A ­ shkenazim in Jerusalem alone, and no stranger (zar) will partake of them.”11 The leaders of the Sephardic community took issue with this ruling, however, and wondered: “Who can stop others from giving their charity to whoever their heart desires, if they wish to support the Sephardic emissaries who go and roam all the cities of Ashkenaz?”12 The matter was presented to the head of the rabbinic court in Cairo, Rabbi Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi, who discussed the controversy in a legal opinion included in his collection of responsa, Ginat Veradim, and who ruled in favor of the Ashkenazi position. While ha-Levi addressed the question on the basis of the rabbinic legal tradition, it is also note­worthy that he was on friendly terms with the head of the Ashkenazim, Moshe ha-Kohen. The latter, in turn, had been close to Abraham ben Mordecai’s father, Rabbi Mordecai ha-Levi, who had immigrated to Jeru­ salem in 1684 and had since passed away. In fact, Moshe ha-­Kohen was the one who used his contacts in Venice to find support for the publication of the late Egyptian rabbi’s responsa; when Mordecai ­ha-Levi’s tome, Darkhei No‘am, appeared in print in Venice in 1697, it included a preface by the author’s son, Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi, in which he praised the Ashkenazi rabbi and emissary and thanked him for his help.13 Thus the personal ties that linked the leader of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem to one of the leading rabbinic families in Cairo, and both to Venice, the center of Hebrew printing and of the fund-raising net-

Solidarity Contested

work for the Land of Israel in the seventeenth century, likely was a factor that made Abraham ben Moredcai ha-Levi lend a sympathetic ear to the position of Moshe ha-Kohen and the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem. Ha-Levi’s responsum in Ginat Veradim outlasted the immediate conflict that it addressed and became an important proof text in subsequent fights over the allocation of funds collected in the diaspora and the right of different groups in the Holy Land to dispatch their own emissaries. Thus, more than 150 years later, when the Jews of Maghrebi origin in Jerusalem sought control over the collection of funds in their home countries and challenged the primacy of the Sephardic community, they invoked ha-Levi’s texts to support their position, a case to which I will return later in this chapter. Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi’s responsum spelled out the difficult economic situation of the Ashkenazim in late seventeenth-century Jerusalem and warned that, if nothing was done, their synagogue was going to be destroyed and thus the voice of Ashkenazi tradition would no longer be heard in the holy city. The text also preserved the grievances brought by the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem against their Sephardic counterparts and represents an early example of a phenomenon that we find throughout the eighteenth and, increasingly, in the nineteenth century: the adoption of the language of ethnic conflict, of ethnic discrimination, as a way to frame social conflicts that arose out of the unique circumstances of a community that depended to a great extent on a far-flung philanthropic network and the donations it channeled to the Holy Land. As reported in ha-Levi’s responsum, the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem complained that the leaders of the Sephardic community—the majority of the Jewish population in the city and in the Land of Israel at the time—were discriminating against them. They invoked what they described as a long-established practice of solidarity that tied Sephardic Jews in the diaspora to Sephardic Jews in the Land of Israel, and Ashkenazim abroad to Ashkenazim in the Holy Land. “Why should you and why should we transgress the boundaries . . . established by earlier authorities?” they asked. It is the simple practice, forever and since many years, everywhere, that the Sephardim anywhere in the world send their contributions

173

174

Solidarity Contested

to the Sephardic community (K. K. Sefaradim) in the Land of Israel, and they never give anything to the Ashkenazim who live among them . . . and likewise all the cities of Ashkenaz send their contributions and donations to their Ashkenazi brethren in the Land of Israel, and they never give to the Sephardim.14

The Ashkenazim further explained that twenty years before—i.e., in the early 1670s—an emissary from Hebron had gone to the Ashkenazi communities in Europe, and since he was Ashkenazi and familiar with them and knowing them and their language, he seduced them and deceived them, saying that there was a great community [of Ashkenazim] in Hebron, and he appointed officials in every city. . . . The affair became known to the ­rabbis of Poland and they determined and decided that all Ashkenazim would not be permitted to send and give their contributions and donations to anyone but to their Ashkenazi brethren in Jerusalem.15

Finally, they warned that if the decree of the Polish rabbis was not respected and if the funds collected by the Ashkenazim of Europe did not go exclusively to help the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, their community would collapse and disperse: how could one allow such a thing when “also the Ashkenazim have a part and inheritance (helek ve-­nahalah) in the land of beauty and in Jerusalem, which was not divided among the tribes.”16 The basic assumption in the argument presented by the Ashkenazim was, then, that support for Jews in the Holy Land was always based on inner-Sephardic or inner-Ashkenazi feelings of solidarity. The existence of separate entities—“Sephardim” and “Ashkenazim”—was taken for granted in the petition to ha-Levi, and the latter did not seem to be troubled by the underlying assumption that the Jewish world could be divided along a binary Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide. This in and of itself is quite extraordinary: it appears obvious to the historian of early modern Jewish culture that Ashkenazim in the large cities of Western Europe, in small towns across Germany, or in the shtetls of Ukraine, for all that they had in common, also represented a very diverse spectrum of Jewish life, whether in terms of their respective place within their non-Jewish environment or the internal organization of their communities. Still, the perception of an East-West divide that sepa-

Solidarity Contested

rated Ashkenazi Jews in the West from the Ostjuden in Eastern Europe was a product of the period of emancipation and not yet meaningful to Jews living in the early modern period.17 At least in their confrontation with the Istanbul Pekidim and the Sephardic establishment in the Holy Land, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe understood themselves to belong to a distinct diasporic community. No less striking is the assumption, never questioned by the participants in the debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that there was a somehow unified Sephardic world that stood vis-à-vis its Ashkenazi counterpart. Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent certainly experienced themselves as an interconnected diaspora community throughout the early modern era, with commercial and cultural links putting Sephardim in Western Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman lands into contact with one another. (Again, it was not until the age of Enlightenment and emancipation that a newly imagined European–non-European divide came to replace what Daniel Schroeter has called the “Sephardic world order” of the early modern period.)18 What is remarkable, however, is that also non-Iberian Jews, or communities where Jews of Iberian origin only represented a portion of the population, were lumped together under the broader category of “Sephardim” in the controversies over shelihut. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Maghrebi Jews or those of Arabic-speaking lands naturally joined the Sephardic communities in the Holy Land, and when early modern responsa talked about the prerogative of the Sephardim in Jerusalem to send emissaries to the Jews in “the cities of Sefarad,” they included places along the North African seaboard where Iberian Jews were a minority and had often been at loggerheads with the local Arab Jews over political power within the community. “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardic” identities in the context of shelihut should therefore not be seen as self-evident and objectively defined. Rather, the Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide of the early modern period was articulated in the context of political conflicts like the debates over shelihut, and the diacritical markers of ethnic difference could vary widely in each context, from language (Ladino, Yiddish, Arabic) to common descent, to practice of Jewish law (those who followed ­Joseph Caro’s Shulhan ‘Arukh and those who followed it with Moses Isserles’ emendations).19

175

176

Solidarity Contested

Abraham ha-Levi in Cairo not only chose to support the legal claims of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, but his own legal reasoning suggested that he accepted the approach that belied the idea of a pan-Jewish unity. There was no sense that, a priori, the Portuguese Jews of Hamburg should have felt obligated to help the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem, or the Jews of Lvov should have felt they had to support the Sephardic community of Hebron. Thus ha-Levi argued that if there were “any existing funds that were endowed [by Ashkenazim in Europe] for the Land of Israel in general, they did not endow them other than because there were Ashkenazi communities living in every city of the Land of Israel.” Since at the time of his writing there were no more Ashkenazim left in Safed and Hebron, however, it was clear to him that “all the funds that were initially sent to the three cities should now . . . be sent entirely to Jerusalem alone.”20 In other words, the original donors had never intended to support the Jews of Safed or Hebron per se, but only the Ashkenazim of those places. Ha-Levi invoked the principle (discussed in Chapter Three) that the “poor of your city” have preference when it comes to the disbursement of charity: he explained that the situation at hand was similar to a wealthy philanthropist who had once given charity to the poor in his hometown as well as elsewhere but who had decided, when poverty increased in his own city, to focus his generosity there and cease to send his money elsewhere. Surely, ha-Levi argued, he would have the right to do so, and so did the Ashkenazim in Europe have the right to privilege the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem: “especially now that the Ashkenazim [of Jerusalem] stand at the gates of death, and how could the Ashkenazim abroad look at the troubles and suffering of their poor and unfortunate brethren who live in Jerusalem, when they are their own flesh and blood?”21 It is noteworthy what is implied here: for the Ashkenazim in Europe, the Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem were “their own flesh and blood” whereas the Sephardic Jews apparently were not. Ha-Levi further cited the opinion of the seventeenth-century Polish rabbi Yoel Sirkes in his Bayit Hadash, a text, as we have seen, which ruled that the poor of one’s city have preference over the poor of another city, even if that city lies in the Land of Israel. For ha-Levi, this meant that, “if we give preference to the poor Ashkenazim over the [other] poor of the Land of Israel, it is because for them, the [other]

Solidarity Contested

poor of the Land of Israel, compared to the Ashkenazi poor, are considered as the poor of another land.”22 In this reading, if there was an ethnic group demanding solidarity, it was the Ashkenazim (or the Sephardim, who appear as a foil for ha-Levi’s argument)—not “the Jews.” While it is clear that this was the underlying assumption, shared by the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem and the rabbi in Cairo to whom they presented their case, Abraham ha-Levi’s position was more ambiguous than it appeared at first sight. Both in the introduction and the conclusion of his responsum, he noted that the practice of excluding Sephardic emissaries and the (Sephardic) communities of Hebron and Safed from benefiting from the funds collected by Ashkenazim in Europe was to be a temporary measure. While this did not change the basic legal argument he presented, it is important to note that, according to ha-Levi’s opinion, there was a three-year window when the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem had the opportunity to pay off their debts and thus save their community from demise, an important enough reason to support their case against the  Sephardim. Ha-Levi also maintained, however, that according to the opinion of the rabbinic court in Cairo, “when the wrath and the suffering have passed and everything is calm, the Ashkenazim should be integrated into the Sephardic community regarding the taxes and the imposts of the king, and the donations [from abroad] should go to the Sephardim because they carry the trouble and the burden, but they must give some for the sustenance [of the Ashkenazim].”23 He reiterated this position in the conclusion of his own legal opinion, endorsing the right of the Ashkenazim in Poland and Germany not to give any support to the Sephardic emissaries but insisting that, once the existential danger to the Ashkenazi community had passed, they should integrate with the Sephardim “and become one people (‘am ehad).”24 The unity of a Jewish people, therefore, was an ideal and a goal—but, in ha-Levi’s own estimation, it was not a reality quite yet. The position staked out in Ginat Veradim (and by the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem making their case to the rabbi of Cairo) represented the accepted traditional practice throughout the early modern period. The Ashkenazi community in the Holy Land could certainly argue that the Portuguese Sephardim of Amsterdam also privileged the people “of their own city” and discriminated against Ashkenazi emissaries who

177

178

Solidarity Contested

visited them. Thus we read about the experience of Nathan Shapira, shaliah for the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem in 1657, who received little support from the Portuguese community there, “not so assisting him, because they alleged that the Portugal and Spanish Jews at Jerusalem, at Hebron and Zephit [Safed] and other places in Judea, did depend upon them, and were supplied by them.”25 In fact, it was common for both Sephardim and Ashkenazim to trade accusations of being discriminated against by the other, thus justifying each other’s own exclusive philanthropic preferences. Rabbi Yomtov Tsahalon (d. c. 1620), for example, was asked, earlier in the century, by the Sephardic community in Jerusalem whether they needed to provide support for Ashkenazi scholars learning in Sephardic yeshivot, to which he responded: In Jerusalem . . . the Ashkenazim constitute a sect (ket) of their own, and the Sephardim derive no benefit from them, not in terms of the charity fund, nor for the Torah scholars, nor for the members of the yeshivot. They distribute every week an allotment for those who are considered Torah scholars . . . , every Sabbath, from the funds of the Ashkenazim, something that is not the case for the poor and miserable Sephardic Torah scholars, who do not receive any fixed allotment at all. . . . When they [the Ashkenazi scholars] attend [a Sephardic] yeshiva, their intention is not to learn but [they come] because of the allotment. Yet if the Sephardim want to learn with them [in a yeshiva], they will not give them an allotment, saying that it was the intention of the donors that nobody other than the Ashkenazim may benefit from their money. Thus we, the Sephardim, do not want to give any of our allotments to the Ashkenazim [either].26

In his response, Tsahalon agreed with the position of the Sephardim. Other examples from the period abound: In Venice, the society for the ransom of captives (Hevrat Pidyon Shevuyim) was an initiative of the local Sephardic community and mostly it was the Western and Eastern Sephardim (Ponentini and Levantini) who dominated its activities. Members of the Ashkenazi and the Italian congregations made contributions as well, but they were not involved in the administration and organization of the hevrah. What is more, the Ponentini and ­Levantini each maintained their own, separate funds (kupot), to be used only for the redemption of captives who belonged to their respective “nation.” It was only in 1741 that the two congregations

Solidarity Contested

signed an agreement to combine their resources for the redemption of captives and in 1742 that the two accounts were merged, at the behest of the Venetian government.27 Also in seventeenth-century Venice, the Italian congregation collected money specifically for the Italian Jews living in Safed, rather than the Jewish community of that city in general, and a congregational ordinance (takanah) of 1644 stated explicitly that all funds were to benefit the Italians in Safed “and no one else.” After the demise of the Italian congregation in Safed, the congregation of Italian Jews in Venice determined that its contributions would be sent to benefit the Italians in Jerusalem instead, and a new takanah in 1683 stipulated that the funds would be given to the Italians or, if there were none, to the Ashkenazim—but not to the community at large.28

The Case for Unity One author who was outspoken in his critique of the sub-ethnic divisions in traditional early modern patterns of philanthropy, particularly when it came to disbursing support for the Land of Israel, was Moshe Hagiz. In addition to defending his own, the Sephardic, congregation of Jerusalem against the accusation of the Ashkenazim, he also challenged the tendency of privileging certain groups within the wider Jewish community over others and lamented that this was as common among the Portuguese Sephardim of the West as it was among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. In his polemical book Sefat Emet, Hagiz singled out the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam, Venice, and Livorno, criticizing them for their habit of privileging individual Se­ phardim—and only Sephardim—as beneficiaries of the contributions that they sent to the Holy Land. “These three communities,” Hagiz wrote, “do not send [their contribution] every year in support of the expenses of the [entire] community (kolelut) of our holy city, not even a small coin, and what they send is only for those individual poor who are considered Sephardim (she-hem tahat sug shem sefaradim).” Hagiz denounced the practice of the Portuguese Jews in Europe of drawing up a list—called lista in the contemporary Hebrew and Ladino sources—which determined on an individual basis who was to receive how much support.29 Naturally, these listas consisted of people who had

179

180

Solidarity Contested

some personal tie to the community in the diaspora that was making the donations and privileging those who were seen as members of the Portuguese “­nation,” or part of the Portuguese-Sephardic diaspora.30 Such support from the Western Sephardic communities for Se­ phardim—or, to be more precise, Jews of Spanish-Portuguese descent—was not limited to the philanthropic relation between Europe and the Holy Land. The sense of mutual solidarity that was the foundation of the sub-ethnic group, referred to as the nação by the Portuguese Jews of the West, informed other instances of intra-group charity as well. Consider, for example, the Dotar societies, which provided dowries for poor girls and orphans, established first in Venice in 1613, then in 1615 in Amsterdam, and 1656 in Livorno.31 In the words of the preamble to the provisional statutes of the Amsterdam Companhia de dotar orfans e donzelas pobres, this was “a society of Portuguese, established with divine favor, to marry poor orphans and poor maidens of this Portuguese Nation, and the Castilian, among residents [in the region stretching] from St. Jean de Luz to Danzig, including France and the Netherlands, England, and Germany.”32 The philanthropic network of the Dotar societies thus established a common framework that promoted a strong sense of self, of a Portuguese-Sephardic identity, that transcended the geographic separation of the various communities of the “nation” and established clear boundaries setting it apart from its non-Sephardic neighbors. Similar distinctions between members of the Portuguese “nation” and other Jews applied to the allocation of poor relief within the ­Portuguese-Sephardic communities themselves, as has been documented in detail by historians of the Western Sephardic diaspora. In reality, the practice denounced by Hagiz was by no means unusual for the early modern period and by no means limited to the Portuguese Sephardim. As we have seen, the Italian congregation of Venice organized the support it provided for the poor in the Holy Land in a similar way, and a lista to determine who was entitled to how much support was drawn up elsewhere as well, for example by the community in Algiers. When a number of rabbinic scholars of North African origin decided to establish a new yeshiva in Jerusalem in 1677 and appointed an emissary to raise money for their endeavor among the Jewish communities of the Maghreb, the North African Jewish house-

Solidarity Contested

holders in Jerusalem complained: “There is a city in the Maghreb, Algiers, which sends year after year forty or fifty reales to be distributed among the Ma‘aravim in Jerusalem, both Torah ­scholars and householders, according to a list (lista), like they use to send from the cities of Europe.” Now, they worried, the money would be diverted to benefit the new yeshiva alone.33 Hagiz was also aware of the practice among the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe of collecting money for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, and he denounced this separate philanthropic network as passionately as he criticized the Portuguese Jews of the West. Taking a clear stance against the position laid out by the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, their supporters in Europe, and by Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi in Ginat Veradim, Hagiz argued: The Ashkenazim are obligated to contribute to all the expenses incurred by the holy community in the holy city [of Jerusalem], in equal parts, like two brothers who live in the same house, and to help and to give half of the revenue to the K. K. Sefaradim, because this is the community which pays the taxes and the fees necessary to sustain the Jewish presence. . . . And if, God forbid, there were no Sephardim in the city, the Ashkenazim could not survive either.

He then lashed out further against the Jerusalem Ashkenazim: All the debts the Ashkenazim have incurred in the past were not debts necessary for the taxes of the city but private debt for private reasons, as we know and as our fathers told us. Indeed, the governor of the city has always collected the tax of the city from the Sephardim who are in our community, and because of the poor leadership in their community in the past they have incurred the debts.34

About thirty years later, in his short treatise Eleh Mas‘ei, Hagiz returned to this issue, no doubt troubled by more recent examples of emissaries in Europe convincing the Ashkenazi communities to contribute all the funds collected for the Land of Israel for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem: It is not enough that they exclude the Sephardic community and individuals in Jerusalem, who always had to bear many troubles on account of the Ashkenazim when they were living there, and it is not enough that, when they were living there, they received great abun-

181

182

Solidarity Contested

dance from Ashkenaz and from Poland but did not carry the burden of taxes and fees that are necessary to maintain the [Jewish] presence in the city and the synagogue and the cemetery, and all this the K. K. Sefaradim suffered without receiving any benefit from the funds [collected in Ashkenaz and Poland] . . . but to this very day the Se­ phardim have to pay [taxes] for them lest the gentiles dig up the cemetery of the Ashkenazim.35

In contrast to both the Portuguese and the Ashkenazi communities in Europe, Moshe Hagiz was full of praise for the Jews in Ottoman lands and for the activities of the Pekidim in Istanbul since the mid1720s. In the cities of the Ottoman Empire, he claimed in Sefat Emet, nobody bothered to ask whether an emissary “was Levantine, or Se­ phardic, or Ashkenazi, or Polish, or a son of the city or a guest, and similar evil divisions, as I have heard in these lands [in Holland] and which have spread, because of our sins, among the Ashkenazim.”36 In his later book, Eleh Mas‘ei, Hagiz lauded the efforts of the Pekidim in Istanbul who had managed to establish the kind of pan-Jewish philanthropic network that he had advocated earlier in the century, and he claimed that under the auspices of the Istanbul Officials, “there is no separation between Ashkenazim and Sephardim . . . and there is no distinction between us, and we are troubled by their troubles. . . . For we are all the children of one man, and we have one God and one Creator.”37 Reality was more complicated, though, than Hagiz’ idealized description of the Ottoman Jewish communities suggests, and the traditional practice of cities in the diaspora granting support to the sons and daughters of their own communities in the Land of Israel could be found among Ottoman Jews as well. Two rabbinic responsa from the second half of the eighteenth century addressed the question of support sent by the Jewish community in Salonika—in this case, clothes for the poor rather than money—to Jerusalem with the instruction not to “distribute these clothes to any poor other than the poor from Salonika, who are the poor of their city.” The officials in Jerusalem now wondered about the following: there were those who had immigrated to the Holy Land from Salonika several years before and there were others who had just arrived a few months earlier on the ship from Salonika, carrying immigrants and pilgrims. Were the clothes to be distributed to all of them, “or is it possible that the poor who [arrived]

Solidarity Contested

earlier have no part in this . . . because more than twelve months have passed and they are like the people of the city [Jerusalem] and called ‘our poor,’ not the poor of Salonika?” The instructions from Salonika make clear that also this Ottoman community thought it appropriate to privilege “its own” and that they regarded the Salonikans in Jerusalem as among the “poor of their city,” who should enjoy preference over other Jews. The inquiry also raised the interesting question, though, of whether one ever ceased to be a “Salonikan” and simply became a Jerusalemite, a resident of the holy city. In his response, Moshe Mizrahi noted that the basic assumption in the question submitted to him was wrong: there simply was no legal distinction between the two groups since both had arrived in the holy city with the intention to stay there and establish a home in Jerusalem, so both had to be considered local residents from the first day. Only an itinerant traveler who was habitually moving about would become legally a resident of a certain place once he had remained there for twelve months. Surely the treasurers of Salonika knew this, Mizrahi argued, so that when they wrote that only “the poor of Salonika” should benefit from their contribution they must have meant all the poor whose place of origin was Salonika, regardless of when they had immigrated to the Land of Israel.38 Responding to the same query, Abraham ben Samuel Meyuhas reached a different conclusion, though he too took issue with the flawed legal assumptions in the question that he was considering. Meyuhas argued that the instructions from Salonika themselves could not be considered to be in accordance with halakhah: assuming that there were enough clothes for all the Salonikans in town and some remained, he wrote, should the officials in Jerusalem not be allowed to distribute those to other, non-Salonikan poor? Should some poor receive two pieces of clothing and others nothing at all? “Rather,” he concluded, “the law is that also the poor of our city [Jerusalem] are entitled to these clothes, and all the more so both categories of the Salonikan poor.” Meyuhas also dismissed the distinction between different groups of Salonikans on the basis of a twelve-months’ residence, citing the opinion of the medieval authority Maimonides on the laws of charity, according to which a person was entitled to receive clothing after six, not twelve, months of residence. Thus, Meyuhas summarized his

183

184

Solidarity Contested

legal ruling: first, if the donors stipulate that the poor of their city are to enjoy priority then both earlier and later immigrants must be included; if there is not enough for all, the earlier immigrants have preference because they have already received such support in the past and therefore have an established right (hazakah) that cannot be taken away. Second, if the donors simply state that the gift is for the poor of Jerusalem in general, then the local poor have preference over the Salonikan poor. However, since in his opinion the stipulation of the ­Salonikan treasurer was not valid because it defied legal logic, the poor of Jerusalem in general, not just the Salonikan immigrants, were entitled to receive the donated clothes.39 The question of how to distribute contributions by the communities in the diaspora extended, then, beyond the rivalry that pitted the Sephardic majority against the Ashkenazi minority for the better part of the eighteenth century. The philanthropic practice denounced by Moshe Hagiz points to one way eighteenth-century Jews perceived themselves: solidarity and communication occurred within a number of parallel networks that tied certain groups (or “nations,” to use a term current at the time) together, for example the Portuguese-Sephardic nação or the Ashkenazim, and established clear, though not impermeable, boundaries between Jews and other Jews. When Hagiz called for unity and protested against the ethnocentric philanthropy of these “nations,” he intended nothing less than to invert the relationship in the traditional philanthropic networks of the early modern period in which the communities in the Holy Land functioned as remote “branches,” to use an image suggested by Israel Bartal, of their “mother” (or home) communities in the diaspora.40 For the Portuguese Jews of seventeenthcentury Amsterdam, or for the Hasidim of Eastern Europe a century later, the Jews living in Palestine were an extension of their own communities in the Holy Land. Those who had moved from the diaspora to the Land of Israel retained their ties to their home communities, and the latter maintained their commitment to “their own” poor, the poor of “their own city” who were living far away from home. In the early modern philanthropic practice, then, the concept of the “poor of your city” was extended to encompass a broader group—PortugueseSephardic, Ashkenazi, Salonikan—that transcended the confines of the locally bound community but conspicuously failed to include all Jews.

Solidarity Contested

For Hagiz, by contrast, the Land of Israel was to be the mother or home community for all Jews, and all Jews were to be tied to their common center through a shared endeavor to support the Holy Land.

The Istanbul Officials and the Sephardic-Ashkenazi Rivalry in the Eighteenth Century The Istanbul Officials considered their role to be overseers of a philanthropic enterprise in the service of the entire Jewish community in the Holy Land, rather than a subsection thereof, and in this sense their activity can be seen as a realization of the vision laid out by Moshe Hagiz at the beginning of the century. The work of the Pekidim in Istanbul did little to alter the sentiment among the Ashkenazim in the Land of Israel, however, who felt they were being discriminated against and who renewed their efforts, in the mid-1730s, to send their own emissaries, designating their own community as the exclusive beneficiaries of the fund-raising among the Ashkenazim in Europe. Following the destruction of the Ashkenazi synagogue in 1720, most of the community had dispersed and the number of Ashkenazi Jews in the Land of Israel remained very small until the arrival of the Hasidic immigrants in 1777. According to a letter from the Pekidim in Istanbul, there were seventy Ashkenazim in Jerusalem in the year 1735, and fifty were referred to in a letter to the community in Metz in 1768; about forty Ashkenazim lived in Safed and just over twenty in Tiberias in the late 1760s.41 This compared to an estimated total Jewish population in the Land of Israel of between 6,000 and 8,000 in the mid-eighteenth century, and an average of 3,000 Jews in Jerusalem.42 Despite the small numbers, the emissary of the Ashkenazim, Petahyah ­Katzenellenbogen, who visited Western Europe in the years between 1736 and 1741, tried to convince the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe to send their contributions directly to the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem rather than through the Pekidim in Istanbul. In Frankfurt on the Main, Katzenellenbogen obtained a letter of recommendation, but the community insisted on maintaining the practice of forwarding its contributions through the fund-raising center in Istanbul. In Metz, however, the emissary was more successful, and the local community sent money

185

186

Solidarity Contested

­ irectly to the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, through Marseilles and d Sidon, circumventing the Pekidim in the Ottoman capital. The important Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam too agreed to send their annual contributions directly to the Ashkenazim in the holy city.43 Katzenellenbogen was not the last emissary to collect all the funds set aside for the Holy Land by the Ashkenazim in Europe for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem. In the 1750s, the emissary Judah Yeruham did the same, provoking the fierce opposition of the Pekidim in Istanbul, the Sephardic leadership in Jerusalem, and the other Jewish communities in the Holy Land. Haim Joseph David Azulai, himself in Europe as an emissary for Hebron at the time, was forced to deal with the consequences wherever Yeruham had appeared before him. In the summer of 1754, he visited the city of Fürth, near Nuremberg in southern Germany,44 where he was challenged by the community leaders who told him that he had been preceded by Yeruham, who had visited the German communities earlier in the year and had appropriated all the funds for the Jews in the Holy Land. The community leaders insisted that, “truly we know that this man, Judah [Yeruham], surpasses any other faithful emissary.” Moreover, Yeruham had carried documents signed “by the rabbis and the leaders of Poland and Ashkenaz.” “But not you,” they chastised Azulai, the Sephar­ dic emissary from Hebron: “what signatures from Ashkenaz did you provide?” As we saw, this encounter was typical of what Azulai experienced throughout his sojourn in southern Germany and emblematic of the suspicions an emissary could face when crossing the cultural boundaries that divided the Jewish world—in his case, a Judeo-Spanishspeaking Sephardic Jew from the Ottoman Empire traveling among Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim in Germany. Whereas the documentation and written credentials that Azulai carried with him were supposed to ensure his trustworthiness, relations of trust were always tied to the network embeddedness of the various actors. The fact that Azulai could produce letters from Venice and Istanbul, two major Sephardic communities in the Eastern Mediterranean, but no recommendations from Germany or Eastern Europe, meant that he was perceived as an outsider and was at a disadvantage when competing with someone like Judah Yeruham, who operated as a cultural insider.

Solidarity Contested

After much back and forth, the Fürth community finally agreed to allocate seventy guilders for the Jews of Hebron and promised they would send the money to Vienna—a disappointing sum, according to Azulai’s comment in his travelogue and, as he claimed, a promise they never actually fulfilled. The day after his meeting with the parnasim, a Friday, the keeper of the inn where Azulai had been staying informed him that he had received orders from the community leaders to send him on his way. When Azulai refused and insisted on staying until after the Sabbath, the community elders agreed that the emissary would leave the following Sunday, which happened to be the 17 of Tammuz, a fast day in the Jewish calendar, and they allegedly told him “since this is a fast day, so much the better, for you won’t incur any expenses [for food].” When the emissary was finally waiting to meet the community elders and take his leave, they were unable to see him as their attention was diverted from the troublesome emissary by a new, dangerous situation that had arisen: an accusation—presumably a blood libel like the one that had shaken the community just a few years earlier—had been made by the local Christians against the Jews of Fürth. “And so I said,” Azulai remarked wryly in his travelogue, “praise to the Lord for he has shown his anger to them.”45 Bonds of solidarity thus failed to transcend the cultural divide between the Ashkenazi community and their Sephardic visitor in several ways: mistrust of the emissary was only partially mitigated by the documentation he provided; he was perceived as less trustworthy, and less entitled to help, than his Ashkenazi predecessor; the community had no qualms about sending him on his way just before the onset of the Jewish day of rest or, when he refused, on a fast day in the middle of the summer; and, finally, Azulai himself responded to news of a blood libel not with empathy and a sense of Jewish solidarity in the face of danger but by thanking God for punishing his reluctant hosts for the way they had treated him. As it turned out, the Fürth community leaders’ confidence in Judah Yeruham’s mission was likely entirely misplaced and it is not clear whether he even was an official emissary. In 1754, in any case, the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem sent another shaliah, Shneur Feivish, to Germany, Poland, and Italy, who denounced Yeruham to the rabbinic court in Vienna as an impostor. Jacob Emden reported the misdeeds

187

188

Solidarity Contested

of the fraudulent emissary Yeruham—though he mistakenly attributed them to another emissary, Yeruham Vilna, who was in Europe at the time and supported Emden’s nemesis, Jonathan Eybeschütz—writing that he “consumed all the funds for the Land of Israel, thanks to deceitful letters that he carried as if he were an emissary from the Land of Israel, and they were fake and fraudulent.” According to the rumor reported by Emden, when Yeruham realized that he was going to lose his case at the Viennese rabbinic court, he allegedly caught up with Feivish, laid in ambush for him and tried to kill him. The injured emissary was taken by some passers-by to a nearby inn and by the time he had recovered, Yeruham had already absconded “and fled to Turkey.”46 In 1772, the Pekidim of Istanbul likewise referred to the activities of Judah Yeruham, “who twenty years ago . . . collected a great amount of money from all those places [in Ashkenaz] and established himself at the edge of the border [on the Ottoman side], in Zemlin [Serbia].”47 Like his predecessor, Petahyah Katzenellenbogen, and like Judah Yeruham, Shneur Feivish too tried, often successfully, to convince the Ashkenazi communities that he would send all their contributions for the Holy Land directly and exclusively to the Ashkenazim of Jerusalem, and he established Metz, in Lorraine, as a fund-raising center. Nonetheless, the Ashkenazim in the holy city felt obliged to write to Metz in 1757, complaining about the meager support they were receiving, and in 1763 they sent another letter, which contained some telling language. “Are we not brothers, with one name, all of us Ashkenazim (ha-lo anashim ahim anahnu ve-shem ehad le-kulanu anshei Ashkenazim),” they wrote and grumbled that, whenever they approached the Sephardim to ask for help, they were told to “turn and get help from your brethren, the notables who are in Ashkenaz. . . . What do we have to do with you, the Ashkenazim (u-mah lanu ve-lakhem benei ha-Ashkenazim)?”48 The trans-local, ethnic Ashkenazi identity vis-à-vis what was perceived as a hostile Sephardic community was thus made explicit in this text. The language of kinship and solidarity was applied to the Ashkenazi “nation” and was used to invoke in-group solidarity, whereas the language of ethnic discrimination was employed to frame the conflict with the Sephardic community (which could just as well have been described as a conflict of social class or competition for political power).

Solidarity Contested

The Istanbul Officials were not amused by the activities of successive Ashkenazi emissaries from Jerusalem who threatened to undermine their authority and operate outside the philanthropic network organized in the Ottoman capital. Writing to the officials of the Sephar­dic community in Jerusalem in 1750, they reported that years ago, there was in Ashkenaz H. Petahyah the confuser (ha-­ balbalan). He maligned and slandered the Sephardim (quitó gusanos de la boca ve-hiv’ish et reah benei sefarad) in the eyes of the Ashkenazim, saying that we are evil people and that we do not show mercy upon the Ashkenazim in the Land of Israel. R. Matityah [Ashkenazi], may he be forgiven, did the same, and most recently, R. Yeruham Vilna, who is currently in Ashkenaz, increased the burden, and with him is the slanderer H. Judah Yeruham, and they drew up a takanah that in Poland and Ashkenaz no more emissaries should visit their countries and that the contributions of their lands would be sent ­every five years to Istanbul and would be distributed to the holy cities. The emissary from Hebron, R. Isaac Tsedakah, is there right now, and R. Yeruham wanted to make him go back on the basis of the above takanah. And because the said R. Tsedakah alerted us, we wrote to Ashkenaz, saying that this takanah will cause the destruction of all the Land of Israel. . . . To the said R. Yeruham and his companion it was written that they will be held accountable before the court of heaven and the court of man for all damage that they do to the Land of ­Israel with this takanah. But we did not achieve anything, for the said R. Yeruham turned to accuse and slander the Land [of Israel], saying that there are very few Ashkenazim in the Land of Israel, and even to those few we show no mercy, and they maintain this takanah that no emissary should go to Ashkenaz, and he wrote similar things to Holland, for no other reason but that he found a letter printed in Istanbul in which we committed to absorb the Ashkenazi scholars among the Sephardic yeshiva scholars, and he persisted and interpreted our words to mean that we decided that . . . no money shall be given to Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, but everything should be given to the poor Ashkenazim in Jerusalem.49

As with other designs to limit or abolish the missions of emissaries, the Pekidim responded forcefully. In this case, of course, there was an additional problem: the tension between the Sephardic leadership in Jerusalem and the Officials in Istanbul on the one hand and the

189

190

Solidarity Contested

­ shkenazim on the other hand. Implied in the ordinance that the PeA kidim alluded to in their letter was the understanding that, in the absence of a sizeable Ashkenazi community in the Holy Land, there was little justification for dispatching emissaries and collecting funds from the Ashkenazim in Europe. The Istanbul Officials, who saw themselves as representatives of all the Jews in the Holy Land, could only reject this logic. They were clearly angered by the constant accusations against the Sephardic community, allegedly discriminating against the Ashkenazim. On the occasion of another conflict in the 1760s, they explained that the Sephardic community incurred great expenses to support the Ashkenazim as members of its yeshivot and as recipients of charity. Most of the money raised in the diaspora was needed to pay taxes and meet other payments to the government, as the Sephardim represented the Jewish community recognized by the Ottoman authorities, and the funds were thus required to sustain the Jewish community at large in the Holy Land. The Pekidim claimed that no distinction had ever been made between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, “for we are all the children of one man, and all our fathers stood at Sinai,” and they implored the Ashkenazi communities, once again, to give their contributions “to the true emissaries from the four [holy] cities” rather than to those who claimed they were raising funds for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem.50 Here, the Pekidim in Istanbul did not speak as representatives of the Sephardic ‘edah, or community, but claimed to speak on behalf of all the Jews in the Land of Israel. Like Moshe Hagiz before them, they thus presented the Jews of the Holy Land as an independent entity on whose behalf the Istanbul Officials maintained their philanthropic network, rather than a patchwork of congregations that served as an extension of various communities in the diaspora. Solidarity, they maintained, was incumbent on the Jews throughout Europe with all Jews in the Land of Israel—and was not to be limited, as the Ashkenazim seemed to maintain in this controversy, to an ethnocentric solidarity including Ashkenazim and excluding all others. Thus, more was at stake in the conflicts between the Pekidim and the Ashkenazi emissaries from Jerusalem in the eighteenth century than competition over limited funds. There were two competing visions of the Jewish world and of

Solidarity Contested

Jewish identity: a new one, which I have called the pan-Jewish model of philanthropy, and a traditional view in which the Ashkenazim of Europe were responsible primarily (perhaps even exclusively) for the “poor of their city,” members of the Ashkenazi “nation,” in the Holy Land. The Istanbul Officials saw themselves as the appropriate conduit for contributions from everywhere in the Jewish diaspora to the Land of Israel, and in reality this did not exclude the possibility of allocating funds specifically for the Ashkenazi scholars or yeshivot in the holy city of Jerusalem. As we have seen, the community in Frankfurt insisted against the wishes of the emissary, Petahyah Katzenellenbogen, on forwarding its contributions through the Pekidim in Istanbul. In a letter to the community of Tarnopol, Ukraine, the Istanbul Officials explained, perhaps in an attempt to assuage the concerns of the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe: Because we already carry the heavy burden of the revenue and expenses of Jerusalem we cannot carry another burden, and this is why it seemed right in our eyes to appoint . . . Abraham and Joseph Camondo . . . so that they will receive the funds sent from the cities of Ashkenaz and distribute them to the Ashkenazim in the Land of Israel. . . . Nothing will be taken to meet the needs of the Sephardim, not even a small coin, and not only that, but we will instruct our Officials in Jerusalem to make disbursements from our charitable funds also to the poor Ashkenazim and to look after them, for we are all the children of the living God, and we are all brothers.51

In a letter to the officials in Jerusalem a 1754, the Pekidim in Istanbul provided detailed instructions about the distribution of funds to both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in the holy city: Distribute . . . 13 kuruş to the Ashkenazim, the amount that R. Joseph gave us for the balance of the shelihut of R. Matityah Ashkenazi [i.e., money that was pledged to R. Ashkenazi during his shelihut (?)]. And you will also distribute 67 kuruş and 52 asper, half to the Sephardic scholars and half to the Ashkenazi scholars, from the inheritance of Raphael de Abraham ha-Levi, which we received from Vienna through Baron Aghilar. And you will distribute to the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi Torah scholars who are in Hebron 36 kuruş and 94 asper, which you should divide fifty-fifty, which is also from the said inheritance.52

191

192

Solidarity Contested

The repeated conflicts of the eighteenth century did not just pit Ashkenazim against Sephardim: in all these cases, rivalry between different cities in the Holy Land was also a factor. As we saw in the controversy addressed in the legal opinion of Rabbi Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi of Cairo in the 1690s, the fact that no Ashkenazi Jews were living at the time in Hebron sufficed to exclude that city from receiving support from the Ashkenazim in Europe. When Haim Joseph David Azulai was confronted with the fact that Judah Yeruham had already collected many of the funds set aside for the Land of Israel, he had to defend not just the interests of the Sephardim in the Holy Land but also those of the city of Hebron, on whose behalf he was undertaking his mission. The ethnic divisions within Jewish society in the Land of Israel and abroad were thus intertwined with the rivalry of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, which once again put the idea of pan-Jewish solidarity to the test. From time to time, the different cities in the Holy Land reached agreements on the distribution of funds allocated for Erets Israel in general. Whereas in the late sixteenth century, Safed was still home to the largest Jewish community in the Land of Israel, Jerusalem had taken the first place by the mid-seventeenth century, a change that was reflected in a new key for dividing the funds among the cities. Conflicts in the mid-eighteenth century arose when the Jewish settlement in Tiberias was renewed, under the leadership of Haim Abulafia (d. 1744), who was born in Palestine, served as shaliah for Hebron in 1699, was appointed rabbi in Izmir in 1726, and finally returned to the Holy Land in 1740. The resettlement of Jews in Tiberias had been encouraged by Zahir al-Umar (d. 1775), a tax farmer who began his career as shaykh of Tiberias and came to extend his rule over the entire Galilee, developing Akko into an important port and promoting trade with Europe, primarily through the export of cotton, wheat, olive oil, and tobacco.53 According to a source written about thirty years after the events, Zahir al-Umar had turned to the Pekidim in Istanbul to request their assistance in encouraging the renewed Jewish settlement in Tiberias, part of his effort to vitalize and develop the Galilee.54 Once the Jewish community of Tiberias had been rebuilt, the Pekidim in Istanbul set out to organize support from the diaspora for the fourth holy city, and the first shaliah, Joshua Meir, was sent to the Balkans and to Europe as early as May 1740. Haim Abulafia

Solidarity Contested

himself, the leader of the Jewish immigrants in Tiberias, likewise dispatched emissaries abroad. One of them, his son-in-law Haim Ventura, went to Europe in 1741 and established special funds (kupot) in support of Tiberias throughout Italy.55 It seems, however, that Ventura exceeded his authority and appropriated funds for the Land of Israel in general for the specific benefit of Tiberias, in violation of the distribution key for the various holy cities that was still valid at the time. In a letter to the rabbis of Jerusalem in 1744, the Istanbul Officials thus complained that Abraham ben Asher, the emissary for Jerusalem, had discovered that some Italian communities had unilaterally decided to distribute their funds to the holy cities in equal parts. The Pekidim resolved to have the agreed-upon distribution key printed and sent out to all the communities in the diaspora. What is more, they complained, in Turin, the community had taken the funds designated for Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed and given them to an emissary from Tiberias, presumably Haim Ventura.56 Despite the intervention of the Istanbul Pekidim, individual communities abroad still did not always follow the established keys for allocating their donations. In 1802, for example, the emissary Abraham Arieh of Jerusalem complained to the Jewish community in Livorno that it was distributing the funds collected on the second day of Passover to the different cities in the Holy Land in equal parts and claimed that “there was not a single congregation among Israel in the entire world” that failed to recognize the primacy of Jerusalem.57 A year and a half later the Istanbul Officials likewise Table 1. Distribution of funds among the four holy cities Jerusalem

Safed

Hebron

Tiberias

Late sixteenth century (24 parts)

7

10

3

4

Mid-seventeenth century (24 parts)

12

8

4

No community in Tiberias after midseventeenth century

1700 through 1740s (24 parts)

11

7

6

No community in Tiberias until 1740

1770s (28 parts)

11

7

6

4

source: Jacob Barnai, The Jews of Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992), 74.

193

194

Solidarity Contested

intervened to denounce this Livornese practice, which the emissary apparently had been unable to rectify.58 In 1768, with the dispatching of the emissary Haim Aharon of Kuty (Kotover) on behalf of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem, the old controversy between the Sephardic leadership and the Ashkenazi immigrants was renewed. Once again, the emissary insisted that all funds collected from the Ashkenazim in Europe should only benefit their Ashkenazi brethren in Jerusalem, leaving the Sephardic emissaries from Safed or Hebron empty-handed, and he complained that the Sephardim were still discriminating against the Ashkenazim. He was able to obtain a decision from the rabbinic court in Fürth in support of his position that the funds collected in Germany and Poland were to be designated for the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem alone.59 This time, though, the Sephardic leadership was not alone in protesting Haim Aharon Kotover’s claims, and in 1771, one of the leading Ashkenazi rabbinic authorities of the time, Ezekiel Landau of Prague, wrote a letter to the Ashkenazi communities in which he echoed the position of the Istanbul Pekidim: “Do we not all have one father, are we not the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?” What is more, he undermined the accusation of Haim Aharon Kotover that the Ashkenazim received no support from the Sephardic community: I know for sure that the Sephardim do good for the Ashkenazim [as well], and I can confirm that the late pious and famous rabbi Gershon of Kitov [the father of the emissary Haim Aharon of Kitov], the entire time that he lived in the Holy Land, received generous support from the Sephardim in Istanbul and from the Sephardim in other places. It is also known that most of the money collected by the emissaries from the Holy Land is received by the Sephardim and that they use it to pay the taxes of the community and the interest on the debts of the communities in the Holy Land and this is beneficial to everyone, ­Sephardim and Ashkenazim [alike], for without this no Jew could live in the Holy Land.60

Landau insisted therefore that the funds collected for the Land of ­Israel were to benefit all the Jews living in Palestine. As a result of this latest controversy, the practice of sending separate emissaries to raise funds for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim was discontinued, though the polemics between the different ethnic communities by no means ended, coming to the fore once again in the nineteenth century.

Solidarity Contested

In the last decades of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth century, Sephardim and Ashkenazim sought to cooperate in their fund-raising missions. Thus in 1791, the Sephardic community of Tiberias and the Ashkenazim of the Land of Israel in general sent two emissaries on a joint shelihut, one of them the son of Haim Joseph David Azulai, Abraham Azulai, the other Asher Ashkenazi, a member of the Hasidic community in Tiberias.61 During this mission, the two emissaries visited communities in Italy, Germany, Holland, and Poland. In the city of Berlin the community rabbi, Tsadok Feivush, noted approvingly in the emissaries’ pinkas: It never seemed right to me that there should be a division within Israel, who are one people. [God] divided them in their countries among their peoples and they were called according to the name of the land upon which they sojourn, for we live in [different] countries, but we all have one father and Israel is one people, and in the Land [of Israel] they are all brothers and should not be divided. . . . Praise be to the Name [of God], for now they have restored the matter to its old state and sent two emissaries from [both] the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim of the K. K. Tiberias, and the disagreement has been removed.62

The Berlin rabbi thus employed the same rhetoric of pan-Jewish unity as that used by Moshe Hagiz almost a century earlier, or that invoked by the Pekidim in Istanbul throughout their quarrels with the Ashkenazim in the course of the eighteenth century. He recognized the reality of Jewish life in the diaspora, dispersed among many different peoples and spread through a myriad of different countries: they had appropriated the names of the places where they lived and a division among different Jewish “nations” had thus emerged. Yet in the Land of Israel, the shared homeland of all Jews, these divisions should not persist, according to Tsadok Feivush, and Jewish unity and solidarity should replace the divisions of the diaspora.

Enduring Controversies in the Nineteenth Century Despite the rising chorus of voices advocating unity and pan-Jewish solidarity, the conflict between Sephardim and Ashkenazim continued in the nineteenth century. In a telling episode from 1814, several Ashke-

195

196

Solidarity Contested

nazi Jews from Eastern Europe—disciples of the Vilna Gaon, known as Perushim, who had settled in Safed—were fleeing an epidemic in Safed and arrived at the gates of Jerusalem where they were forced to remain in quarantine for eight days before they were allowed to enter the city. The accountant of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem duly noted that the Sephardim provided the Ashkenazi arrivals with food and clothing and rented a dwelling for them in the city—and concluded: “I possess a written statement from the rabbi, Rabbi Mendel Ashkenazi, head of the Ashkenazim, in which he states that when the shaliah of the Ashkenazi kolel arrives, God willing, he will immediately send me a contribution toward the named expenses [on their behalf].”63 In other words, while Sephardim and Ashkenazim did collaborate at times,64 they still perceived themselves as two separate entities whose primary responsibility was to help “their own,” the members of their own ethnic community. Intermarriage between the groups occurred but was not common, and Sephardim and Ashkenazim continued to live separately. Even in the first neighborhoods built outside the old city walls in the second half of the century, this pattern continued: when Moses Montefiore, the English philanthropist, established Mishkenot Sha’ananim in 1860, eight homes and a synagogue were dedicated to each of the two communities.65 The Ashkenazi rabbi who signed the statement to repay the Sephar­ dic community for its efforts, Menahem Mendel, was the leader of a group of Perushim from Safed who established themselves in Jerusalem in October 1815. The move had been opposed by Rabbi Israel of Shklov, leader of the Perushim in Safed, who feared that the Ashkenazi settlement in Jerusalem would divert funds from the Galilee.66 At first, the Perushim in Jerusalem avoided confrontation with the Sephardic community and declared they had no intention of encroaching upon the Sephardic fund-raising network abroad. A few years later, however, when their numbers had grown to about one hundred,67 they changed course and, in 1821, demanded that the contributions collected among the Ashkenazim “in Ashkenaz and in Poland” should be for their benefit, and not the benefit of the Sephardic community, and should henceforth be sent to Vilna rather than to the Officials in ­Istanbul. They claimed that they had come to reestablish the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem that had been destroyed in 1720, and they cited

Solidarity Contested

Moshe Hagiz’ Sefat Emet as evidence that in the early eighteenth century the Ashkenazim of Europe had earmarked their contributions for the exclusive benefit of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem.68 Hagiz himself, of course, had mentioned this practice in order to criticize it, but taken out of context, his description of Ashkenazi fund-raising in the eighteenth century was now invoked by the Jerusalem Perushim a century later to justify their claims against the Sephardic community. The Ashkenazim found an outspoken opponent in Joseph David ‘Ayash, the son of a former chief rabbi of Jerusalem. ‘Ayash served as an emissary for the Sephardic community of Jerusalem in Europe, visiting Italy, Holland, and Germany in 1820–23. Not long after his return to Palestine, ‘Ayash was dispatched on another mission, in 1825, this time to North Africa. When he arrived in Livorno, however, he apparently changed his mind, canceled his commitment, and instead took on a mission on behalf of Hebron that led him to Italy, France, England, Holland, and Germany. A note added by an Italian Jew to a copy of ‘Ayash’s letter of shelihut indicates that the emissary’s “name was lost from among Israel,” that is, that he had left Judaism, presumably converting to Christianity, “a few years after his shelihut.”69 During a six-month visit to Amsterdam in 1822, Joseph David ‘Ayash produced a pamphlet in which he provided a detailed legal refutation of the claims of the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem and defended the position of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem and the Pekidim in I­ stanbul. He questioned the legitimacy of the Perushim as the presumed heirs of the Ashkenazi settlement in early eighteenth-century Jerusalem and argued that they had no claim to presumptive ownership, or hazakah, to the funds collected among the Ashkenazim of Europe.70 “Perhaps one could have accepted their claims,” ‘Ayash wrote, “had they [the Perushim] asserted their hazakah as soon as they entered the Land [in the early nineteenth century],” but after accepting the status quo for several years they clearly had forfeited any legal claim they may have had. Instead, after the century-long hiatus of organized Ashkenazi life in Jerusalem, the Sephardim themselves had clearly established a claim to the funds collected from Ashkenazi donors in Europe.71 In fact, it was by no means clear that the Ashkenazim ever even had an exclusive claim to the funds collected from the Ashkenazim in Europe, as this had been a temporary measure to help with paying off the monumen-

197

198

Solidarity Contested

tal debt of the Ashkenazi community in the early eighteenth century.72 ‘Ayash likewise dismissed the demand made by the Perushim that all Ashkenazi contributions in Europe should be collected in Vilna and forwarded to them from there, rather than through the services of the Istanbul Officials. Had they intended to reestablish the old center of shelihut in Frankfurt, ‘Ayash argued, it would have been more reasonable, yet he was sure to add that the Frankfurt leaders too had voluntarily transferred their prerogatives to the Pekidim in Istanbul and had thus abandoned any rights of hazakah to the Sephardic-dominated philanthropic network.73 ‘Ayash advanced another important argument that would be invoked in controversies about shelihut and the distribution of funds that pitted the Sephardic community of Jerusalem against the Ashkenazim in subsequent decades, and which echoed similar reasoning by Moshe Hagiz in his writings from a century earlier: the Sephardim were the ones responsible for paying all taxes to the Ottoman authorities and, by doing so, they ensured the continuity of a Jewish presence in the holy city. The government, ‘Ayash argued, recognized only one Jewish community—the community of the Sephardim—and all Jews living in the city had an obligation to contribute to the payment of government taxes and fees: “How could it be that the Sephardim are obligated [to pay taxes] and the Ashkenazim are exempt?”74 ‘Ayash added that it was not by coincidence that the funds designated for the Land of Israel in the Ashkenazi communities of Europe were known as mahatsit ha-shekel, or “half shekel,” an allusion to the contributions made in ancient times to the Temple in Jerusalem. Now, in the times of exile and in the absence of a Temple, ‘Ayash maintained, the taxes paid to the gentile masters of the Holy Land had taken the place of offerings to the Temple because only by virtue of these taxes could a continued Jewish presence in the Holy Land be ensured. Just as Temple property could not be diverted for any other purpose, the funds collected in Europe, designated to enable the Sephardic community in Jerusalem to pay the taxes to the Ottoman government, thus surely could not be withheld from the Sephardim for the benefit of the Ashkenazi community alone.75 Throughout the confrontation between Sephardim and Ashkenazim ever since the late seventeenth century, the reality of these groups as

Solidarity Contested

two separate entities was taken for granted. ‘Ayash too, in his legal reasoning, seemed to accept the division between Sephardim and Ashkenazim as a given. At one point, however, he challenged the validity of a distinction between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim of Jerusalem in matters other than religious ritual. There had never been a rabbinic legal authority, ‘Ayash contended, “who would maintain that the one who follows a certain custom (minhag) is considered a relative (karov), and the one who follows a different minhag is considered a stranger (rahok).” He noted that in Italy, for example, in many cities there were those who followed the Ashkenazi and others who followed the Sephar­dic custom, yet “they are one people (‘am ehad).”76 For ‘Ayash, then, it was necessary to reaffirm the unity of the Jews living in the Holy Land and to transcend the division into sub-ethnic entities. Throughout the medieval world, local identities had been central to the self-understanding of Jews, and a number of halakhic concepts that were relevant for the debates regarding shelihut and the distribution of funds reflected the primacy of local belonging. The maxim of “the poor of your city have preference,” for example, was an expression of this principle, as were the rules of hezkat ha-yishuv, or the right of settlement, which allowed local Jewish communities to admit or ban newcomers from trading or settling in their cities. If an individual moved from one place to another, he could be expected to submit to local custom, and local custom could even overrule halakhah. The early modern period had put these concepts to the test: the large numbers of migrants, growing networks of commerce, and emergence of diasporic communities of kinship and shared culture over large geographic distances meant that the local foundations of identity were now challenged by competing concepts of belonging that transcended the confines of the local community. Ensuing conflicts played out throughout the early modern Jewish world, and they were particularly relevant in the Land of Israel, which not only attracted Jewish immigrants from throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, but also occupied a special place in the Jewish imagination and in Jewish law. Joseph David ‘Ayash responded to the challenge by insisting that the established rules of local identity applied in Jerusalem and the Holy Land as much as they did elsewhere. The Sephardim had established their hazakah, their claim as residents of the place, and the

199

200

Solidarity Contested

Ashkenazim, while entitled to maintain their own customs, could be expected to submit to the leadership of the existing Sephardic community, which shouldered the expenses of government taxes and was seen by the authorities as representing the Jewish community tout court. Ashkenazi accusations of discrimination at the hands of the Sephar­ dic leadership continued. Rabbi Israel of Shklov wrote an agitated letter, in the early 1820s, to “all the great scholars of Ashkenaz and Poland.” He complained about the practice that the estates of those who died and had no heirs in the Land of Israel automatically fell to the community—the Sephardic community, that is.77 Already in the eighteenth century, to be sure, many individuals had tried to circumvent this arrangement, including the prominent Jerusalem rabbi Moshe Bula, who resorted to a legal fiction, signing over his property to someone in Sofia but retaining usufruct until his death.78 In his letter, Israel of Shklov gave voice once again to a diaspora-centric selfunderstanding in which the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel remained an appendix of their mother communities abroad. Thus he concluded that, whenever an Ashkenazi passed away without leaving an heir in the Holy Land, “if there is a Jewish congregation (kahal ) to which the deceased belonged, the congregation should take [his estate] and send it to his heirs [in the diaspora], and if not, the consul [of the corresponding European power] should take it and must send it on [to the heirs].”79 In other words, Rabbi Israel of Shklov did not even endorse the principle that the capital of Jewish immigrants needed to remain in the Land of Israel, perhaps by insisting that it should benefit the Ashkenazim living there: he rejected the underlying assumption itself by privileging the ties of the immigrant Jew to his home community and kin abroad over the collective responsibility for maintaining the Jewish community in the Holy Land. Moreover, he insisted that the principle invoked by one of the Sephardic rabbinic authorities in the controversy, Joseph Hazan, namely that the practice regarding estates without heir followed the practice of Ottoman Islamic law and “the law of the land is the law,” did not apply to the Ashkenazim, “for they are the sons of a different country (medinah aheret).”80 Israel of Shklov renewed the accusation that the Sephardic leadership discriminated against the Ashkenazim. The Sephardim, he

Solidarity Contested

explained, benefited from the “channels of abundance,” that is, the contributions, from the Ottoman Empire and from North Africa. Invoking a “legal decision (pesak) from Istanbul”—it is not clear what precisely he was referring to—as well as the opinion of Ginat Veradim, Mordecai ha-Levi of Cairo’s opinion discussed above, he further noted that the Sephardim had been allowed to collect money from “the lands of Ashkenaz, the burial ground of our fathers,” with the sole purpose “that they can pay the taxes on behalf of the Ashkenazim, and also give to the Ashkenazim sustenance along with the Sephardim.” In reality, Israel of Shklov claimed, the Sephardim had not met their obligation, had not paid the taxes on behalf of the Ashkenazim, and had done nothing to support the Ashkenazi poor. What is more, he maintained, the money raised through the confiscation of the estates of those who died without an heir in the Holy Land, as well as through other fees, far exceeded the amount that was due in tax payments.81 In reality, of course, all communities were suffering from numerous blows throughout the decade of the 1820s, from the violence following the murder of the treasurer to the governor of Akko, Haim Farhi, in 1820 and the rebellion of the fellahin against the governor in Damascus, which led to the siege of Jerusalem in 1825 and 1826, to the cholera epidemic in the Galilee in 1827. Massive fines were imposed on the Sephardic community after the siege of Jerusalem, and it almost collapsed as a result of the burden.82 In a telling display of rejecting the notion of pan-Jewish solidarity within the Holy Land, Israel of Shklov noted approvingly in his letter the intervention of the Russian consul on behalf of the Ashkenazim who, as non-Ottoman citizens, were to be exempted from paying the poll tax altogether and who thus could, and should, relieve themselves of the burden of the Sephardic leadership.83 The confrontation between the Sephardic community of Jerusalem and the Ashkenazim was aggravated when the latter began to dispatch their own emissaries to areas that had hitherto been considered exclusive territory of Sephardic shelihut, namely the Sephardic communities of Italy and North Africa. The Sephardim of Jerusalem responded with irritation and issued in 1821 a herem prohibiting anyone in the “cities of the Sephardim” from contributing money to the Ashkenazi emissaries—Perushim or Hasidim—who had so blatantly “removed the yoke

201

202

Solidarity Contested

of the Torah, the yoke of the kingdom, and the yoke of the way of the land (derekh erets) . . . and nullified all the ancient agreements and rules.”84 The Jewish community of Algiers, not sure how to respond in the face of this ban issued by the Sephardic rabbinic court of Jerusalem, decided to consult Rabbi Haim David Solomon Zerafa, a rabbinic judge in that city. They inquired whether they were bound by the ruling of the Sephardic rabbinate in the Holy Land and whether they had to cancel any commitments they had already made to the visiting Ashkenazi emissaries, “for they fear for their lives, lest they fall into the net of the herem, God forbid.”85 In a lengthy ruling that ran for about seven columns in the printed version of his responsa, Zerafa determined that the Jews of Algiers were not subject to the ruling and the ban imposed by the Sephardic rabbis in the Land of Israel, arguing that the rabbis of the Holy Land had no more authority than their counterparts abroad. He challenged the notion of a juridical hierarchy on the basis of the special sanctity of the Holy Land and the merits of its scholars, but he nonetheless supported the claim of the Sephardim in Jerusalem that the Ashkenazim were not to infringe on their rights acquired by virtue of previous practice. The Sephardim argued that they were the established local residents (muhzakin be-yishuv E[rets] Y[isra’el]) and that the Ashkenazim were foreigners (gerim).86 According to the laws of hezkat ha-yishuv, the Sephardim therefore had the option even to expel the newcomers if they threatened their livelihood,87 though all they asked was that they not infringe on their established line of support from Sephardic communities abroad. Zerafa agreed with this reasoning, arguing that in the present time, when the Holy Land was under non-Jewish rule, there was no distinction in the laws if hezkat ha-yishuv in the Land of Israel and in the diaspora, and the Sephardim “have a claim (hazakah) on settlement and a claim (hazakah) on the contributions from their relatives in the Sephardic diaspora.”88 Even so, Zerafa determined, as long as the Jews in Algeria resolved to provide new funds to the Ashkenazi emissaries without hurting any existing commitments made to the Sephardic communities in the Holy Land, they had the right to do so. Rather than fear the consequences of the herem, they would be blessed, and the rabbis of Jerusalem had no right to stop them from providing

Solidarity Contested

­ dditional contributions to the Ashkenazim, as long as they did not a divert anything from the funds to which the Sephardic community had already established a claim by historic precedence.89 In the context of the present discussion, two aspects stand out in Zerafa’s responsum: again, the distinction between different ethnic groups—Sephardim and Ashkenazim—is taken for granted, and the division of the Jewish world among the “cities of Sefarad” and the “cities of Ashkenaz” is never questioned. Second, Zerafa’s ruling rests on the basic assumption that at present, with regard to the legal precepts relevant to his case, there is no difference between the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel and those abroad. This leads him to conclude, on the one hand, that the ban declared by the Sephardic rabbis of the Holy Land has no force over the Jewish community in Algiers. On the other hand, the rules of hezkat ha-yishuv apply in the Holy Land no less than they do elsewhere in the Jewish world, which means that the Sephardic community is justified in guarding against any infringement on the foundations of its livelihood by the more recent Ashkenazi immigrants. Zerafa thus articulated a traditional position that had come to compete, by the nineteenth century, with two alternative views of the relation between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel: on the one hand, the advocates of a pan-Jewish network of philanthropy invoked the unity and solidarity of the Jewish people against subdivisions such as that separating Ashkenazim from Sephardim and insisted on the supremacy of the Land of Israel and its rabbinic leadership. On the other hand, the Ashkenazi immigrants in the Holy Land continued to identify first and foremost with their home communities in the diaspora and they saw themselves as expatriates living in the Holy Land; for them, all Jews had an equal claim to the Holy Land, but at the same time, none were truly at home in it. Even when the Sephardim and Ashkenazim finally reached a series of agreements in the 1820s establishing rules about the dispatching of emissaries to various regions and the allocation of funds received from the diaspora, the presumption of ethnic difference separating the two groups remained. Thus, when the Sephardic community of Jerusalem and the Ashkenazim signed an agreement about the distribution of money raised by the emissaries in 1829, the existence of two

203

204

Solidarity Contested

separate ­entities—the Sephardim tied to Sephardim abroad, and the Ashkenazim, likewise tied to other Ashkenazim abroad—continued unchallenged.90 The two sides agreed, for example, that of all the funds collected by emissaries in the “cities of Ashkenaz, from the Ashkenazim specifically,” half was to go to one community and half to the other. Of the revenue from the shelihut in Italy, meanwhile, a third was to be disbursed to the Ashkenazim and two-thirds was to benefit the Sephardic community. It was further agreed to allow the Ashkenazim to send emissaries to “the cities of Sefarad, Rumelia, Arabia, and the inner and outer Maghreb, specifically to raise new contributions” (but not to collect existing funds for the Land of Israel), in which case the Ashkenazim were to receive two-thirds and the Sephardim one-third of the revenue. Finally, should a donor in Europe decide to establish a new yeshiva in the Holy Land, if the benefactor himself was Sephardic, the Sephardic scholars would be entitled to two-thirds of the funding and if the donor was an Ashkenazi Jew, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic scholars would each receive half.91 Even when pragmatic considerations, appeals to the unity of the Jewish people, and pressure from philanthropists abroad led the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities to reach an agreement and cooperate, they continued to operate and understand themselves as constituting two different ethnic groups. The genuine unity Hagiz had called for a century earlier remained an unfulfilled ideal. In the meantime, the demographics of the Jewish population in the Holy Land, and in particular in Jerusalem, shifted significantly in the course of the nineteenth century. According to some sources, the immigration of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, coupled with the immigration of others from Ottoman cities and from North Africa, meant that the overall Jewish population in Palestine doubled in the years between 1808 and 1840.92 If the Ashkenazim still represented a minority of the Jewish population in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel in general in the 1820s (one estimate cites 1,000 Ashkenazim out of 7,000 Jews in Palestine in the early years of that decade) and in the 1850s (about 2,000 Ashkenazim and 3,700 Sephardim in Jerusalem, and 4,500 Ashkenazim and 5,500 Sephardim in all of Palestine, in 1856), they came to represent about half the Jewish population in Jerusalem in the 1870s and a majority, 13,000 out of 22,000 (and 20,200 out of 34,000 in Palestine), in the late 1880s.93

Solidarity Contested

Despite the agreements reached in the 1820s, subsequent decades witnessed further conflicts pitting the Ashkenazim against the established Sephardic community. These controversies continued to revolve around funding from abroad, but they also highlighted the distinction between a Sephardic community that understood itself as the local, indigenous community, as opposed to the Ashkenazim, who habitually invoked their status as non-Ottoman citizens and appealed for support from European consuls stationed in the cities of Palestine in order to back up their claims against the Sephardic establishment. The old rivalries between the various communities thus became increasingly entangled in the politics of what contemporaries referred to as the “Eastern Question.” Whereas European powers, through their consuls, claimed to protect the interests of religious minorities living in Ottoman lands, and utilized this role to interfere in the affairs of the empire, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Europe learned how to turn this shifting balance of power to their advantage in their own struggle against the Sephardic establishment in Jerusalem and in Istanbul.94 One long-standing controversy involved the supply of kosher meat, over which the Sephardim held a monopoly. At the center of this conflict stood the practice that allowed the Jewish butchers to sell meat to Muslim customers, obviously an important financial benefit for the Jewish butchers. It fell to the Sephardic chief rabbi (hakham bashı, in the Ottoman terminology; the office was formally established in 1842)95 as the representative of the Jewish millet, or “nation,” in nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, to testify to the Jewish bone fides of the individual shohet, thus enabling him to sell meat to the Muslims as well.96 When the Ashkenazim tried to establish their own ­shehitah and to sell their own meat, they realized that the Muslims were unwilling to buy from them unless the hakham bashı certified that they were “Children of Israel.” According to the Hebrew news­ paper ­Ha-Levanon, “when the Muslims asked [the chief rabbi] whether the Ashkenazim are Children of Israel he answered: ‘I don’t know.’”97 During their controversy with the Ashkenazim, the Sephardic leader­ship insisted on its prerogatives as the legitimate representatives of the local, indigenous Jewish community. The chief rabbi Shalom Moshe Hay Gagin stated during the confrontation involving the sale of kosher meat that “we,” the Sephardim, “are the majority, and we

205

206

Solidarity Contested

are the citizens of this land (ezrehei ha-arets).”98 In the early 1890s, the Sephardic leader Joseph Navon was quoted as saying: “The Sephar­dim were the first ones to take hold of the Land of Israel, and when the Ashkenazim came they found everything ready, and they stole the livelihood from the Sephardim and diverted the channels of abundance for their benefit,” the latter accusation an allusion to the role of the Ashkenazi emissaries.99 Ashkenazi observers too linked the controversy of shehitah to controversies of shelihut: Joshua Yellin, for example, noted in his recollections regarding the conflict over the sale of kosher meat that the Ashkenazim suffered from the jealousy of the Sephardim, as the latter observed that the Ashkenazim received support from the people of their country (anshei medinatam) through the halukah money [i.e., the distribution of the funds gathered abroad]. . . . And they did not have any support, for they are natives of the land (yelidei ha-arets) since time immemorial and they have no more ties to the residents of the cities of their forefathers abroad.100

Clearly, by the late nineteenth century the power dynamic between the two communities had shifted: while the Sephardim continued to invoke their status as the community officially recognized by the Ottoman authorities, their previous dominance in the philanthropic networks of the diaspora had been eclipsed by the Ashkenazi fund-raising in Europe and beyond. Even more so, however, the shifting relations of power were the result of another factor: the growing influence of European states, through their local consulates, in internal Ottoman affairs. Whereas the Sephardic community invoked its status as the Jewish community recognized by the Ottoman authorities, the Ashkenazim invoked their condition as foreign citizens, claiming exemption from local taxes and involving European consuls to defend their interest vis-à-vis both the Ottoman government and the Sephardic community. Thus in 1867, Noel Temple Moore of the British consulate in Jerusalem could report on “the removal, through the joint intervention of myself and my Prussian and Austrian colleagues, of a long-standing grievance of the Ashkenaz or European Jews of this city, connected with the supply of animal food to that community.”101

Solidarity Contested

As the dominant role of the Istanbul Pekidim came increasingly under siege and the fund-raising activities of the Ashkenazim, once the underdog in the internal dynamics of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, began to outdo those of the Sephardim, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the ideal of Jewish unity and solidarity. The intrusive role of European consuls—first among them, the English representatives in Jerusalem, whose preeminence derived from British dominance in trade with the Ottoman Empire—only accelerated the unraveling of the fragile equilibrium that had been reached by the end of the eighteenth century.

The Sephardic Leadership and the Maghrebi Jews In the early 1840s, the rabbis and householders of the Maghrebi community in Jerusalem gathered for a solemn ceremony at the Western Wall. A lengthy statement was read in public and then signed by those in attendance. The text of this document lamented the poverty of the Ma‘aravi (Maghrebi, particularly Moroccan) Jews, accused the Sephardic leadership in Jerusalem of discriminating against the North African immigrants, who technically belonged to the Sephardic community, and asserted the right of the former to dispatch their own emissaries to North Africa. The twelve-page pamphlet was then printed—omitting the names of its signatories for fear of retribution— under the title Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov.102 (The Sephardim, for their part, attacked the Maghrebis and in particular their leaders, rabbis Moshe and Jacob Turjeman, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Edut ­le-Yisra’el, signed by a long list of the most prominent Sephardic rabbis and including the endorsement of the rabbis of the Perushim and the rabbinical courts in Damascus and in Tiberias.)103 In the course of the nineteenth century, increasing, though still modest, numbers of Jews from the Maghreb were settling in the Land of Israel, bringing their number in Jerusalem alone from 1,000 in the 1840s to about 2,000 by the 1890s. Unlike the Ashkenazim, who remained separate from the Sephardic community from the outset, the Maghrebi Jews and immigrants from the Middle East had long been integrated into the existing community structures.104 Some of the most

207

208

Solidarity Contested

prominent members of the Sephardic community, in fact, had their origins in the Maghreb, including Moshe Hagiz and Haim Joseph David Azulai, whose ancestors had been Spanish exiles in Morocco. Tensions were growing, however, between the Maghrebis in Jerusalem and the Sephardic leadership and, like the Ashkenazim before them, the Ma‘aravi Jews eventually resolved to defy the monopoly of the Sephardic elites over the philanthropic network in North Africa.105 As far as the account appended to a polemical text such as ­Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov can be trusted as reliably representing the facts, the Sephardic leadership proved ruthless in asserting its control over the Maghrebi contingent within the Sephardic community. When the Ma‘aravim decided to establish their own synagogue in the early 1840s, they borrowed a Torah scroll from the Ashkenazim; after a mere six months, however, the Sephardim had involved the French consul— many of the North Africans were considered to be under French protection—who personally went to confiscate the Torah scroll, bringing the experiment to an end. Shortly thereafter, the Maghrebis decided to send letters asking for support to the communities of North Africa and dispatched their own shaliah in defiance of the Sephardic community leadership. When the Sephardim got word, they went after Jacob Turje­man and asked to see the letters. “Our emissary has already taken the letters,” Turjeman responded, “and so the members of the ma‘amad [the Sephardic community leaders] fell upon him and beat him almost to death.” According to the account in Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, the Sephardic chief rabbi prohibited any Jewish doctor from attending to Turjeman’s injuries and as soon as he recovered, after receiving assistance from an English missionary doctor, the Sephardic community had the Ottoman authorities arrest Turjeman and incarcerate him in a prison in Nablus. Released four months later, after the intervention of the British philanthropist Moses Montefiore, the Sephar­dim again turned to the French consul and tried, this time in vain, to have Turjeman removed from Palestine altogether.106 In 1850, the leaders of the Ma‘aravi community sent a petition to the British consul, claiming that they were “finding it impossible . . . to join in prayers with the Sephardim Jews whose origin is from Turkey, and consequently have quite different customs and ceremonies,” and asking for support in their quest for permission to build their own

Solidarity Contested

synagogue.107 It was only in 1860, however, that the Ma‘aravim, under the leadership of Rabbi David ben Shim‘on, who had arrived from Morocco in 1854, reached an agreement with the Sephardic community that allowed them to establish their own synagogue and maintain their own shelihut.108 Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, the pamphlet published in support of an independent fund-raising mission on behalf of the Maghrebis in Jerusalem, gave voice to what in some sense was a class conflict, pitting the leading oligarchy of the Sephardic community against a group of more recent and impoverished immigrants. The authors of the text chose to express this social conflict in the language of ethnicity, however, thus making a case for solidarity that did not appeal to the poor of the Jewish community in Jerusalem against the entrenched wealthy and rabbinic elites but instead invoked ethnic difference. They lamented the wretched poverty among the Ma‘aravim and portrayed the humiliation suffered by Moroccan Torah scholars who were forced to live as beggars.109 In their telling, the funds received from fund-raising abroad as well as through the levy of taxes and fees internally did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the poor: All the money that they send from there to here . . . , that is to say what the sheluhim collect everywhere from east to west, north and south, and everything that is collected in the city [of Jerusalem] itself, such as burial fees and inheritance . . . and the like, everything enters the purse of the Pekidim and the Memunim [the Sephardic community leadership] ‘and the earth closed over them’ [Dt. 16:33; i.e., the money disappeared]. And the Torah scholars, the poor and the destitute cry out and nobody hears them.110

While the Sephardic rabbis benefited from the established order, their North African counterparts had little hope of overcoming discrimination and making inroads into an entrenched elite. “The indigenous Torah scholars (ha-t"h ha-toshavim) here have endowments (hekdeshot) and yeshivot and fixed appointments to public positions (minui serarot) that they inherited from their fathers, and earn their living from this.” Yet, “when one of them dies, they will not replace him other than with one of their own, so that a Maghrebi Torah scholar has no access to and no part in the endowment or the ­yeshiva or the

209

210

Solidarity Contested

public positions.”111 The terminology employed here—the Sephardim as the local, indigenous population (toshvaim)—is telling as it echoed the legal claims made by the Sephardic community itself against the encroachment on its lifeline of support from the diaspora by more recent arrivals. Requests for charity by the North African poor and their Torah scholars were rebuffed, according to Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, and if someone invoked the fact that he had contributed money for the Holy Land himself before immigrating to Jerusalem, he was met with resentment: “When you were still living abroad, sending us support, your attitude [to us] was: you are all our servants (kulkhem ‘avadim shelanu).” If another expressed his longing for Zion and noted that he came to Jerusalem “for the sake of the dust of the Land of Israel,” the Sephardic leaders “take some dust and give it to him and say: then eat the dust for which you came. Don’t rely on the kolel. . . . We have two solutions for you; go back to your city [in Morocco], or go to the doorsteps [and ask for charity].”112 The situation in Jerusalem had become so bad, they lamented, that many recent arrivals from North Africa had seen themselves forced to relocate to places like Shefar‘am or Haifa, “even though they are not places of Torah [learning],” or to find a home “abroad, in the vicinity of the Land of Israel,” for example in Akko (which, according to some opinions, was considered to lie outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel), Sidon, Alexandria, or Syria.113 The solution, then, was to follow the Ashkenazim, whose example was mentioned throughout Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov: the text even included a lengthy quotation from the seventeenth-century legal opinion in Ginat Veradim, discussed earlier, that had allowed the establishment of a separate Ashkenazi shelihut.114 The Ashkenazim, it was observed, had their own emissaries “and everything that the shaliah brings with him, they divide among themselves.” Not so the Ma‘aravim, “for even of the money that our brethren in the Maghreb send here, they do not give anything to us, not even a small portion to sustain our lives.”115 “Why should we be less than the Ashkenazim?” the author of Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov asked: “Like them, we come from a different country (mi-malkhut aheret), and like them we are not under this king’s [i.e., Ottoman] rule. And we see how they send their emissaries to their cities and they give them their contributions and support.” What is more,

Solidarity Contested

both Ashkenazim and Sephardim also send emissaries to raise funds in North Africa: “and if those who are not Ma‘aravim send emissaries to the Maghreb to gather new funds,” the Maghrebis themselves should certainly do so as well, because “they have preference over the others by law, because they are the poor of their family and the poor of their city, for we are brethren” and “the poor of [one’s] city have preference.”116 As in the case of the earlier Ashkenazi-Sephardic rivalries, solidarity, once again, did not cut across lines of ethnic distinction, uniting the poor from all communities—Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Ma‘aravim—together or pitting “the people” against an entrenched and corrupt oligarchy.117 Instead, embeddedness in the far-flung network of migration, pilgrimage, and philanthropy linked the Maghrebi Jews of Jerusalem to their counterparts in their North African homelands. Theirs continued to be a world in which the diasporic homeland served as the center and a marker of identity,118 rather than some kind of new pan-Jewish society that was united by its shared fate in the Land of Israel and tied by bonds of solidarity and identity that cut across lines of ethnic difference. Thus, establishing a competing framework of shelihut seemed to be the obvious path to take. Predictably, the Sephardic community was opposed to this reasoning and complained, according to Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, that if the Maghrebis were allowed to send their own emissaries for the benefit of their community alone, soon “the sons of every other city and country who live here, like the people from Turkey or Syria etc., will do the same.” That, however, was bound to hurt the interests of the Jerusalem community at large: people in the diaspora would tell the emissaries of the Sephardic kolel, “We already fulfilled our obligation to donate to the Land of Israel through what we send to our brethren, for they are also from the Land of Israel, and this will lead to the destruction of the kolel.”119

Philanthropy, Identity, Community It was no coincidence that in Bordeaux the terms Sedaka (“charity,” from the Hebrew tsedakah) and Nation were used interchangeably to refer to the community of the Portuguese Jews.120 Philanthropy,

211

212

Solidarity Contested

identity, and community were closely intertwined and conflicts within the philanthropic network of shelihut were expressions of competing visions of the Jewish world. As we saw in the preceding chapter, Moshe Hagiz had polemicized against a narrow, local under­ standing of disbursing charity to the poor of “one’s own city.” In the course  of the eighteenth century, as the philanthropic network in support of the Jews of the Holy Land expanded, a new challenge to pan-Jewish sensibility emerged. If ethnic groups emerge through processes of “coalescence and division,” as Anthony Smith has suggested,121 then the dynamic within the network of shelihut in the eighteenth century is a case in point. As the notion of “the poor of your city have priority” was extended beyond the confines of the local community, it now came to include expatriates who hailed from one city and established themselves elsewhere, especially as immigrants in the Land of Israel. In spite of Hagiz’ vision of pan-Jewish unity, the practice of shelihut in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century actually contributed to the crystallization of sub-ethnic groups within the Jewish diaspora, linked by kinship, language, religious tradition, and bodily practice, in distinction to a perceived Jewish “Other.” This kind of trans-local identity that was built on a shared past but also on an acute sense of being different from other Jews was pioneered by the Portuguese Sephardic communities of Western Europe and the ­Atlantic seaboard, the much-studied Hebrew Portuguese “nation.” The dynamics of competition over funds for the Holy Land also encouraged, however, the rise of an Ashkenazi “nation” that transcended the closely bounded local community, even the divisions between Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern and in Western Europe, and set this greater Ashkenazi community against the Sephardim of the Land of Israel and their supporters in Istanbul. The advocates of the pan-Jewish network of shelihut continued to denounce the divisions that perpetuated the fragmentation of the Jewish world, but to no avail. The reality within Jewish society of the Land of Israel in the nineteenth century—the “old yishuv,” as Zionist historiography calls it—was one of persistent and, indeed, increasing divisiveness, not only between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, but also within each of these putative “ethnic groups.” Thus, the Ashke-

Solidarity Contested

nazi community was subject to the divisions between various Hasidic groups and the Perushim—followers of the Gaon of Vilna, one of the main opponents of Hasidism. In 1837, the Jews of Holland and Germany organized themselves into a separate community, the Kolel Ho"d (Holland ve-Deutschland), which often cooperated with the Sephardic community and whose members adopted “Oriental” dress. On the other side of the divide, as we have seen, the Jews of North African descent sought to separate from the Sephardic community, followed later in the century by a host of other communities, from the Bukharans to the Yemenites.122 Throughout this chapter (and, indeed, throughout this book) we see that there was a tension between the idea of Jewish unity and solidarity, as promoted by the Istanbul Pekidim and their supporters, and a reality of conflict and competition often articulated in terms of ethnic difference. Both, however, were the result of the same broader reality, an increasingly interconnected Jewish world. As Jews from the most diverse backgrounds came to interact with one another in the early modern period and into the nineteenth century (a development of which the international philanthropy of shelihut was both a symptom and contributing factor), they had to make sense of the cultural differences that separated them. Whereas the philanthropic network of the Istanbul Pekidim encouraged cooperation and solidarity, the competition for funding especially on the local level of the Jewish yishuv in Palestine accentuated an experience of alienation when encountering the “Jewish Other.” It ultimately fell to the modern, European Jewish movements of the mid to late nineteenth century—the philanthropists of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the nationalists of the Zionist movement—to revive the pan-Jewish sentiment first advocated in the eighteenth century by the traditional Ottoman Jewish leadership. Thus Eliezer BenYehuda, the pioneer of Modern Hebrew revival, noted in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Or in 1890: One of the great evils in the situation of our people here [in Palestine] is that the nation of Israel (‘adat Yisra’el ) in the Land of Israel and in our city [Jerusalem] is not one nation. . . . There are two reasons that cause this division . . . : the difference in language and the distribution

213

214

Solidarity Contested

(halukah) [of the financial contributions from abroad]. The different languages spoken by Ashkenazim and Sephardim make them strangers to one another, as if they belonged to different peoples (‘amim), and the halukah only strengthens this feeling.123

What Zionists like Ben-Yehuda did not quite realize, however, was the degree to which their ideas of pan-Jewish unity harkened back to precisely the traditional Jewish world they hoped to overcome.

Fi v e  End of an Era The Transformation of the Philanthropic Network in the Nineteenth Century

In March 1827, Zvi Hirsch Lehren, the leading force behind the ­Amsterdam-based Pekidim ve-Amarkalim, who organized the fundraising for the Land of Israel in Western Europe, wrote to the Istanbul Officials expressing his sympathy over the recent demise of the prominent leader of Ottoman Jewry, Isaac Çelebi Bekhor Carmona.1 Responding to a rebellion of the notorious Janissary corps, once the backbone of the empire’s military prowess, Sultan Mahmud II had decided to annihilate the troublesome Janissaries once and for all. The massacre of the Janissaries and the abolishment of the corps represented an important milestone in the century-long effort to reform and modernize the ailing empire, beginning with the military reforms of the early nineteenth century and continuing with the fiscal, administrative, and educational reforms—the tanzimat—from 1839 onward.2 Since the early eighteenth century, several prominent Istanbul Jewish families had served as moneylenders (sarraf s) and financiers for the influential Janissary corps, among them Isaac Bekhor Carmona. As a result of the events of 1826, Carmona—one of the Pekidei Kushta at the time3—as well as two other leading figures of the Istanbul Jewish community, Ezekiel Gabai and Isaiah Ajiman, the last Jewish paymaster (bazergan) of the Janissary corps,4 were executed, creating a power vacuum in the Jewish community. There is no reason to doubt that Lehren simply wished to convey his dismay over the sad fate of Carmona, but it is also clear that the increasingly assertive role played by him and the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam in the organization of the philanthropic network to support the Jews of the Holy Land was facilitated in part by the declining fortunes of the Jewish leadership in the Ottoman capital.

215

216

End of an Era

Zvi Hirsch Lehren (1784–1853) had been appointed in 1809 along with Abraham Prins and Isaac ben Neta Breitbart to oversee the collection of funds for Jerusalem from the Ashkenazi communities of Amsterdam and elsewhere in Holland, London, and Hamburg-­Altona, by two rabbinic emissaries from Jerusalem, Jacob David ­Yekutiel ­ha-­Kohen Rapoport and Raphael Jacob Matalon. In 1813, another emissary, the Sephardic rabbi Isaac ben Rubi of Jerusalem, signed a document that authorized Lehren and his collaborators “to conduct all the affairs of the charities for the Land of Israel as they see fit, according to their opinion and their resolution, without anyone undermining them or protesting against them.” The Istanbul Officials confirmed the appointment in the spring of 1814, and in 1815 the Sephar­dic communities of Hebron and Safed followed suit. When Isaac Breitbart passed away in 1817, Solomon Barukh Rubens took his place and became nominally the head of the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim, an appointment once again confirmed by the Istanbul Officials. It was only in 1821 that the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim were appointed as representatives in charge of the fund-raising by the Ashkenazim as well, first by the Perushim—the disciples of the Vilna Gaon under the leadership of Rabbi Israel of Shklov—in Safed and in 1825 by the Hasidim in Safed and Tiberias.5 Until his death in 1853, Lehren was clearly the driving force and dominant figure in the Amsterdam-based philanthropic operation on behalf of the Land of Israel, even when others formally served as head of the organization. As Jozeph Michman has shown, the rise of Lehren’s Pekidim ve-Amarkalim was linked to the struggle of the defenders of rabbinic orthodoxy, led by Lehren and others like Abraham Prins, against the central consistory that had been established by Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother and king of the shortlived Kingdom of Holland, in 1809, and against the forces of religious reform and Haskalah. When the Dutch Ashkenazi communities lost their traditional role to the consistory, including the once lucrative monopoly on the sale of kosher meat and the right to impose fines and fees on their members, the community income declined dramatically (some seventy percent within five years, according to Michman), and the funding of the philanthropic support for the Land of Israel suffered accordingly. By 1815, for example, the Ashkenazi community

End of an Era

of Amsterdam already owed 800 florins of outstanding pledges to the Jewish community of Hebron.6 Lehren understood the work of his organization, not unlike the vision proposed by Moshe Hagiz in Amsterdam over a century before, as both ensuring the material support for the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel and leading the international battle against the challenge of religious reform and the Jewish enlightenment. Lehren found himself ostracized by the Amsterdam Ashkenazi community when he established a separate minyan to hold prayers in his home, adopting the prayer rite identified with the kabbalist Isaac Luria (the “Ari”), and was forced to relocate to The Hague.7 Lehren’s militant opposition to any kind of change from tradition found expression in his bitter campaign against manifestations of religious reform among West European Jewry, for example in response to the reform-oriented rabbinical conferences held in Brunswick, Frankfurt, and Breslau in the 1840s.8 In his uncompromising struggle against anything that threatened to introduce the spirit of change into the Jewish communities of the Land of Israel, he strongly objected to the designs of Moses Montefiore to open a Jewish hospital in Jerusalem and he warned the Perushim against getting involved with the famous Anglo-Jewish philanthropist who was known to give “to idolatrous causes” as much as to Jewish ones.9 Back in London, of course, Montefiore himself was a stubborn opponent of religious reform, though never as radical—and certainly not as traditionally learned—as Lehren.10

Abolishing Shelihut in Western Europe In his long letter to the Pekidim in Istanbul from March 1827, Lehren informed his counterparts in Istanbul of two significant innovations in the fund-raising operations he was overseeing in Western Europe: first, he had negotiated a new distribution key that set the allocation for the various cities and communities in Palestine and, second, he had resolved to ban all emissaries from visiting communities in the lands overseen by Lehren’s organization. According to the initial “compromise” brokered by Lehren, half the funds raised from Ashkenazi communities in Western Europe would go to the Ashkenazim in Jerusalem,

217

218

End of an Era

even though at the time they represented only about 10 percent of the 2,500 Jews living there, and the other half to the Sephardim.11 After much back and forth and several failed attempts, a comprehensive deal was finally reached in 1829, allocating 67 out of 168 parts to the Sephar­ dic communities of the four holy cities and 101 parts out of 168 to the various Ashkenazi groups.12 Sephardim in Jerusalem Sephardim in Safed Sephardim in Hebron Sephardim in Tiberias Perushim in Jerusalem Hasidei Volhyn in Safed Hasidei Volhyn in Tiberias Hasidei Rusiya in Tiberias Hasidei Habad in Hebron

33 14 12 8 67/168 39 35 13 ½ 4½ 9 101/168

In his letter to the Istanbul Pekidim, Lehren presented himself as the impartial mediator between the competing interests of the various Jewish groups, claiming a position for himself and the Pekidim ve-­ Amarkalim as the most reliable trustees of the welfare of the Jews in the Holy Land. He reminded the Sephardim in Jerusalem, and their backers in Istanbul, that not long ago the Ashkenazim of Europe had wanted to exclude them from their contributions altogether.13 By ostensibly standing above the fray, Lehren positioned himself as the new leader best equipped to supervise the philanthropic network in Europe. Further solidifying Lehren’s attempt to take control of the philanthropic efforts in Western Europe was another major decision in 1824: the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Holland had resolved to abolish the practice of dispatching emissaries from the Land of Israel to Western Europe. In his letter to the Pekidim in Istanbul in 1827, Lehren explained that the initiative had originally come from the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of London, Solomon Hirschell, “and we saw that his words were good and right, for the expenses of the emissaries are great in their travels from one country to another, from one city to another.” The

End of an Era

benefactors in the diaspora had become weary because of the frequent visits of the emissaries and the great cost of their mission, and in the end “the reward is eaten up by their expenses.” Thus Rabbi Hirschell had decided that the community of London would establish its own fund-raising on behalf of the Holy Land and send its contributions in regular intervals to Palestine, and that in the future no more emissaries would be welcomed in the city. The Pekidim ve-Amarkalim too had embraced this new policy and established a new fund-raising network in the Ashkenazi communities of Holland, Germany, and France. “And thus there is no need anymore for the coming and going of the emissaries from the Holy Land to the Ashkenazi communities in these countries, and if they come it will be in vain and, quite the contrary, if they come [here] nonetheless they will cause damage, God forbid, to the poor of the Land of Israel and to themselves.”14 While Lehren went ahead with establishing an elaborate philanthropic network under the auspices of the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim that would channel the contributions from the Ashkenazi communities in Holland, Germany, France, England, and North America to Palestine without the intervention of rabbinic emissaries from the Land of ­Israel, an acrimonious exchange of letters ensued between the leadership in Amsterdam, the Pekidim in Istanbul, and the Sephardic community in Jerusalem. A month after his letter to the Istanbul Officials, Lehren wrote to Solomon Moshe Suzin, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Jerusalem, and complained that the Sephardim of the holy city had “gone out to war” and had leveled all kinds of unjust accusations again him. ­Lehren insisted that the idea to end the visits by emissaries from the Land of Israel had issued from the chief rabbi of London and that the rabbis of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam had concurred with him. “The paths had been closed before the emissaries from the Land of Israel, even to collect the funds from the Erets Israel cash boxes, and certainly from collecting the donations of individuals,” he reminded Suzin and the Sephardic rabbinate of Jerusalem, and he had thus determined to appoint officials to organize the fundraising in Holland and Germany. He therefore was distressed when he learned that yet another emissary, Solomon Zalman Shapira, had been dispatched to Western Europe. After setting up a new network of fund-raising, appointing special officials in numerous cities through-

219

220

End of an Era

out Holland and Germany, on the assumption that no more emissaries would make their rounds, Shapira’s visit threatened to undermine the understanding Lehren had reached with the communities and donors of those places. “My efforts and hard work were for the benefit of all the inhabitants of the Land of Israel in general,” Lehren insisted, “. . . and for the Sephardic community in particular.” How come, he complained, that “for all the good that I have done for you, with the help of God, you write such a rebellious letter to me?”15 Lehren expected the Sephardic leadership in the Holy Land to formally accept the new policies that the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim had determined in the 1820s, including the distribution key for donations from Europe among Ashkenazim and Sephardim and the abolishment of shelihut. This acceptance, however, was not forthcoming; only Rabbi Joseph David Abulafia, the official of the Sephardim in Tiberias, had written to Lehren in agreement with the new policy, acknowledging the compromise between Sephardim and Ashkenazim and the end of sending sheluhim to the Ashkenazi communities of Western Europe.16 In January 1828—about ten months after Lehren’s letter to the Istanbul Officials—the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim wrote once again to ­Istanbul to complain that they had still not received a response from the Sephardim in Jerusalem, Safed, or Hebron.17 Yet another five months later, Lehren and his partners were still waiting to hear from the Sephardim in the Holy Land. In the meantime, the Pekidei Kushta had again requested the transfer of funds that had accumulated in Amsterdam and reminded Lehren of the suffering of the Jews in the Holy Land. Lehren responded furiously that he did not need to be told of the difficulties of the Jewish communities in Erets Israel and needed “no incentive in order to labor for their good.”18 In July 1828, Lehren complained once again to the Pekidim in ­Istanbul. Much time was lost sending letters back and forth about an issue—the abolishment of shelihut—that had already been decided and on which he was not going to compromise. Sometimes two months or more were lost, he lamented, until letters were exchanged. Still “we will not depart from our earlier words and authorization is not given to issue bills of exchange until we receive an answer as is appropriate.”19 Before Lehren could mail this letter, however, the Pekidim veAmarkalim had apparently changed their minds and decided not to

End of an Era

withhold the funds for the Sephardic communities in Erets Israel any longer. Thus, in a note added to his missive, Lehren informed the ­Istanbul Officials that the Amsterdam Pekidim had resolved to allow the immediate release of the funds and authorized the issuing of bills of exchange in Istanbul to be drawn on Lehren’s name in Amsterdam.20 As it turned out, however, the Pekidei Kushta had not even waited to hear back from Lehren and had simply gone ahead, on their own account, and issued bills of exchange that had to be paid by the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim. All Lehren could do now was to threaten that, should another bill of exchange be sent to Amsterdam without his authorization, he would refuse to honor it.21 The problems between Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and Istanbul that came to the fore in this exchange of letters in 1827 and 1828 echoed the tensions that had characterized the relations between the Pekidei Kushta and the Jewish community in Jerusalem throughout the eighteenth century: accusations were traded, communication was slow, bills of exchange were issued without consultation, and the putative center of the philanthropic network—Istanbul in the eighteenth century, Amsterdam in the nineteenth century—found it difficult to assert its authority vis-à-vis the communities in the Holy Land, despite repeated threats that funds would be withheld and exhortations that the very survival of the Jewish yishuv in the Land of Israel was at stake. In many ways, fundraising for the Holy Land continued to function like the early modern network, and Lehren’s ambition to centralize control and institutionalize the philanthropic project remained elusive. If we understand Lehren’s attempt to reorganize support for the Jewish yishuv in Israel as an example of modernization, centralization, and rationalization, his failure reminds us of the uneven nature of such modern transitions and the persistence, well into the nineteenth century, of networks that may more appropriately be labeled “early modern.” At the same time, Lehren’s own staunch Orthodoxy and the pervasive religious rhetoric of his letters show how his attempts at modernization could go hand in hand with his traditionalism, likewise undermining any notion of a linear progression from early modern forms of network organization to more rational and institutionalized forms of philanthropy in the nineteenth century. The hierarchy within the philanthropic network linking the diaspora and the Holy Land continued to be negotiated in a dialectic relation-

221

222

End of an Era

ship in which the philanthropists abroad embraced an ideology that saw the Land of Israel as the center of an interconnected Jewish world yet, at the same time, tried to assert their own role at the center of the fund-raising operations. In the 1820s, moreover, a new rivalry arose that pitted the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam under Lehren’s leadership against the Pekidim in Istanbul, who were losing the role that they had established a century earlier. In his correspondence with the Istanbul Officials, Lehren did not hesitate to chastise his counterparts in the Ottoman capital for not following his instructions. “We were very surprised about you,” Lehren wrote on one occasion, that you have completely disregarded what we have said twice and three times, not to write to us in Italian but rather in the holy tongue [Hebrew], but nonetheless the [latest] letters arrived in the vernacular [la‘az, i.e., Italian]. . . . It seems to us that the scribe who responds to us in the vernacular does not understand our letters, which are written in the holy tongue, and therefore your answer is not to the point and not as it should be. . . . You should hire for yourself, for the matters of the Land of Israel, a scribe who knows and understands the holy tongue . . . and he should write his letters in the holy tongue and in Rashi script, and this is how the Pekidei Erets Israel in Istanbul used to do it [in the past].22

Like the philanthropic network of shelihut in the eighteenth century, Lehren’s operation depended on the constant exchange of information. Lehren, who never visited Palestine himself, was adamant that he be kept abreast about everything that was going on in the Holy Land. Thus he exhorted the Hasidim in Safed, to write to us in regular intervals, no less than four times a year, and let us always know about the situation of the holy city and its inhabitants, and everything that is new there, and do not withhold words of truth and justice. This is not only for our enjoyment, but will also assist us in our undertaking that we have taken upon us, with the help of God, replacing the emissaries from the Land of Israel who are no longer to come here, so that those who thirst for news for the Holy Land will not become angry.23

Thus Lehren admitted, despite himself, a danger inherent in abolishing the practice of shelihut: it risked cutting the Jews of the West-

End of an Era

ern European diaspora off from developments in the Land of Israel, whereas previously, the emissaries had established this kind of bond between the Jews of Palestine and those abroad. He considered, however, that the ongoing exchange of letters, with him as mediator of the news, was still preferable and more efficient than the visits by emissaries from the Holy Land. Trying to control the smallest detail of his philanthropic network, he added an admonition “to write the letters on good paper, not thick and coarse, which increases the cost of mail, and not to leave any blank spots on the paper.” He also insisted that the exchange between himself and his trusted representatives in the Land of Israel not be disturbed by the local rabbis, for he had heard “that it is impossible for the inhabitants of the holy city [of Safed] to write anything abroad or receive any [letters] there without the rabbis and community leaders knowing about it, because the rabbis and community leaders open and read first all the letters that arrive and go out.” Lehren denounced this practice as a clear violation of the famous decree of the eleventh-century rabbi Gershom ben Judah, “light of the exile,” against the reading of private letters. Trying to wrest control over communication between the Holy Land and Amsterdam from the rabbinic establishment, he insisted that none of his letters, or letters destined to him, were to be opened and read by the city’s rabbis.24 (Lehren himself, to be sure, had no qualms about admitting on another occasion that he himself had opened and read a letter by Moshe Sacks to Joseph Schwartz, two rabbis from Germany who immigrated to the Land of Israel in the 1830s.)25 In Western Europe, to ensure the exchange of information and the smooth operation of the fund-raising, Lehren created a network of appointed representatives (gaba’im) who were responsible for overseeing the fund-raising for Erets Israel in their respective cities, forwarding the money to Amsterdam, and submitting detailed accounts to Lehren on a regular basis. He also provided them with news about the Jewish communities in the Holy Land, printing and distributing leaflets in Hebrew, German, and French.26 The synchronic experience of a pan-Jewish community linked to a common center in Palestine that had previously been facilitated by the emissaries was now expanded into the nascent pan-Jewish public sphere of nineteenth-­ century Europe.

223

224

End of an Era

Other innovations too encouraged the broader involvement of a wider Jewish public in the philanthropic effort on behalf of the Holy Land: in Eastern Europe, for example, it became common at the time to put up collection boxes (pushke) in private homes, allowing both men and women to make small contributions for the Jewish communities in the Holy Land and thus become more deeply involved in a philanthropic network that previously had largely been dependent on donations from the wealthy elites or the public funds of the community. The first reference to the use of the pushke appeared in a letter from Lehren to Rabbi Moshe Frankel in Hamburg from 1827, in which he praised its effectiveness and encouraged the use of this fund-raising device, which was already being used for the Holy Land collections “in Poland and Russia.”27 Disappointed as he was with the Pekidim in Istanbul, Lehren devised ways to increasingly circumvent the rival center of the philanthropic network. From the second half of 1834, he ceased to send his letters to Palestine through Istanbul and dispatched them with the help of the Dutch diplomatic service directly to the coastal cities of Syria and from there on to Palestine. Until 1831, the Pekidim ve-­ Amarkalim had also continued to send the funds they raised in Western Europe through the services of the Istanbul Officials and with the help of bills of exchange. That year, however, Lehren decided to find a new route, complaining that the use of bills of exchange and the route through Istanbul led each time to a significant loss of money, presumably because of the payment of commissions and varying exchange rates. While Arieh Morgenstern described the change introduced by Lehren as an example of the “rationalization” of the network, it is not clear why it should be seen this way: instead of sending bills of exchange, Lehren’s organization in Amsterdam reached an agreement with the merchant Jacob Minervi of Trieste who promised to deliver the funds, in cash, on one of his ships that regularly sailed to ­Beirut and Alexandria, without charging any fees for his service. There was a considerable risk involved in this operation, to be sure, and the money still had to be transferred from Alexandria or Beirut to Jerusalem or Safed—and sure enough Lehren soon complained that the fees charged to transfer the money from Alexandria to Palestine, between five and seven percent, were too high.28 Rather than being a sign of

End of an Era

increased rationalization, the new trajectory of funds to be transferred to the Holy Land primarily served to undermine the once dominant position of the Pekidim in Istanbul and to assert the primacy and control of Lehren’s organization over the philanthropic network of the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the novelty of his methods, the ideological foundations that informed Lehren’s tireless labor on behalf of the Holy Land were not so different from those that had motivated his Ottoman predecessors in the eighteenth century. Lehren expressed the ideological grounds for his work on behalf of the Holy Land in the familiar terms of rabbinic tradition; in a letter to the officials in charge of the fund-raising in Frankfurt on the Main in 1828, he wrote: The charity given to the poor of the Land of Israel is among the most eminent of this commandment [of charity]: First, it is like the ransom of captives . . . and the ransom of captives takes precedence over feeding the poor and clothing the destitute, and probably even over the feeding of the poor of [one’s own] city. Second, by it one sustains the Torah scholars. . . . Third, one participates in the fulfillment of the commandment to settle the Land of Israel. Fourth, by it one sustains the lives of many who are hungry for bread and thirsty for water.29

Resisting the End of Shelihut In Italy, in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, and in North Africa, the traditional network of shelihut under the auspices of the Istanbul Officials persisted into the nineteenth century. Livorno, for example, continued to receive the visits of emissaries from the Holy Land who continued to be equipped with letters from the Pekidim in Istanbul. This was the case of David Yekutiel ha-Kohen of Jerusalem, who had signed the original appointment of Zvi Hirsch Lehren in Amsterdam on a previous mission and was again in Europe in the 1820s. In 1828, he was still in Livorno, apparently unable to finish his shelihut because of ill-health. (A list of expenses he incurred included 746:10:4 pieces of eight for eye surgery paid to a certain Professor Mazzoni.)30 The following year, Jerusalem sent a letter to Livorno regarding the appointment of a new emissary replacing ha-Kohen, who had passed

225

226

End of an Era

away before he could return home: Abraham Solomon Zalman Ashkenazi, who was dispatched with the approval of the Pekidim in Istanbul “to all the cities in Europe, including Germany,” in explicit defiance of the ban issued by Lehren.31 Joseph David ‘Ayash of Hebron, who was in Livorno in May 1829, likewise had been equipped with the customary documents from the Istanbul Officials, as were Moshe Ben Simhon of Safed in 1836 and Samuel Magiar of Jerusalem in 1840.32 In North Africa, meanwhile, emissaries continued to collect funds throughout the nineteenth century and until the First World War. In 1899, the Consistoire (the official representative body of the Jewish community) in Algeria apparently resolved to no longer receive the visits of ­sheluhim, but the Jews of the Land of Israel dispatched Rabbi Jacob Meir as a special envoy to plead their case and the consistory’s decision was rescinded.33 In mid-nineteenth-century Palestine, the Pekidim of Istanbul continued to wield some influence as well, limited though mostly to the Sephardic communities. During the decade-long Egyptian occupation of Palestine in the 1830s, the Navon family asserted a leading role within the Sephardic community of Jerusalem and in 1836 Jonah Moshe Navon was appointed as chief rabbi, with the support of the pakid of the community, Abraham Bekhor Abraham, but circumventing the authority of the Istanbul Officials. When Navon died, in 1841, a year after the defeat of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, Judah Bekhor Raphael Navon was elected to replace him, and a fierce power struggle broke out pitting the Navon family and its allies against Rabbi Haim Abraham Gagin, who had expected to become the new chief rabbi, and his supporters. With Ottoman rule restored, the head of the Istanbul Pekidim, Abraham Camondo, intervened and used his connections in the imperial government to assure the appointment of Gagin as hakham bashı, the official chief rabbi, by the Ottoman authorities. He also ensured that Abraham Bekhor Abraham was removed by a government decree banning him from Jerusalem for twenty years.34 By the 1860s, however, the era of the Istanbul Pekidim overseeing the philanthropic network for the Land of Israel was coming to an end. On March 12, 1867, Abraham Camondo and Mandolino Fua informed the Portuguese Sephardic congregation of Amsterdam that,

End of an Era

“because of their advanced age” they were no longer able to deal with the administration of the funds to support the rabbinic scholars in the Holy Land, that they had “decided, with great sorrow, to give up their office,” and that in the future the rabbis of each yeshiva would deal with its own affairs directly.35 It is not surprising that the representatives of the old system of shelihut resisted Zvi Hirsch Lehren’s unilateral move to ban the emissaries from visiting the Ashkenazi communities of Western Europe. When the community of Safed sent an emissary, Moshe Suzi, to Europe, Lehren issued a pamphlet in which he called on the communities to donate money for the Holy Land but beware of the unauthorized shaliah, and he asked the Ashkenazi rabbi of Amsterdam to issue a halakhic ruling against Moshe Suzi and, “if he does not listen, to warn him that we will be obligated to . . . have him expelled by the police.”36 Still, the occasional emissary ventured into Western Europe in defiance of the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim. In the 1840s, the emissary Aharon Zelig Mann traveled to Germany to raise money for the rebuilding of the Ashkenazi synagogue, the Hurvah, in Jerusalem. Still in the 1870s, long after Lehren’s death, another two emissaries, Rahamim Franco of the Sephardic community and Abraham Baer ha-Kohen from Safed, showed up in Western Europe, the latter waging a stubborn and public campaign against the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam.37 Another such emissary was Nathan ‘Amram ben Haim ‘Amram, who was sent to Western Europe as shaliah jointly by the Sephardim and the Chabad-Hasidim of Hebron in 1835.38 The year before, the Jews of the city had been caught in the middle of an uprising that was put down violently by the Egyptian troops, who were occupying Syria and Palestine under the leadership of Mehmet Ali’s stepson, Ibrahim Pasha, at the time. As elsewhere during the rebellion against Ibrahim Pasha in 1834, Jews were killed and pillaged by both the rebels and the Egyptian soldiers; now, the small, battered community of Hebron was seeking relief from the Jews in Europe.39 Like other emissaries who were dispatched to Europe following the ban on shelihut ten years earlier, ‘Amram visited the communities of Italy, though in 1836–37 he interrupted his travels in Italy and called on several communities in the Balkans. He then returned to Italy and later went on to France and London. I will return to ‘Amram’s mission

227

228

End of an Era

in more detail below; what is most relevant in the context of the present discussion was his vocal opposition to the abolishment of ­shelihut in Western Europe, the consequences of which he suffered himself during his long and fruitless visits to France, London, and eventually Amsterdam. During his sojourn in Europe, ‘Amram printed a number of works, including a twelve-page polemical pamphlet called Igeret Malkat Sheva, against the “clan of innovators,” the religious reformers, “who want to uproot what was planted, from what was arranged by the members of the Sanhedrin in the morning blessings: [blessed are you God, king of the universe], who has not made me a gentile, who has not made me a slave, who has not me a woman.”40 In 1843, he published in Hamburg a public defense of his mission, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, which included a chapter denouncing the abolishment of shelihut in Western Europe. He later incorporated this chapter in another work of his, Kedushat ha-Arets, published ten years later in Salonika. ‘Amram noted that he had run into problems both in France and London as the communities refused to receive emissaries from the Land of Israel, and thus he had resolved to go directly to Amsterdam to try—in vain, as it turned out—to make his case for the continued need for sheluhim. The phrase used by ‘Amram when speaking of his visit to Lehren—to “ascend and appear at the sublime Porte (sha‘ar ‘elyon)”41—was a telling allusion to a term that also denoted the Otto­ man imperial government. Whether meant reverentially or sarcastically, ‘Amram’s wording certainly captured the eminent position that Lehren had acquired for himself and his organization, the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam, in the international philanthropic network for Erets Israel by the 1840s, eclipsing the earlier center of the network in Istanbul. Making his case in defense of shelihut, Nathan ‘Amram warned that without the continued visits by emissaries, “the love of the Land will be forgotten . . . completely.” Even if the scheme of Lehren and his associates succeeded and they sent money to the Land of Israel on a regular basis, the donations would only be forthcoming as a voluntary donation (nedavah), as a benevolent action, but “not out of love and for the sanctity of the Land.”42 If advocates of shelihut such as Moshe Hagiz in the eighteenth century had argued that the donations from

End of an Era

the diaspora were not an act of charity but really the fulfillment of an obligation to the Jews of the Holy Land, who served a mission on behalf of the entire people by maintaining the Jewish yishuv in the Land of Israel, Lehren’s impersonal network threatened to invert the hierarchy within the philanthropic relationship once again. ‘Amram was convinced that the initial success of Lehren’s operation notwithstanding, the long-term outlook was bleak. “Even if they all agreed and were of one mind to send the funds together from one place, the thing would not last more than ten or twenty years,” he wrote,43 and as proof of his assertion he noted what he had heard from an unnamed official in charge of collecting funds for the Land of Israel in an unnamed city: the community had agreed to send its donations on an annual basis on to Marseilles, “and he told me that in the first year they sent through him 4,000 francs, in the second year 3,000 francs, and thus each year a bit less until this year, 1841, they only sent 400 francs.”44 Thus, the material conditions of the Jews in the Land of Israel were bound to deteriorate in the absence of emissaries who reminded the Western European Jews of their commitment, and therefore, “the Torah will necessarily be forgotten among us, for where are they [the Jews of Erets Israel] going to find the means to live? So they will make their Torah study an accessory and their work [for a living] the main activity.” Worse, “even if we wanted to till the soil it would never be possible for us, for we could not say our prayers in public [i.e., with a minyan], and especially the observance of the Sabbath would be impossible, for we would have to take care of the fields and vineyards.”45 This argument ironically echoed Lehren’s own opposition to the various schemes of developing agricultural labor among the Jews of the Holy Land because he was concerned it would distract them from their primary task, the study of Torah. Nathan ‘Amram’s skepticism about the viability of the Amsterdam model of fund-raising was linked to the fundamental problem of communication between the Land of Israel and the Jews of the diaspora and what appeared to him, and had appeared to his predecessors in the eighteenth century, as the crucial role of the rabbinic emissaries in forging bonds of solidarity within a pan-Jewish community. In the absence of emissaries, ‘Amram wondered, how would future generations,

229

230

End of an Era

“when even their fathers have not known any emissary from the Land of Israel,” be able to relate to the Jews of the Holy Land? Then who will be able to plant in their hearts the meaning of this commandment? . . . They will say that it is preferable for us to feed the poor of our own city who depend on us and not the poor of the Land of Israel, of whom we have never heard anything, not even from our fathers. . . . And in the end everything will be forgotten so that no memory at all will remain of the holy cities.46

It was just wrong, ‘Amram suggested, for Lehren and his associates to think about the philanthropic network merely in terms of efficiency: the emissaries were essential to maintaining the bond between the Jews of the diaspora and the Holy Land, a bond that could not be replaced by books and letters and pamphlets. Consequently, it was well worth the cost involved in dispatching the sheluhim. When Nathan ‘Amram published this chapter again in 1853, he included another text in Kedushat ha-Arets regarding the importance of shelihut. Signed by eight of the leading rabbis of Tunis, this was a pronouncement against a decision of the Jewish community of Tripoli, in Libya, according to which emissaries from the Holy Land would henceforth only be allowed to visit every seven years. This evidently fell short of the wholesale ban on shelihut that had been pronounced in Western Europe and was in itself by no means without precedent—we saw similar measures from the eighteenth century in previous chapters—but the rabbis of Tunis were still adamant in their opposition: “You want to do something new that is unheard of, and should never be heard of,” they warned, and added their suspicion that “it appears that your desire and your intention is to stop . . . the rabbinic emissaries [altogether].” They reminded the community in Tripoli that it was the emissaries who ensured there was a continued Jewish presence in the Holy Land, and they emphasized, again rehearsing the argument marshaled by Moshe Hagiz in the preceding century, that “it is they who are called the ‘poor of your city’” and who should thus receive preferential treatment.47 Admonishing the Jews of Tripoli, the rabbis of Tunis declared somewhat boldly and not very plausibly, given the restrictions on shelihut elsewhere, that “we have never seen anything like this, to establish limitations on the emissaries from the Land of Israel.”48

End of an Era

What this text demonstrates is that reservations over the frequent visits of emissaries were also appearing outside Western Europe and even in a region like North Africa where sheluhim had long been treated with much reverence. It also shows that ‘Amram, in his battle against Lehren and the regime of the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-­Amarkalim, had to rely on the opinion of the rabbis of Tunis at a time when the rabbis of London and Holland had long given their backing to Lehren and when even the Sephardic chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Haim Abraham Gagin, had been recruited to write in support of Lehren and against the mission of the emissary Aharon Zelig Mann, in a pamphlet published under the title Emet me-Erets in Amsterdam in 1842, the year of ‘Amram’s visit in the Dutch metropolis.49 Nathan ‘Amram reached Amsterdam in 1842, where he was told that “they do not receive any emissary unless they have a confirmation (zikhron ‘edut) from the Pekidei Kushta about his shelihut, which must reach them by mail. Even if they receive a letter from the rabbis of the city [that has dispatched the emissary] confirming that he is a true emissary, this will still not be sufficient, but only [the documentation] from the Pekidei Kushta.”50 This had in fact long been the practice of the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam according to a haskamah from 1769, which was reaffirmed on the occasion of the visit of a shaliah from Tiberias in 1789, when the Ashkenazim declared that “not a single coin will be given from now on to any emissary, unless . . . the Officials of Istanbul have sent an authorization and certification here.”51 To ‘Amram, of course, this appeared to be nothing but an excuse to keep the intrusive emissary at bay when in fact shelihut had explicitly been abolished over a decade earlier.52 In any event, Nathan ‘Amram wrote to the Pekidim in Istanbul and urged them to provide him with the necessary authorization, which he had evidently neglected to secure before leaving for his mission: also in Livorno, his request to collect the donations for Hebron had been rejected because he had failed to present an endorsement from the Istanbul Officials.53 When he finally heard back from Istanbul, he complained, “they answered me with mockery and like the [evil] decree from a king.”54 What had happened? ‘Amram himself provided the text of the letter he had received from the Istanbul Officials, signed by Abraham Camondo, Haim Abraham Palachi, Barukh ha-Kohen, and Meir ha-Levi. In their letter, the

231

232

End of an Era

Pekidim confirmed his appointment as emissary for the holy city of Hebron but explained that they had sent instructions to Zvi Hirsch Lehren in Amsterdam “that all the money from the mentioned ­shelihut should be sent to us as usual, and after we receive the entire sum of the shelihut completely, then we will be willing to give you your portion, as is customary.”55 ‘Amram reacted angrily—“I saw their foolishness and their lack of understanding”56—as he felt that the Pekidim in ­Istanbul were further undermining the standing of their emissary.

Shelihut and the Jewish Public Sphere Nathan ‘Amram’s concern when he published Igeret ha-Emunah vehaTif’eret in 1843 was not primarily, however, to wage a private war against Lehren, but to defend his own reputation. The mission of the shaliah had come under scrutiny as he failed to present the proper authorization from the Pekidim in Istanbul and as questions arose about his handling of the funds he managed to collect. He received a letter from Rabbi Haim ha-Levi, one of the rabbis of the Sephardic community in Hebron signing his original appointment as shaliah in 1834,57 who had heard that ‘Amram “had sent 11,000 kuruş to pay old debts incurred in Alexandria, and that [he] was going to publish [his] book in Livorno [with money collected during his mission], and also that [he] had always sent money to his family but to the community in the holy city [of Hebron] nothing, only 500 caras.”58 ‘Amram had indeed tapped into the funds he had received in Italy and the Balkans, although, as he insisted, only from the portion he was entitled to as an emissary.59 The problem was, of course, that according to the Pekidim in Istanbul, he was supposed to first clear his accounts with them at the conclusion of his mission and then receive his share. In order to defend himself against accusations of impropriety, ‘Amram took an unusual measure and resolved to go public: he printed his accounts, listing the funds collected in the various cities he had visited since the beginning of his mission in 1835, and had the rabbinic court of London certify that he had concluded his shelihut and that his accounts were accurate.60 According to his own summary of the mission, divided into two periods, ‘Amram unwittingly must have provided additional ammuni-

End of an Era

tion to those who considered emissaries a waste of scarce resources: between the beginning of his shelihut and early 1840, about 40 percent of the revenue had been eaten up by various expenses, and in the remaining two years he had spent a whopping 56 percent of the revenue.61 June 2, 1835, to January 1, 1840 Funds raised Minus expenses

3,347 ⅓ duros 1,360

Revenue

1,987 ⅓

Benefit of Hebron community, after payment to the shaliah

1,322

January 1, 1840, to February 2, 1842 Funds raised Minus expenses

4,769 ½ duros 2,671 ½

Revenue

2,098

Benefit of the Hebron community, after payment to the shaliah

1,400

With its rather haphazard arrangement and the multiple different currencies, the account is not easy to read. It is clear ‘Amram himself felt that his expenses were entirely justified and that he had acted in good faith. It is also clear from the information he volunteered, however, why his spending habits had come under scrutiny. Among the expenses during his time in Italy, for example, he noted various outlays related to the publication of his father Haim ben Solomon ‘Amram’s commentary on the Passover haggadah, Korban Pesah, which appeared in Livorno in 1836. Throughout his accounts, he also frequently noted that he had sent money to his family and, involving more substantial sums, for the payment of private debt. In fact, ‘Amram had taken out a loan of no less than 3,000 kuruş from a Jerusalem notable, Judah Raphael Navon, “without which I could not have set out on this mission.”62 Suspicions of the reliability and trustworthiness of rabbinic emissaries were not new. As we have seen, the Pekidim in Istanbul worked to ensure that their sheluhim kept them informed, provided accurate

233

234

End of an Era

a­ ccounts, and honored the trust that was invested in them. Throughout the eighteenth century, the establishment and maintenance of such relations of trust had been based on the ongoing exchange of information between the center of the philanthropic network in Istanbul, the emissaries themselves, and the Jewish communities in the Holy Land and in the diaspora. By the time Nathan ‘Amram reached the end of his European mission in the early 1840s, however, a new factor had emerged: public opinion. At the time when ‘Amram published the account of his mission, a new kind of pan-Jewish public sphere was developing with the rise of Jewish newspapers that transformed Jews (especially across Europe), in Abigail Green’s formulation, “from a body of believers into a body of opinion.”63 By publishing his accounts, ‘Amram decided to appeal directly to a Jewish reading public to defend his reputation and make his case in defiance of the authority of both the Istanbul Officials and the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-Amarkalim under Zvi Hirsch Lehren. In 1840, while Natan ‘Amram was making the rounds in Western Europe, newspapers from England to France and Germany to Italy offered their readers ample coverage of the fate of the Jews in the Syrian city of Damascus, who had been accused of ritual murder. The socalled Damascus Affair quickly became an international cause célèbre, which led to the involvement of two of the leading figures of French and English Jewry, Adolphe Crémieux and Moses Montefiore, respectively. Historian Jonathan Frankel has identified the Damascus Affair as an important catalyst in the development of a rapidly expanding Jewish press through Europe, with the founding of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums in Germany in 1837, the French Archives Israélites following in 1840, and the Jewish Chronicle in England in 1841.64 The rich Jewish newspaper culture in a plethora of languages, from German, English, and French to Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino, carried news from every corner of the Jewish world and contributed to a sense of a global, interconnected, pan-Jewish community. “Having reduced the nation to a page of type that one could hold in one’s hands,” Mark Baker has commented on the significance of the rise of the modern Jewish newspapers in the nineteenth century, “every reader could connect individually to the entire national body.”65 This new mode of communication was bound to have an impact on the traditional net-

End of an Era

work of shelihut. Now, the activities of the emissaries came under the scrutinizing eye of a not always sympathetic reading public, and the reputation and integrity of individual emissaries, as well as the merits of the fund-raising network more generally, were now examined in the pages of the Jewish press. In 1871, for example, the Judeo-Spanish newspaper El Coreo de Viena printed an article accusing the emissary Moshe Malka, representing the Maghrebi community of Jerusalem, of embezzlement. In response, Malka felt obliged to publish a detailed account of his mission in the pages of the Hebrew newspaper Havatselet (which appeared in Jerusalem under the editorship of Israel Dov Frumkin).66 In a letter to the editor that appeared half a year later, Abraham Baer ha-Kohen Gott­ lober of Zhitomir in Russia praised the newspaper for having made the emissary’s account public. Acknowledging the role of the paper’s editors, who were “spreading the canopy of love over the descendants of Jacob who are dispersed to the ends of the world and the farthest islands,” he saw the publication of Malka’s accounts, and thus accountability, as a sign of progress among the Jews of the Holy Land.67 However, accusations of impropriety persisted and the Coreo de Viena claimed that the emissary had retained three-quarters of the substantial funds he raised during his mission for himself, that he had bought a mansion in Jaffa from the money, and that the Maghrebi community itself had been forced to excommunicate Malka when it learned of his misdeeds.68 In response, a declaration signed by the Sephardic chief rabbi, Abraham Ashkenazi, and several other Jerusalem notables was published in Havatselet a month later to defend Malka against what they described as slanderous and unfounded allegations. The authors of the appeal in support of the emissary were well aware of the potential impact of the new print media, noting that the editors of newspapers “are no prophets nor the sons of prophets to distinguish between truth and lies,” and thus the false accusations, which amount to “a desecration of the Name [of God] and a desecration of his holy Torah, and in particular a desecration of its students and sages, spread throughout the world without root or branch.” While Rabbi Ashkenazi and his cosignatories admitted that a disagreement had arisen between them and the emissary, they emphatically denied that it had had anything to do with the

235

236

End of an Era

accuracy of his accounts but rather with a complaint that they had received about the emissary who had come into conflict with the Se­ phardic leadership in the Romanian (Vlach) city of Turnu.69 The Jewish press could serve as a vehicle both to publicly raise doubts about the honesty of an emissary from the Holy Land and to provide support for his mission. Still at the end of the nineteenth century, a piece in El Tiempo explained to the readers of this Ladino newspaper published in Istanbul: “As you know, the different Israelite communities in Jerusalem and the administrations of certain religious and charitable institutions of that city have the custom of sending emissaries (shelihei de-rahamana) to the Israelites of all countries.” Shelihut had thus further fragmented by the end of the nineteenth century as not only the different ethnic communities—Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Ma‘aravim, etc.—resorted to sending their own emissaries but also individual institutions—yeshivot, hospitals, schools—dispatched their representatives to collect money. “More than once,” the paper noted, “there were complaints about this way of collecting contributions, because it gives room for abuses and scandals and useless expenses.” How often, El Tiempo wondered, have emissaries ended up spending more money on their travels than they were able to collect, eventually being stranded without means in some faraway country. Moreover, “many of these emissaries do not shine with honesty (no brillan por sus ­honestidad).” Because they were paid a percentage of the funds collected, they were tempted to manipulate their accounts.70 The occasion of the article was the visit of one such emissary from Jerusalem, Haviv Azulai, who was accompanied by a certain Joseph Molho of Salonika, to the city of Philipoli to raise money for a Jerusalem orphanage. The community council agreed to pay twelve francs for Azulai’s travel expenses and to forward a donation of fifty francs to Jerusalem through the services of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. At first, according to the account in El Tiempo, the emissary was taken aback, considering the Alliance as “damaging to Judaism,” but when the community leaders suggested that instead they would issue a recommendation for the shaliah to raise the funds from private donors in the city, Azulai demurred and accepted the initial proposition. The following day, however, the emissary secretly took the letter of recommendation from the community council and began to raise private

End of an Era

donations in addition to the funds provided by the community. The community council, feeling betrayed and already suspicious because of certain irregularities in the emissary’s account, was now convinced that it was dealing with a swindler and immediately sent a circular to the other Jewish communities in the principality to warn them about this emissary. The editor of El Tiempo, while withholding judgment on whether or not Azulai had committed fraud, added that the subsequent behavior of the emissary had demonstrated that he was unworthy of support: having heard about the circular from the community of Philipoli, he had issued a violent condemnation of the community and its leadership, something that was “unworthy of a Jew and especially of a rabbi, if indeed he is one.” In conclusion, El Tiempo appealed to the rabbis in Jerusalem to call back this emissary, that is, “if he had actually been sent by them” in the first place.71 Ten days later, El Tiempo carried a letter from the emissary, Haviv Azulai, in which he defended his mission. He explained that the impoverished Jews of the holy city “for a long time” had to recur to sending emissaries abroad whose travel expenses were covered by the communities in the diaspora and who would raise the funds necessary to sustain the Jews in Jerusalem. He apologized that he had approached private donors after the community council in Philipoli had already agreed to a donation of fifty francs, but he warned not to damage the worthy cause—the orphanage in Jerusalem—on account of his mistake. Moreover, he noted that the sum pledged by the Philipoli community was “very small” for the size of the city, which had impelled him to seek additional contributions.72 Two weeks later, the chief rabbi of Adrianople, Abraham Tsemah, intervened with another letter on the pages of El Tiempo, declaring that he had telegraphed the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Elyashar, requesting information about ­Azulai’s mission. Elyashar had responded that Azulai was “dispatched to collect money from all countries other than the cities of Turkey for the [Jerusalem] orphanages.” Rabbi Tsemah concluded that Azulai’s cause was important and worthy of support and recommended to the communities “of the foreign countries, such as Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, etc.” to contribute to his mission.73 As this exchange illustrates, the pace of communicating information by the late nineteenth century had accelerated to a degree unimagin­

237

238

End of an Era

able to the Pekidim in Istanbul and their emissaries in the eighteenth century, and relations of trust were now established, challenged, and defended in the public sphere—in this case, the Ladino press. Newspapers carried information quickly and far, and the various actors involved—the emissaries, the communities, the rabbis in the diaspora and those in the Land of Israel—had recourse to the new technologies of exchanging information (the telegraph) and the new platforms to convey their message (the Jewish press). By the late nineteenth century, then, the trustworthiness of an emissary and the merit of his mission would increasingly come under public scrutiny and recommendations and warnings would be exchanged in front of an evergrowing reading public. The emissaries were not the only ones who had to contend with the new Jewish public sphere, sustained by the thriving Jewish news­paper culture that emerged everywhere in Europe, North America, and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Zvi Hirsch ­Lehren and the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam were increasingly called upon to publish their accounts and to answer to the public, who participated in the philanthropic network but had no way of knowing how much money was in fact collected and disbursed to the various Jewish communities in the Holy Land. The German Jewish press was particularly adamant in its public criticism of Lehren and the secretive practices of the Dutch-based institution. The dissatisfaction with the lack of public accountability went hand in hand with profound ideological differences: Lehren, as a defender of Orthodoxy and the status quo in the Jewish yishuv in the Land of Israel, on one side, and, on the other, his critics, for the most part representatives of the Reform or Positive-Historical (“Conservative”) school of Judaism, who advocated the modernization and “productivization” of the Jewish communities in the Holy Land.74 One of ­Lehren’s most outspoken adversaries was Raphael Kirchheim. Responding to the pamphlet Emet me-Erets in which the Pekidim veAmarkalim had defended themselves against the accusations of the Ashkenazi emissary Aharon Zelig Mann, Kirchheim wrote with biting irony: “In order to avoid the repeated calls for a public accounting, they have conjured up a cloud of frankincense from Jerusalem . . . [hoping] to restore the shaken trust of many contributors in the infal-

End of an Era

libility and impeccability of their supreme insight and return them to their childlike innocence.” Kirchheim dismissed the pamphlet as an inadequate response to the valid critique of the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim: “You have not convinced public opinion with this passionate circular, Mr. Lehren. . . . The contributors [to the Erets Israel fund] do not by any means intend to travel to The Hague to verify the accuracy of your accounting; rather, they still demand an annual report in a European language, or [if necessary] even in . . . Hebrew.”75 Throughout his two-page article, which appeared in a supplement of Der Orient in February 1843, Kirchheim employed variations of the term “public” (öffentlich, Öffentlichkeit), emphasizing what stands out as perhaps the most important difference between the traditional philanthropic network of the eighteenth century and the new conditions of the mid-nineteenth century: accountability to a new Jewish public sphere that transcended and threatened to undermine the mutually reinforcing authority of the traditional fund-raising agencies (the Pekidim in Istanbul, the P ­ ekidim ve-­Amarkalim in Amsterdam), the rabbinate, and the established leadership of the Jewish communities in the Holy Land. Zvi Hirsch ­Lehren resisted the repeated calls for publishing his accounts, however, noting that in many areas where the fund-raising for the Land of Israel was being conducted, namely in the Habsburg lands, such donations had in fact been illegal since the eighteenth century. It was only after he passed away in December 1853 that the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam began to publish reports specifying the amounts collected and disbursed to the different Jewish groups in the Holy Land, with the first appearing in 1854.76 Not only the critics of the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-Amarkalim used the Jewish press as a platform, of course. Jewish newspapers also provided the opportunity for conducting the philanthropic activities in support of the Jews in the Holy Land on a much broader scale and at a much faster pace. Moses Montefiore of England had been a pioneer in marshaling the support of the Jewish press to stage an international philanthropic campaign in response to the crisis arising from the Crimean War—which interrupted the flow of support money from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel—and the famine in Palestine in 1854. The Crimean War had propelled “the Orient” to the front pages

239

240

End of an Era

of newspapers everywhere in Europe, and the Jewish press too, as in the wake of the infamous Damascus blood libel in 1840, displayed a great interest in the Jews of the East. Montefiore’s campaign no doubt benefited from these circumstances; “the first successful attempt to use the press and modern subscription-based fund-raising to help the Jews of Palestine,” as Abigail Green has observed, “it was pioneering in targeting Christians as well as Jews,” and Montefiore managed to collect £20,000, a third of which came from faraway Australia.77 Another illustration of the growing role of the press was the response to the famine in Palestine late in the summer of 1865.78 On August 16, 1865, the mouthpiece of German Jewish Orthodoxy, the paper Der Israelit, published by Marcus Lehmann in Mainz, carried an appeal by the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-Amarkalim under their president, the late Zvi Hirsch Lehren’s brother Akiba Lehren. The newspaper Ha-Magid, published at the time in the Prussian city of Lyck and read mostly by Jews in Eastern Europe, carried the text in Hebrew.79 The Amsterdam committee appealed “to our brethren in all the lands of Europe and America” to respond to this crisis. What distinguished this public plea from the circulars the emissaries of earlier generations had carried with them on their missions was that the organizers of the philanthropic network now addressed their Jewish readers as individuals rather than communities. While the text did include a special call on the rabbis, teachers, and community leaders to do their part in spreading the word and supporting the fund drive, the central message was that “even the smallest donation, if only collected in large numbers, will accumulate to great sums.” Moreover, Der Israelit was not only a platform for informing as many people as possible of the crisis in the Holy Land, but it itself accepted donations and promised to make sure they reached their destination as quickly as possible.80 In the subsequent weeks and months Der Israelit published with each issue extensive lists of all the donors, including the amount of their contributions, and throughout the following year (1866), such donor rolls continued to appear in the pages of the newspaper. Only a few weeks after the initial appeal, Der Israelit reported with satisfaction on the overwhelming response to the fund-raising campaign. In only two weeks, over 14,000 gulden had been collected, and similar fund drives elsewhere had likewise yielded impressive results. The

End of an Era

newspaper’s editors also acknowledged gratefully that everywhere the German press had given its support to the philanthropic campaign “by opening its pages to the appeal, in its entirety, without a charge.” By November 1865 already 64,000 gulden had been raised for the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam, in addition to 30,000 florins in England and 12,000 in France, and another estimated 12,000 in Hungary, but “unfortunately the sum is still not enough to alleviate the incredible misery.” Der Israelit noted that “the large sums already collected come almost all from the middle class, and even the impecunious,” whereas the wealthy had yet to respond according to their means, following the likes of the banker Ignatz Deutsch in Vienna or the famous Moses Montefiore in London.81 Despite the remarkable success and wide appeal of the fund drive, backed by newspapers like the Israelit, critical voices had also appeared, encouraged by the widely publicized crisis in the Holy Land. Once more, Der Israelit noted, the Jews of the Land of Israel had been accused of “idleness, causing their [own] misery,” and some had even suggested that, given their precarious situation, it would be best for them to leave Palestine and move elsewhere. The Orthodox news­ paper, which according to Mordechai Eliav served as a mouthpiece for the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-Amarkalim,82 predictably disagreed: to be sure, the economic conditions were bad and the Jewish population of the Holy Land, whose primary activity was studying Torah, continued to depend for its sustenance on contributions from abroad. But “who would therefore council our coreligionists to emigrate? The ruins of the Holy Temple are still standing, veha-shekhinah lo zazah mi-kotel ha-ma‘arvi [‘and the divine presence will not move from the Western Wall’; Hebrew in the original]; Palestine is ours and will remain ours as long as heaven extends over the earth.”83 What is more, Der Israelit acknowledged the importance of the philanthropic network in supporting the Jews in the Land of Israel, not only in moments of crisis like during the latest famine, but also as the enduring proof of pan-Jewish peoplehood—an implicit polemic, of course, against reformers who sought to reimagine the Jews as a religious confession and not a separate nation, as Germans (or French, or Englishmen, or Ottomans) “of the Mosaic persuasion.” When the federal fortress in Mainz (where the newspaper was published) suffered

241

242

End of an Era

a catastrophic explosion in 1837, Der Israelit argued, all of Germany had awoken and shown its solidarity; the call “Mainz is German” had resounded everywhere and “one saw in this correctly a manifestation of a unified German spirit.” In the same way, the article’s author maintained, “the misfortune that has afflicted our brethren in the Holy Land became a touchstone, as it were, of a true Jewish consciousness (des echt jüdischen Sinnes), which, thank God, is still visible everywhere. The call ‘Palestine is ours’ can now be heard everywhere Jews live.”84

Philanthropy, Shelihut, and the Question of ‘Aliyah in the Nineteenth Century As individual emissaries continued to instill resistance and mistrust— if they “stank and gave off a stench,” as Zvi Hirsch Lehren put it not too delicately85—and as Lehren’s operation itself increasingly came under the scrutiny of the Jewish press, the need to defend the ideological foundations of the philanthropic network seemed as urgent as ever. While emissaries disappeared for the most part from Jewish life in Western Europe, the visits of sheluhim continued in the communities of the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa, in Eastern Europe, and in Italy, throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the old doubts remained: where did all the money go? Was sending funds to the Land of Israel not futile if the Jewish communities of the Holy Land would never be able to sustain themselves? Should Jews even live in the Holy Land, given the persistently difficult circumstances? Should they leave the country or, to the contrary, should the foundations of the Jewish presence in the Holy Land be rebuilt altogether, making Jewish society there more productive and self-sustaining? What was, really, the relationship between the Jews of the diaspora and the putative center of the Jewish people? Thus, just like in the early eighteenth century, rabbis in the nineteenth century penned works in praise of the sanctity of the Holy Land and in support of the ceaseless fund-raising campaigns, whether organized by the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Western Europe or sustained by rabbinic emissaries elsewhere. A prominent example was Isaac Farhi (1779?–1853), born in Safed and later living in Jerusalem, who was him-

End of an Era

self dispatched as an emissary, twice on behalf of the Jewish community of Jerusalem and once on behalf of the Jews in Hebron. In the late 1820s and early 1830s Farhi served as a shaliah to the Ottoman communities of Izmir, Istanbul, and the Balkans, and in the 1840s, he went on a mission that led him to Italy (he later published a collection of sermons he gave during his visit in Florence) and southern France, where we know of his sojourn in Marseilles. Farhi was a prolific author of works in both Hebrew and Ladino, and several of his books seem to have been popular as they were reprinted numerous times. In 1843, he published a treatise on the sanctity of the Holy Land, an impassioned defense of the network of shelihut and a call for philanthropic support of the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, entitled Tuv Yerushalayim. Farhi’s book followed the model established by Moshe Hagiz in his Sefat Emet of 1707, though it was much less polemical and aggressive than its literary predecessor. Much of the text was a lengthy, selective collection of traditions in praise of the Holy Land and the virtues of those dwelling there. This was followed by a description of the financial needs of the Jews in Jerusalem, a detailed description of the various charitable expenses of the community, and the existential importance of the ongoing support from the diaspora. It may be useful to juxtapose this work by a former emissary, as a representative of the philanthropic network of shelihut that had persisted through the “long” eighteenth century, with the cautious, ambiguous view of traditional Ottoman rabbinic culture, on the one hand, and the activist, proto-Zionist views that emerged within the Sephardic rabbinate of the Eastern Mediterranean in the course of the nineteenth century. A good example of the former, the traditional attitude of Ottoman rabbinic culture, was Artsot ha-Hayim, a book by Haim Palache of Izmir, published in 1872. As to the more innovative, messianic-nationalist view, Judah Alkalai of Bosnia figures as a well-known, so-called precursor of Zionism, and Jacob Moshe Hay Altaras of Sarajevo, entirely absent from the usual historical narrative, presented another, self-consciously modern vision that deserves our attention. While I will focus first on Farhi and Palache, I will then also provide a few cursory notes on Alkalai and Altaras, whose views presented a significant departure from the established pattern of relations

243

244

End of an Era

between the Land of Israel and the diaspora in the network of shelihut, but whose ideas also highlight the connection between the traditional philanthropic network and the emerging novel ideas of nineteenthcentury nationalism. It is important to note that all four authors—Farhi, Palache, Alkalai, and Altaras—were active in roughly the same period, writing and publishing their works in the mid to late nineteenth century. Thus, rather than suggesting a neat progression from “traditional” to more “modern” attitudes, from traditional philanthropy to nationalism, I argue that we need to appreciate the simultaneous existence of these different approaches in the nineteenth century, all anchored in rabbinic tradition and yet each playing a role in charting new paths for the Jewish engagement with the Land of Israel in the late nineteenth century and beyond. How did Farhi and the others negotiate the tension between the idealized, imagined sacred space of the ancient homeland and the reality of the physical land with its impoverished and by all accounts marginal Jewish population (when, in the early nineteenth century, only 1 out of 500 Jews lived in Palestine, where the Jews were a small minority of about two percent of the total population86)? How did they envision the ideal relationship between the Jews of the diaspora and the Land of Israel? And what was the role of philanthropy and of immigration (‘aliyah) in each of these works? In his long list of traditions regarding the sanctity of the Holy Land, Farhi missed none of the all-time favorite quotes from the Talmud, such as “One who lives outside the Land is like one who has no God” (Ketubim 110b) or “The air of the Land of Israel makes one wise” (Bava Batra 158b). Farhi explains that anyone who moves to the Land of Israel will receive a new soul: the first night in Erets Israel, the “­exilic” soul leaves the body and is replaced the next morning by a new, fresh soul that is attached to the Holy Land. Anyone who subsequently abandons the Land, however, forfeits his new soul and the old soul of exile is bound to return.87 As Hagiz before him, Farhi also invoked the opinion of Abraham Azulai (citing it from the late-seventeenthcentury Tuv Yerushalayim by Nathan Shapira) according to which the opening that connects the divine with the material worlds (the “gate of heaven”) was located right above the site of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. It was only from there that a direct communication with

End of an Era

God was possible and all prayers uttered in the diaspora, enveloped as they were in the impure forces of the “lands of the nations,” had first to reach the Land of Israel before ascending to heaven—something they could only do because of the merit of the Jews who lived there.88 Other such traditions abound: if one is buried in the Land of Israel, “no maggots and worms” will attack the body, as happens to those who are buried abroad. What is more, one who dies in the diaspora must undergo a series of reincarnations (gilgulim) to atone for his sins, which is not the case for one who dies in the Land of Israel.89 Death is delivered in the diaspora by the angel of death, but by the angel of mercy in the Land of Israel and “everyone who is buried in the Land of Israel, it is as if he were buried right under the altar (mizbeah) [of the holy Temple].”90 When reading a book like Farhi’s Tuv Yerushalayim (or Hagiz’ Sefat Emet, for that matter), it is important to remember that its presentation of traditions about the Land of Israel was highly selective. Such books wanted to convey a sense of the absolute centrality and supreme sanctity of the Holy Land, inciting a sense of commitment and attachment to the Jewish homeland among their readers. A rather different work was Artsot ha-Hayim, by Haim Palache (1788–1869), chief rabbi of Izmir. The various traditions in praise of the Land of Israel that appeared in Farhi’s collection were also included by Palache, of course, but his work was much more comprehensive and put the traditionally rather ambiguous attitude toward the distant homeland on display. Palache cited Moshe Hagiz early on his book to the effect that “the entire merit of the [people of] Israel depends on this Land, as it is written ‘Israel is a unique nation on earth’ [1 Chronicles 17:21], in order to teach that when Israel is on its soil (‘al admatam), precisely then they are called ‘a unique people.’”91 But he also included traditions such as the famous declaration of Babylonian pride in the Talmud (Kedushin 69b): “With regard to lineage, all the countries are dough [i.e., a mixture] compared to the Land of Israel, but the Land of Israel is dough compared to Babylonia.”92 While Palache did not go as far as some in spiritualizing the Land of Israel and detaching the idea of the Land from its physical reality, his reading of the sanctity of Erets Israel blurred at times the clear distinction between the physical space inside and outside the Land. Palache

245

246

End of an Era

cited the kabbalistic tradition, also invoked by Hagiz and Farhi, according to which prayers recited outside the Land of Israel could not ascend to heaven directly. He added, however, an important qualification: the synagogues and study houses of the diaspora will be part of the Land of Israel in the messianic future (Megila 29a) and thus “they partake of the sanctity of Erets Israel now as well.” Therefore, surely prayers said within a synagogue or study house, even if they were physically located outside the Holy Land, would also ascend to heaven directly.93 Palache presented a number of similar interpretations that endowed places in the diaspora with the sanctity of Zion, without ever challenging the notion of the supreme holiness of the Land of Israel directly. On one occasion he noted, for example, that, while all the other lands and other peoples were ruled by an angel and were subject to a star assigned to them, “the Land of Israel is not subject to a star” but to the direct oversight of God. Yet he modified the message significantly when he added: “and thus also the Torah scholar (talmid hakham) controls his own star, for he embodies the holiness of the Land of Israel.”94 In other words, while he affirmed the sanctity of the ancient homeland, he also turned it into a symbol independent of the physical territory. Other passages in Palache’s book drove home a similar point: The house and the yeshiva of the talmid hakham are considered like the Land of Israel even though he lives outside the Land, and his prayers are like those of the Land of Israel. . . . And therefore the talmid hakham is exempt from the [obligation of] settling in the Land of Israel.95 The talmid hakham himself possesses the sanctity of the Land of Israel . . . and [the words] “talmidei hakhamim” themselves have the numerical value of the 613 commandments, so that one who supports them is like one who fulfills all 613 commandments.96

The sanctity of the Land of Israel is thus linked to the sanctity of the talmid hakham as a student of Torah. Therefore, those who engage in Torah study indirectly, by providing support and sustenance to the scholars, likewise partake of the sanctity attached to the Holy Land: It is said that the study house outside the Land has the sanctity of the Land of Israel, and it could be that this is the reason why they used to call in those days this city, our community [Izmir], the “little Land

End of an Era

of Israel,” for in those days they sustained scholars in each home, and thus it was for them like the sanctity of the Land of Israel.97

Elsewhere, Palache goes even further by invoking a tradition that blurs the distinction between the Land of Israel and the diaspora even in the messianic era: “In the future, all the lands will be sanctified like the Land of Israel, and this is meant by ‘the Lord will be king over all the earth (‘al kol ha-arets)’ [Zechariah 14:9]. . . . In the future, Erets Israel will extend to the whole world, and Jerusalem to all of Erets Israel.”98 Thus, for Palache and many others, the sanctity of the Land of Israel was not only tied to the physical homeland of the Jewish people, but it could adhere to places in the diaspora—synagogues, study halls, or the homes of Torah scholars—as well. Palache made, in other words, the sanctity of Erets Israel into a portable principle that was connected to the actual physical, geographic space but also extended far beyond it. By choosing and juxtaposing these traditions, Palache conveyed an ambiguous message: the Land of Israel was unique in its holiness, yet the study and the students of Torah had the potential to endow places outside the Holy Land with this holiness as well. Life outside Erets Israel was thus sanctified in a way that almost neutralized the difference between homeland and exile, even though Palache never directly challenged the centrality of the Holy Land. Isaac Farhi, on the other hand, rejected the spiritualization of the Land of Israel: for him, it was the real, physical land that mattered. A good illustration of this was his explanation of a kabbalistic tradition (found in Zohar Hadash) according to which “the Holy One, blessed be he, made the Jerusalem of above (Yerushalayim shel ma‘ala) according to [or in the image of] the Jerusalem of below (ke-neged Yerushalayim shel mata).” Farhi explained: “Note that he made the Jerusalem below the point of reference . . . , for it does not say the reverse, that he made the [Jerusalem] of below according to the Jerusalem of above.” Thus, he concluded, no one will enter the Jerusalem of above, of heaven, “until Israel will enter the Jerusalem of below.”99 This was a clear rejection of making Jerusalem and Erets Israel a mere symbol at the expense of the real, physical land. For Farhi, the ultimate redemption of the Jews would not happen unless the Jewish people were restored to their ancient homeland.

247

248

End of an Era

What then were the practical conclusions Farhi drew from his effusive praise of the Holy Land? He pointed to the importance and centrality of the Land for the Jewish world, he praised the merits of those who dwell in Erets Israel, and he linked gaining the “Jerusalem of above”—redemption—to the return to the physical “Jerusalem of below.” Does this mean, however, that he was advocating immigration and settlement? Did he envision, like his famous contemporary Judah Alkalai, a collective restoration of the Jewish nation to the Land of Israel? A telling indication as to his intentions is a brief, apologetic remark that appears toward the end of his work. Farhi noted that the rabbis of Palestine were often accused of writing their treatises in praise of Erets Israel out of pure self-interest and for their own, financial gain. He responded by insisting that his intentions in writing Tuv Yerushalayim were entirely “for the sake of heaven,” and he provided the following as proof of his disinterested position: My intention [in writing this book] was for the sake of heaven: if, for example, these words bear fruit and the hearts get excited and people say to one another, why are we living in the lands of the [gentile] ­nations? . . . and if many of those residing abroad get up and ascend to the holy mountain, to Jerusalem, in order to partake in all its praise and its virtues, know . . . that then every single one of the inhabitants of Jerusalem would suffer great loss in a variety of different ways, but most importantly in the matter of housing.100

Coming on the heels of Farhi’s passionate defense of the sanctity of the Holy Land and the importance of dwelling there, this passage is anticlimactic: if too many of his readers take him at his word and decide to move to Jerusalem, housing prices will go up. In fact, Farhi pointed out how the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century had already made the dire economic situation of the community worse by pushing up rents and by increasing the demand for charity and poor relief. Some people say, he added, that more immigrants are going to attract more donations from their home communities in the diaspora—but alas, “with my own ears have I heard this [before] but with my own eyes I have not seen it [come true].”101 This cautious attitude toward immigration, of ‘aliyah, was shared by traditional thinkers like Palache. In fact, there were not only pragmatic

End of an Era

but also ideological considerations suggesting that immigration, much less mass immigration, was not always desirable. The Land of Israel, after all, was not only one that flows with milk and honey, a land of promise and redemption, but also a land that presents a trial, a land whose sanctity inspires awe, a “land that devours its inhabitants,” in the words of Numbers 13:32: Everyone who lives in the Land of Israel, his [past] sins are forgiven: this is only if he will be chaste (parush) from then onward, and beware of any kind of sin, and fulfills all the commandments that apply in the Land. For if he should sin he will be punished more than one who sins outside the Land . . . and it is not the same to rebel against the kingdom inside the palace as outside the palace.102

The imperative of living in the Holy Land was thus countered by the concern that only a spiritual elite could really be expected to live up to the demands of living “in the king’s palace.” Moreover, there was disagreement among the medieval and early modern rabbis as to whether settling in the Land of Israel was a positive biblical commandment and whether it still applied at the present. Palache seemed to agree with those who did consider it an enduring biblical commandment to establish one’s home in the Holy Land and he provided an entire page of citations in support of this view.103 Then again he also wrote an entire chapter explaining the exceptions to the rule.104 As for the rabbis of earlier generations, much of the discussion in Palache’s collection centered on practical limitations to performing the commandment. Aware of the economic hardships that awaited immigrants to the Land of Israel, Palache argued that moving to Palestine or not was a matter of priorities: “It is more of a commandment not to move to the Land of Israel and rather to sustain one’s sons and daughters, like one who is offering charity all the time but is still obligated to provide sustenance for his wife.”105 He went on to explain that if there are factors that prove an impediment, it is not a commandment for him to ascend [to the Land of Israel], for example in order to study Torah or marry a woman, and certainly if his wife does not want to move and he would have to divorce her, and perhaps he won’t find [­another] wife there. . . . And also if he has sons and cannot take them with him . . . or won’t find there [the means to have them] study T ­ orah.

249

250

End of an Era

And also if he has his livelihood abroad but would not in the Land [of Israel], or if he doesn’t have the means to immigrate and would have to ask for charity . . . and obviously not in the case of danger.106

Adding to this the exemption that applied to Torah scholars, it is hard to think of many circumstances under which the commandment of moving to Palestine did apply. In any event, Palache clarified that, according to a well-established opinion, the commandment to move to the Land was not directed at the Jews collectively but only at the individual because of the Talmudic tradition that the Jews had taken an oath not to hasten the end and not to move to the Holy Land “like a wall,” i.e., en masse—an argument that would later be used by the Orthodox opponents of political Zionism.107 In his writing, Palache praised the example of Moses Montefiore, the British philanthropist who had bought land to build homes and develop agriculture among the Jews of the Holy Land, “and thus the wealthy of the people of Israel should do the same and buy fields in the Holy Land so that they can build and plant; and it is said about him, ‘Moses attained merit and brought merit to the many, therefore the merit of the many was attributed to him’ [Mishnah Avot 5:22], and this brings forth the redemption (matsmiah yeshu‘ah), with the help of God, speedily in our days, amen.”108 Given the aggressive opposition of the leader of the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam, Zvi Hirsch Lehren, to the designs of Montefiore and others to develop a Jewish agricultural settlement in the Holy Land, Palache’s praise was not gratuitous.109 But just a few pages later, once again showing the ambivalent attitude of this prominent representative of Sephardic rabbinic tradition, Palache also cited approvingly the takanah of the Jerusalem community according to which unmarried men between the ages of twenty and sixty were not to be permitted to live in Jerusalem. ­According to the takanah, if a man reached that age and had not found a wife, “he must immediately leave the Holy City and find a living outside the Land, and the Pekidim of the city have the authority to expel him from the Land if anyone transgresses our words.”110 By embracing this arrangement, Palache showed that he did not contemplate a substantially different approach to Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, despite his support of Montefiore’s initiatives, and that he was

End of an Era

still committed to the traditional, cautious—if not outright negative— attitude toward ‘aliyah.111 What was, then, the purpose of Palache’s comprehensive collection of traditions about the Land of Israel and the merit of those who lived there? Why did he first set out to convince his readers that it was praiseworthy and indeed a biblical obligation to settle in the Land of Israel—only to then discourage all practical steps toward immigration? The author’s own situation may provide an answer: Palache informed his readers that he himself had intended to immigrate to Palestine at one point, but that the elders of his home community had urged him to remain in Izmir and his plans had come to naught.112 Instead he declared, in the introduction to his work: “May this [book] be considered as if I were living in the Holy Land.”113 The study of the traditions relating to the Holy Land thus reconciled the tension between the ideal and reality, between the yearning for Jerusalem and the reality of life in the diaspora. This was not a new strategy, to be sure: the ancient rabbis had responded in a similar way to the dilemma of the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the homeland. Centuries later they still promoted the study of the laws pertaining to the Temple and to agriculture in the Holy Land, and the study of the laws replaced the reality of the sacrifices in the Temple and of life in the Land of Israel. The focus on studying the traditions and laws pertaining to the Land of Israel risked, however, reducing Erets Israel to an imaginary homeland far removed in the biblical past or the messianic future at the expense of the physical, contemporary land. There was another way for the Jews to show their attachment to the contemporary, real Land of Israel, however, and that was to participate in the philanthropic network providing material support for the Jewish communities in Palestine. Thus Palache wrote that for “those who promise a contribution to the fund in the name of R. Me’ir Ba‘al ha-Nes [in support of the Holy Land] and pay their dues, it is considered as if they were living [in the Land of Israel] themselves.”114 While Palache made this point only in passing, the philanthropic commitment to the Land of Israel and its Jewish communities was the central concern for Isaac Farhi in Tuv Yerushalayim. If Farhi did not encourage immigration but also rejected the trend to spiritualize the Land of Israel, and if he insisted on the importance

251

252

End of an Era

of the physical land but did not think that large-scale Jewish immigration was realistic, he was primarily interested in renewing the ideological foundation of the philanthropic network of shelihut. Like his predecessors, Farhi insisted that the Jews of the diaspora had an obligation to take care of the Jews in the Land of Israel, so much so that “they must give preference to the poor of the Land of Israel over the poor of their own city abroad.”115 He praised in particular two institutions and their efforts to maintain the philanthropic ties between the Jewish communities in the diaspora and those in the Land of Israel: first, the Pekidei Kushta under the leadership of Abraham Camondo,116 who continued to play a role when Farhi was publishing his book in 1843, though they had lost most of their influence in Europe to the second institution mentioned by Farhi, the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam under the leadership of Zvi Hirsch Lehren. Effusive in his praise of the Pekidim in Amsterdam, Farhi did not explicitly address ­Lehren’s controversial decision in 1824 to abolish the practice of sending rabbinic emissaries from the Land of Israel to Western Europe. Farhi seemed to recognize, however, the benefit of Lehren’s model of fund-raising in Europe, “so that no Torah scholar has to leave the Land of Israel and move from the holy to the profane,” roaming the diaspora and begging for support.117 Despite his praise for Lehren’s philanthropic work in Western Europe, it is clear that Farhi continued to see shelihut—at least outside the area under the auspices of the Amsterdam Pekidim ve-­Amarkalim— as an important and indispensible vehicle for ensuring support for the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel. He maintained that, in general, “everywhere a shadar sets his foot, they receive him gladly and with honor, and they embrace and kiss him, and they bring their contributions and their charitable donations with great love and affection, and they accept his words like the words of Moses by divine command (mi-pi ha-gevurah).” There were those, however, who maligned the emissaries from the Holy Land—such people should be considered “like the uncircumcised and idolaters,” he wrote—and Farhi pointed out that he himself had on occasion come across serious criticism on his own missions in Turkey and in Europe. One who “has no fear of God in his heart” might think that, given the frequent visits of the emissaries from the

End of an Era

Land of Israel and the generous contributions from abroad, the Jews of the Holy Land surely were building “palaces of gold and silver.”118 In response, Farhi explained that in reality an emissary to the communities of the Ottoman Balkans might gather as much as 50,000 kuruş, but after deducting all his expenses and his compensation, at the end of the four- or five-year-long shelihut the community could expect to collect no more than 25,000 kuruş. The ratio between the amount raised by the emissary and the amount that reached the Jews in the Holy Land had thus remained unchanged since the eighteenth century, when, as we saw in an earlier chapter, only about half the amount collected went to benefit the communities in Palestine. Furthermore, Farhi maintained, not all missions were equally successful and not all regions provided equally generous contributions, so that the community in Jerusalem could at best expect to collect some 40,000 kuruş each year, which amounted to less than half of what was needed.119 Others were suggesting, according to Farhi, that the money raised locally by the community from estate and burial taxes should be used “to build new homes and plant vineyards” (Ez 28:26), a reference to the designs spearheaded by philanthropists like Moses Montefiore but also envisioned by European Jewish immigrants like Eliezer Bergman and Moshe Sacks,120 who thought new housing outside the hopelessly overcrowded Jewish quarter within the walls of the old city needed to be provided and Jewish agriculture in the Holy Land should be developed. Such plans were dismissed by Lehren, who declared on one occasion: “Whoever wants to make a living in trade should stay abroad, and whoever immigrates to Erez Israel should engage in Torah study and prayer, everyone according to his own level, and not waste his time with trade. . . . Nobody can eat from two tables: either you live in Erez Israel, or you are a merchant and live from your work.”121 Farhi too rejected ideas of modernizing the economic foundations of the yishuv and maintained that in reality no money was available for such plans and everything was needed to provide public welfare to the poor and the Torah scholars.122 For Isaac Farhi, philanthropy was the key to reconciling the ideal of the sanctity and centrality of the Land of Israel with the reality of its marginal role in the Jewish world of the nineteenth century. Whereas for traditional authors like Haim Palache the study of the traditions

253

254

End of an Era

pertaining to the Holy Land substituted for the need to live in the Holy Land and made the sanctity of Erets Israel into a portable principle, Farhi focused on the ties between the Jews in the diaspora and the physical, contemporary Palestine and its Jewish community. For him, yearning for the heavenly Jerusalem but forgetting about the Jerusalem of below, was wrong: like his eighteenth-century predecessors, he envisioned a global Jewish community bound by ties of solidarity with the Jews of the Land of Israel. Not a renaissance of Hebrew culture, not a collective return to the ancient homeland, but philanthropy was, for him, the foundation of Jewish peoplehood in the nineteenth century.123

From Philanthropy to Nationalism: Judah Alkalai and Jacob Altaras Rabbi Judah Alkalai (1798–1878) is well known as a “forerunner” of religious Zionism;124 in fact, he is usually the only traditional Sephardic thinker, next to Judah Vivas of Corfu (1780–1852), who appears at all in the standard narrative of the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism. Vivas and Alkalai proposed a radically new interpretation of the concept of teshuvah, which usually has the connotation of repentance, in the literal sense of “return” to the ancient homeland. Both rabbinic thinkers were clearly influenced by the national movements that were taking hold around them, and Alkalai himself invoked the “spirit of the times” which “summons every [people] to reclaim its sovereignty and raise up its language; so too does it demand of us that we re­ establish [Zion], the center of our life, and raise up our holy language and revive it.”125 Alkalai’s activist approach to redemption ran directly counter to the established, cautious view of traditional rabbinic culture in evidence in the writings of someone like Haim Palache. As we saw, even Isaac Farhi, who promoted the cause of the Holy Land and praised the virtue of those who chose to live there, continued to display an ambiguous attitude toward ‘aliyah. Alkalai himself was aware, of course, that the collective return of a large number of Jews to Palestine that he was proposing represented a significant departure from tradition. Like the advocates of the cautious traditional attitude, Alkalai invoked the oath

End of an Era

the Jews had taken, according to the famous Talmud passage alluded to earlier: not to move up to the Land of Israel “like a wall” and thus to take the work of redemption into their own hands and possibly provoke the opposition of the gentile nations. Alkalai, however, provided a novel interpretation: “During this [present] exile, because of our many sins, our land lies destroyed and desolate and it is necessary to build houses, to hew cisterns, to plant vineyards and olive trees. Therefore we took the oath [referred to in the Talmud] not to ascend [to the Land of Israel] all together,” the rationale being “so that our brethren in the exile can support those who do ascend from exile, for the first immigrants (‘olim) will likely be a ‘poor, humble folk, and they shall find refuge in the name of the Lord’ [Zephaniah 3:12].”126 As in the more traditional approach of Farhi or Palache, therefore, philanthropy played an important role in Alkalai’s more radical vision. An avant-garde of the Jewish people was called upon to move to the Land of Israel and prepare it for settlement and collective return, but others would remain behind, in the diaspora, to provide material support. In fact, the philanthropic engagement with the Land of Israel that tied the Jewish communities of the diaspora to a common center and to one another was one of the continuities between the traditional network of early modern shelihut and the international Jewish networks that developed in the nineteenth century. References to the importance of philanthropy were a common thread throughout Alkalai’s numerous writings. In the beginning of his Minhat Yehudah of 1843, for example, he offered the following interpretation, linking the central concepts of teshuvah and beneficence: Through the acceptance of one commandment we will become complete ba‘alei teshuvah [those who “repent” or “return”]. . . . This one commandment is the commandment of the tithe for charity (ma‘aser kesafim). . . . The collective teshuvah [return] upon which redemption depends is the acceptance of this felicitous commandment, to adorn the site of our sanctuary and to sustain the Torah in the court of the house of our God. . . . Jerusalem is not built except through charity [Shabbat 139a].127

Consequently, Alkalai saw the signs of the growing philanthropic activity of European Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century as a clear in-

255

256

End of an Era

dication of the approaching redemption, as an important step toward the realization of his dream of teshuvah, in the sense of actual, physical return to the Holy Land. Alkalai’s Minhat Yehudah appeared three years after Moses Montefiore of London and Adolphe Crémieux of Paris had intervened on behalf of the Jews in Damascus who had been subjected to the blood libel in 1840 (which also happened to be a year of intense messianic speculation, marking for many, including ­Alkalai, the beginning of the era of redemption), and references to major European Jewish philanthropists, in particular Montefiore, Crémieux, and the Rothschild family, abound. In another text, Alkalai explained that “in the First Temple they blessed the Name [of God] with wisdom, as it is said about Solomon . . . ; in the Second Temple they blessed the Name with valor, as it is said in [the book of] Yosipon; and in the Third Temple they bless the Name with riches (be-‘osher).”128 Alkalai’s Ashkenazi counterpart, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) from the Prussian city of Posen, displayed a similar fascination with the rise of European Jewish philanthropy in the nineteenth century. Kalischer, like Alkalai, considered a traditional “forerunner” of Zionism, maintained that “the beginning of redemption will come when the spirit of [Jewish] philanthropists will be aroused and when gentile rulers will wish to gather some of the dispersed of Israel to the Holy Land.”129 Another Sephardic author writing in the late nineteenth century, Jacob Moshe Hay Altaras of Sarajevo, living at the time in Belgrade, also shared the enthusiasm for the significance of modern philanthropy. Altaras published an intriguing text, Zikhron Yerushalayim, in Ladino in 1887. A large portion of the book, which has been ignored both by historians of Zionism and of Ladino literature,130 is a history of the Israelites in ancient times, from the biblical origins to the destruction of the Second Temple, in rhymed verse. This is interspersed with chapters of the most varied contents, from Talmudic stories to a chapter in praise of Moses Montefiore, and from an account of Altaras’ travels to Jerusalem to the story of the miraculous delivery of the Jews of Sarajevo during the Austrian siege of the city. Altaras declared that he had written his book “out of love for the Eastern householders,” i.e., the Ladino-reading Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and in “praise of the settlement of the Land of Israel ( yishuv

End of an Era

Erets Yisra’el ). . . . May they read this book at least with as much pleasure as when they read the newspapers about the affairs of kingdoms and politics, matters that are not our own doing, and may they look to our own advancement, and our own politics, how to advance our nation (natsyon) and how to acquire our right and inheritance.”131 Employing the vocabulary of modern nationalism rather than the traditional, messianic discourse that permeated Judah Alkalai’s writings, Altaras called for the Jews to acquire “the name of a nation among all the peoples” (tener nombre de natsyon entre los puevlos todos) and to assert national self-determination (enseñorar como todos)—that is, to understand themselves and be recognized as a nation in a world of nations, nationalism, and nation-states.132 The basic Jewish predicament, in Altaras’ analysis, was the absence of a Jewish homeland. “All the evil that happened to us occurred because of a lack of unity among us and because we failed to remember our Holy Land,” he noted. “The Jews of Spain had no peace. . . . Some of them were uprooted from their lands, some changed their religion, and some were burned together with their families: all these heavy and bitter evils happened because we had no place of safety and refuge.”133 Altaras compared the case of the Jews explicitly to the national awakening in the Balkans when he wrote that the Serbs and Bulgarians too, “even when they were under the [rule of] their enemies [i.e., the Otto­ mans], they were always united and were prudent to collect money . . . in order to return to their lands and return the lands to their possession.”134 Thus the Jews also needed to unite around the common goal of reclaiming their former homeland and developing the Jewish colonies in the Land of Israel. For him, the shining model was European Jewry with its philanthropists, referred to by Altaras simply as “the Ashkenazim” (though he singled out the Sephardic Englishman Moses Montefiore, whose family hailed from Livorno, for special praise): How much land did [the Ashkenazim] acquire / in the Land of ­Israel, / A lot of people flourish / Of the children of Israel, / They established colonies, / Great benefit for Israel. . . . All this is being done / By the honorable Ashkenazim, / Who go [to Palestine] in large numbers / In order to establish themselves on the Land. / It is they who are bringing / Redemption to those in captivity. . . . We, the ones

257

258

End of an Era

in the Orient, / Are still asleep. / . . . Let us awaken, brothers and relatives.135

Immigration to and settlement in the Land of Israel thus emerged at the center of Altaras’ agenda—he obviously wrote under the impression of the first modern-day ‘aliyah from the Russian Empire, which began in the wake of the pogroms of 1881—and represented a significant departure from the traditional, cautious stance of rabbis like Haim Palache and Isaac Farhi. Altaras did not envision the dissolution of Jewish life in the diaspora, however. Once again, philanthropy served as the crucial link between a global, pan-Jewish national community and the Land of Israel as its shared homeland: The wealthy notables / Who increase their possessions / Wherever they reside / Constantly they benefit. / May they live in tranquility / And [continue to] live abroad (hutsa la-arets). . . . God does not wish / To harm any of us. / Rather he wishes / That we help each other. / Those whose soul so desires / May they help others to settle [the Land of Israel].136

There was a common thread, then, that linked the ideology of authors as distant and different as Moshe Hagiz in the early eighteenth century and Isaac Farhi, Haim Palache, Judah Alkalai, and Jacob ­Altaras in the nineteenth century: the central role of a philanthropic network in support of the Jews in the Land of Israel that was designed not merely to ensure the material well-being of the Jewish communities in Palestine but also to help forge a pan-Jewish community, a global Jewish diaspora that could, by the end of the nineteenth century, “imagine” itself as a national community with its own political aspirations, inside the Land of Israel but also abroad.

Philanthropy, Tradition, and Modernity Abraham Camondo (1785–1873), one of the Istanbul Pekidim for the Land of Israel in the middle of the nineteenth century whom we encountered throughout this chapter, was among the great Jewish philanthropists of the time, known as the “Rothschild of the East.” Abraham Camondo and his brother Isaac (who also served as a pakid

End of an Era

for the Holy Land) had established the banking house I. Camondo & Cie. in 1802, predating the establishment of other banking houses in ­Istanbul.137 They later provided financing for the Ottoman war effort during the Crimean War in the 1850s and Abraham Camondo also acted as a financial advisor to the Austrian and Italian governments. The Camondos built a thriving real estate business in the Galata and Pera districts of Istanbul, inhabited by Christians, Jews, and European foreigners, and consequently Galata became the center of banking in the city. The Camondos contributed to the modern transformation of the city; thus, for example, apart from building office buildings (hāns) and apartment houses, they participated, together with other members of the ruling Ottoman elite, in the foundation of a company that provided transportation by steamboat on the Bosphorus (in 1851) and joined together with the Christian bankers Christaki Zographos and Georges Zarifi to establish the Société des Tramways de Constantinople (in 1870).138 After the demise of the leadership of the Istanbul Jewish community in the wake of the suppression of the Janissaries in 1826, and following the death of his brother Isaac, Abraham Camondo emerged as the most important leader of the Jewish community in the empire’s capital. His wealth permitted him to play a major role as a patron of several yeshivot and as a philanthropist supporting a wide range of community institutions. Given his contacts at the Sublime Porte during the rule of Sultans Abdülmecid (1839–61) and Abdülaziz (1861–76), he also played the traditional role of an intermediary, or shtadlan, who interceded on behalf of the Jewish community before the imperial authorities. When the first European-style Jewish school in Istanbul opened in 1854, Abraham Camondo had emerged as a leading supporter of educational reform. In an often deeply divided community in which traditionalists and modernizers clashed throughout the 1850s and the 1860s, ­Abraham Camondo and other francos—Jews of European, often Italian, origin living in the cities of the Ottoman Levant—were the leading advocates of European-style modern education and became the main allies of European philanthropic organizations, first and foremost the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in 1860.139 Camondo, as one of the Pekidei Kushta and at the same time a backer of the Alliance and its Westernizing mission, epitomized the

259

260

End of an Era

transition from the traditional networks of beneficence that had operated in the Sephardic world of the early modern period to the selfconsciously modernizing philanthropic operations that emanated from Western Europe but relied on members of the Jewish business elites in the communities they sought to transform. Ironically it was another organization operating in Western Europe, the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam under the leadership of Zvi Hirsch Lehren, that assumed a leading role in the fight against the establishment of precisely this kind of modern, European-style education in Palestine. Lehren understood his task not only as promoting philanthropy on behalf of the Jews in the Holy Land but also as heading the struggle in defense of rabbinic Orthodoxy and against the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment and the incipient movement for religious reform. The simultaneous participation of an Ottoman Jewish philanthropist, Abraham Camondo, who advocated educational reform, and of a Dutch Jewish philanthropist, Zvi Hirsch Lehren, who led an aggressive campaign in defense of Orthodoxy, in the network to support the Jews of the Holy Land is a good illustration of the coexistence of the “traditional” and the “modern,” the “old” and the “new” in nineteenth-century Jewish philanthropy and in nineteenth-century Jewish society more generally. In fact, the example of these two leading figures shows how the “modern” networks established, for instance, by the Alliance I­ sraélite Universelle, built on foundations laid by the networks of traditional philanthropy going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all the while someone like Lehren could employ the methods of the centralized, institutionalized European-Jewish philanthropy of the nineteenth century in his quest to perpetuate the traditional social order.140

Epilogue Pan-Judaism

“When I first arrived in Bombay, walking on the streets of the city I encountered some fair-skinned, awe-inspiring people, with their heads shaved, their beards grown, with side-locks and wearing a tall hat on their heads, and I thought they were Jews . . . and greeted them with a shalom, but they did not respond because they couldn’t understand me.” As it turned out, they were Parsis.1 When Jacob Sapir, who reported this anecdote in his travelogue Even Sapir, landed in India in November 1859 he was a shaliah on behalf of the Ashkenazi Perushim of Jerusalem. His mission had begun in 1858, lasted almost five years (he returned home in 1863), and led him to Egypt, Yemen, India, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand.2 Sapir’s encounter with the ­Parsis of Bombay illustrates the unique nature of his beautifully written travelogue, which was published in two volumes, in 1866 and 1874: as he was moving about at the frontier of the Jewish world, first in Yemen and then in South and Southeast Asia, all certainties about Jewishness, the unity of the Jewish people, and the markers of difference between Jews and non-Jews were constantly put to the test. Sapir’s experiences and the account he gave in Even Sapir provide a suitable coda to the history and transformation of shelihut in the modern period. Even Sapir was not the only nineteenth-century travelogue describing the Jewish communities of India and “the Orient.” David De-Beit Hillel traveled to Asia in 1824–32 and published, at the prompting of some English missionaries he had encountered, an abbreviated E ­ nglish version of his travel accounts in Madras in 1832. Meanwhile, one of the most celebrated Jewish travelers of the nineteenth century was ­Israel Joseph Benjamin (1818–64) of Romania, who fashioned himself as “Benjamin the second,” after the famous medieval Jewish traveler

261

262

Epilogue

Benjamin of Tudela. Benjamin was an adventurer, who set out with a quest to find traces of the ten “lost tribes” of ancient Israel, and his travelogue, Mas‘ei Yisra’el, was first published in a French translation (in 1856) and subsequently in English (in 1859) as well as in the Hebrew original, revised by David Gordon, also in 1859. Like “Benjamin the second,” Sapir was interested in news about the “ten lost tribes” of ancient Israel, and he ventured that some of the natives of Ceylon could count exiled Israelites among their ancestors.3 He plainly criticized the author of Mas‘ei Yisra’el, however, who had claimed that the Benei Yisra’el of Bombay, Poona, and the surrounding area were descended from the ten lost tribes. Israel Joseph Benjamin had said that these Jews possessed “very ancient” Torah scrolls, evidence of their remote Israelite past, when in reality, as Sapir explained, “the Torah scrolls they have are neither ‘ancient’ nor ‘very [ancient],’ but new” and had only recently been provided to the Benei Yisra’el by the Baghdadi Jews who had came to Bombay in the early nineteenth ­century.4 The only thing that he agreed on with Benjamin Israel was that the Torah used by the Benei Yisra’el was no different from that known by Jews in Europe, “for indeed,” Sapir noted, “there is [only] one Torah for all of us, and it is the same in Babylonia and in Jerusalem, in Sefarad and in Ashkenaz; it is one and the same for the Israelite nation (la-umah ha-yisre’elit) wherever it accompanied them into exile.”5 With regard to the origins of the Benei Yisra’el, Sapir concluded that they were neither a remnant of the lost tribes of Israel nor natives of the land who had converted to Judaism at some point, but rather descendants of Yemenite Jews who had arrived centuries earlier. This, at any rate, was what Sapir learned from one of the Benei Yisra’el, and he found confirmation “in their appearance and the features of their face, as well as their traditions, which are similar to those of the people of Yemen.”6 The predisposition of many authors, like “Benjamin the second,” to identify the remnants of the lost tribes of ancient Israel among the native peoples of lands that Europeans encountered since the early modern period derived from the desire to make sense of the new, strange, and marvelous and integrate the unfamiliar into a familiar mental landscape. The fascination with the lost tribes linked current experiences to the distant, biblical past, as well as to a utopian, messianic future.

Epilogue

Jacob Sapir, however, was more interested in understanding the lands and peoples, and in particular the myriad Jewish communities he encountered on his way, in historical time. His description of distant and exotic, yet interconnected Jewish communities in faraway lands conveyed a synchronic experience of participating in a larger, contemporaneous, pan-Jewish world. Thus, with its detailed description of the various Jewish communities that he met on his mission and the elaborate comments on the landscapes, peoples, and religions that he encountered, Sapir’s travelogue represented a novel approach to Hebrew travel literature, reading more like a work of ethnography than a collection of fantastic tales of exotic lands traversed in the quest for a sign of the “ten tribes” somewhere beyond the mythical river Sambation.7 Although a member of the Ashkenazi Perushim in Jerusalem and very much part of a traditional East European rabbinic milieu, Sapir also displayed a keen interest in secular matters and critical scholarship—Noah Gerber has called him quite appropriately a “Lithuanian maskil from Jerusalem.”8 Sapir’s curiosity for the world around him, his interest in the history of the communities he encountered, and his ethnographic gaze certainly marked his travelogue as a product of the modern era. In this sense, Sapir was yet another example defying any clear-cut juxtaposition between traditionalists and modernizers or, in the parlance of Zionist historiography, between the “old” and the “new” yishuv in Palestine. Much of Sapir’s travelogue was dedicated to a detailed description of the dwellings and furniture, the liturgy and life-cycle traditions, the livelihoods and foodstuff of the Jews (and, to a lesser degree, their non-Jewish neighbors) in the countries he visited in the course of his shelihut. Though mostly interested in the history and customs of the Jews, Sapir also talked about the religions and languages of India, marveled at the lush countryside he witnessed when traversing Southern India on a river boat, explained the ten different uses of the coconut, and described in detail the use of elephants to unload lumber from ships docked in the port of Calcutta on the Hugli River.9 Unlike Haim Joseph David Azulai in his travelogue a century earlier, Sapir provided few details regarding his own fund-raising mission; instead, his work aimed to introduce the Jews of distant lands to a Jewish readership in Europe (and in the Holy Land). In doing so, he contributed to a pan-

263

264

Epilogue

Jewish sensibility of belonging to an interconnected community that spanned the globe. Sapir’s travelogue introduced in particular Yemenite Jewry to a European Jewish readership in unprecedented detail and it was this part of his travelogue, which takes up most of the first volume (and spills over into the second) that has attracted the interest of modern readers and scholars of Yemenite Jewry; Abraham Ya‘ari published excerpts from Even Sapir dealing with Yemen in 1944, twenty-two years before the reprint of the entire travelogue.10 In the following, however, I will focus on Sapir’s sojourn in South and Southeast Asia.11 Though India might seem a somewhat unlikely and out-of-the-way destination, emissaries from the Holy Land had called on the Jewish communities of Cochin, on the southwestern coast of the subcontinent, since the eighteenth century. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a shaliah from Jerusalem had been engaged there in a polemic against Sabbateanism, another sign of how much this community was part of a global Jewish network of cultural exchange.12 When Sapir visited Calcutta in the early 1860s, he reported that the city was home to “a distinguished community of about 200 households,” receiving a constant stream of “poor visitors and emissaries from the Holy Land and other countries in the East who take turns as one is leaving and another is coming, no less than one hundred each year.”13 (Sapir noted that he ran into other visiting rabbis from Jerusalem on several occasions while traveling around India.)14 Presumably this was the reason why, according to Sapir, the Jews of Calcutta had departed from the venerable tradition of wealthy community members hosting the emissaries from the Land of Israel in their homes and why he had to rent a place for the duration of his visit.15 In Cochin, by contrast, the community provided him with lodgings, as was their wont to do for “all the guests from the Land of Israel.”16 In India, Sapir visited first Bombay and eventually, after a long and complicated journey that led him to Cochin and then, around the southern tip of the subcontinent, Calcutta. He described Bombay and Calcutta as bustling port cities and major hubs of trade and commerce, Bombay being famous “for the abundance of its commerce and its merchants of all nations and all tongues,” Calcutta “a beautiful city, considered one of the largest capitals (‘arei ha-mamlakhot) in the world.”17

Epilogue

In both places, Sapir encountered sizeable and well-to-do Jewish communities, dominated by a wealthy group of merchant families hailing from Baghdad and Basra. Sapir’s description of the Jewish merchant elite in Bombay and Calcutta, as well as their counterparts in places like Singapore and Batavia (Jakarta) that he visited en route to Australia, presents a fascinating portrait of a globally connected diaspora community, inhabiting what could be described as the Eastern frontier of the Jewish world of the nineteenth century. The Iraqi-Jewish merchant communities of Bombay and Calcutta (as well as the small offshoot in Singapore) had thrived through international trade in indigo, silk, precious stones, but above all the opium trade with China (which also led to the establishment of Baghdadi merchants in Shanghai, a place Sapir did not visit.)18 When Sapir talked about the Jewish merchant families of India, for example the Sassoons and the Ezras, an image emerged of a complex tangle of connections that defied any kind of straightforward, binary distinction between center and periphery, homeland and diaspora. There was, of course, the family-cum-trade network, extending over great geographic distances. Sapir speaks at length, for example, about the central role of David Sassoon, who had come to Bombay from Baghdad in 1830; at the time of Sapir’s visit, one of Sassoon’s sons was living in London and another was representing the family business in Shanghai.19 In their correspondence and among one another, the Baghdadi merchants maintained Judeo-Arabic as their common language, just as they continued, at the time of the emissary’s visit, to dress in their traditional fashion, rather than adopting European-style dress. They also knew local languages, in addition to English, however, so that they were well equipped to function as intermediaries for merchants in Persia, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula.20 Not all faraway relatives of the well-to-do Baghdadi families were engaged in business: one son of the late Yehezkel Yehuda of Calcutta, for example, was a Torah scholar in a Jerusalem yeshiva established by his father.21 As this example shows, the success of individual merchant families spawned their philanthropic activities. Thus David Sassoon established schools and hospitals in Bombay, and word of his fabulous wealth and generous philanthropy drew “many poor and destitute people who come from afar . . . , from Baghdad, Basra, Persia,

265

266

Epilogue

Bukhara, Yemen, Aleppo, Damascus, in addition to the emissaries from the Holy Land, [representing] the kolel or themselves, and . . . they won’t return empty-handed.”22 If the Baghdadi families of Bombay and Calcutta were at the center of their respective family, merchant, and philanthropic networks, their communities also were far removed from the centers of rabbinic learning. As they sought to maintain their religious tradition, with Baghdadi benefactors building magnificent synagogues in their Indian home cities, the absence of local rabbinic leadership meant they had to seek guidance from abroad. On the one hand, they maintained their specific Baghdadi traditions and contacted rabbis in Baghdad with questions regarding Jewish law, a cumbersome procedure as it took two months before they would receive a response. On the other hand, rabbis from abroad, in particular from the Holy Land, passed through frequently and the Baghdadi Jews of India often relied on their expertise to adjudicate disputes and oversee the religious life of the community.23 That, however, engendered its own problems, as Jacob Sapir learned in Calcutta where a (self-declared) scholar from North Africa had been issuing writs of divorce (get). After looking into the man’s work and consulting with the rabbis of Jerusalem and Baghdad, Sapir determined that the Maghrebi rabbi had little idea what he was doing. The divorces he had administered were therefore declared invalid and Sapir took it upon himself to write up proper divorce documents.24 Emissaries from the Holy Land thus played a role in maintaining a religious infrastructure in frontier communities like those in the port cities of India; that, however, does not necessarily mean the Land of Israel was always the central point of reference, as even Sapir himself was sure to involve the rabbis of Baghdad—the home city of the Indian Jewish merchant diaspora—in the Calcutta get affair. Finally, the center of cultural aspiration for the Baghdadi merchant families was Great Britain.25 Suggesting that the Jews of India really needed a rabbinic leader, Sapir noted that such a person would have to be more than just an authority on Jewish law, but also a respectable representative of the community vis-à-vis its neighbors and the British government, someone who spoke the languages of the country, someone “whose head is from Babylonia and whose torso is from Britain.”26 On numerous occasions, Sapir pointed out how beneficial British rule

Epilogue

had been and how “European” the schools and hospitals established by the Baghdadi philanthropists were.27 If the Baghdadi merchants represented the ideal—in Sapir’s view— combination of traditional piety and modern cosmopolitanism, the situation he encountered in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies on the island of Java, was quite different. When Sapir arrived there on his way to Australia, after having suffered a shipwreck off the Javanese coast, he did not know where to turn at first. Speaking Arabic, which he had learned in Jerusalem, he sought out the Muslim quarter of the city; after encountering some initial hostility against this foreign Jewish visitor, he was able to rent a room from one of the Arabicspeaking Muslims. The following day, he went to see the Prussian consul, who led him to one of the Jewish merchants in the city, a certain Wilhelm Habgesund of Amsterdam. It is interesting to see who Sapir turned to when at a loss about where to find a Jewish community— Arabic-speaking Muslim merchants; the Prussian consul—with whom he had something in common. When he made the acquaintance of ­Habgesund, Sapir encountered the flipside of the Baghdadi diaspora experience: a tale of radical assimilation of isolated Jewish merchants on the frontier of European colonial expansion that so upset him that the account of his conversation with the Amsterdam Jewish merchant included an unusual number of exclamation points.28 There were about twenty Jewish homes in Batavia, Sapir learned from Habgesund, but probably “quite a few more that are not known,” all of them from Europe—mostly the Netherlands and Germany—and thoroughly assimilated and “ashamed” to say they were Jews. Sapir was taken aback: “Why would you be ashamed to say: I am a Hebrew (‘ivri anokhi)? Why would you be embarrassed to say: I serve the God of Israel?”29 To his dismay, he discovered that the Jews of Batavia had no synagogue and no cemetery, no supply of kosher meat nor any kind of religious infrastructure. What is more, most of them had come to the land as bachelors and had subsequently married local women, or Christian women from among the colony of Europeans. Their children were not circumcised and none of them had learned a word of Hebrew or any of the prayers of the Jews. Abraham Seihendler of The Hague showed Sapir his prayer shawl, phylacteries, and prayer book, “but how can he all by himself maintain his religion?”

267

268

Epilogue

The emissary from Jerusalem was scandalized: how could it be that in a place like this, under Dutch rule, enjoying religious freedom, these merchants had come to completely forget about their Judaism? Sapir contrasted this with what he had seen among the Baghdadis, who were sure to establish their regular prayer quorum and ensure the provision of kosher foods, and he wondered why those European Jews did not follow the example of the numerous Muslims who had come to the Dutch East Indies to trade and who were careful to maintain their religious traditions and their social cohesion.30 In the end, though, Sapir ended his chapter on a positive note: after he had written to Amsterdam to report the dismal state of affairs in Batavia, the Dutch Jews had promptly dispatched a rabbi to serve their wayward brethren and the government had provided land for a synagogue to be built.31 In his own telling of the tale, the intervention of the emissary from Jerusalem, who had not even planned on making a stop in this colonial city, had saved the Jews of Batavia from complete assimilation. In May 1860, Sapir arrived in Cochin, the oldest of the Jewish communities in India, where he encountered a challenge to the idea of Jewish unity and solidarity rather different from the Sephardic-­Ashkenazi rivalries or the conflicts pitting Perushim against Hasidim with which he would have been familiar. The social stratification of Hindu society, with a hierarchy of castes, and the Portuguese notion of castas shaped Cochin Jewish society. In his account, Sapir identified three communities (he did not use the term “caste”) in a way that reflected the impact of notions of race that arguably dated back to the Portuguese era (the Portuguese controlled Cochin between 1498 and 1663, when they were defeated by the Dutch, who ruled the area until the British took over in 1797): according to Sapir, Cochin was home to the “White” Jews, the “Black” Jews, and a third group, the former slaves whom he called “liberated Hebrews” (‘ivriyim meshuhrarim).32 It appears that the concept of race as an internal marker of difference within the Jewish community, for which there was no foundation in Jewish law, was an idea that Sapir could not easily make sense of. Thus he noted that also Jews of other countries—he mentioned “Yemen, Baghdad, Kurdistan, and Persia”—looked just like the Black Jews of Cochin, and “the Jews of Yemen, are they not considered to be the Jews with the oldest lineage (ha-yoter meyuhasim) in the world, and

Epilogue

nonetheless they are a little black?” For, he explained, this “Blackness” was due to the climate in which they lived, “not like the Blackness of the Kushite nation [ha-umah ha-kushit, the biblical term commonly used to describe black Africans], who are considered a kind of man unto himself (min adam levado).” Even the Portuguese and Dutch settlers who had been living in these climes for centuries, he argued, were “similar to these Jews.” (At the same time, “real” Blackness and Jewishness were not mutually exclusive either in Sapir’s mind and he noted that he considered the “Falashas of the Kingdom of Abyssinia” to be descendants of the ancient Israelites.)33 Sapir explained that some of the White Jews of Cochin were descended from the first Jewish settlers in the region—tradition has them arriving in India in the days following the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce—who first lived in the port of Cranganore (Shingly, as the Jews called it) before moving to Cochin. There they were joined later by Sephardic Jews, following the expulsion from Spain (it is clear that the Cochin community was connected to the Portuguese Jewish diaspora in the days of Portuguese and Dutch rule, establishing connections in particular with the Portuguese community of Amsterdam), as well as by Jews from Germany, Yemen, and Aleppo. According to Sapir, the latter were the largest group at the time of his own visit.34 Sapir noted with surprise that while the liturgy used in the Paradesi synagogue of the White Jews in Cochin followed the Sephardic rite, the additional prayers of the Sabbath, new moon and holidays (musaf ) were said according to the Ashkenazi custom. He explains this as a “compromise,” given the varied origin of the community. It is not likely that this explanation was accurate, but in any case it must have seemed to Sapir that the distinction that continued to divide the Jews of the Holy Land and the network of shelihut so fiercely, the difference between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, was of little consequence in a community in which “caste” (or, indeed, color) seemed to matter more. The White Jews carefully maintained their distance from the Black Jews, who were more numerous and more likely to make a living from farming than trade. They considered the Black Jews to be the descendants of the slaves of their own ancestors and never to have been formally freed; when a Black Jew came into the synagogue of the White Jews, he would not be counted in the prayer quorum, was not allowed

269

270

Epilogue

to wear his prayer shawl and phylacteries, and had to sit on the floor. “The hatred in their heart against them is so profound that they consider it to be dangerous to intermarry with them,” Sapir observed.35 By contrast, the Black Jews themselves claimed that they were the descendants of the original Jewish settlers who had come to India in antiquity and that the White Jews had arrived from Europe only recently, infringing on their established rights as the local Jewish community.36 A third group consisted of slaves owned and then freed by the White Jews. Many of them after being liberated from slavery went on to Calcutta or Bombay to enter the services of Baghdadi Jewish families, but others remained in Cochin and had recently established their own community and synagogue in Fort Cochin, thanks to British rule there, which “did not know of master against slave.”37 What this community of former slaves did not have, however, was a trained mohel to perform circumcisions, and the White Jews of Cochin had prohibited anyone from circumcising anyone from what they considered a breakaway community of rebels. Sapir, unaware of the ruling, was invited to perform a brit mila in the community of the meshuhrarim, or former slaves, and happily obliged. Upon his return to his White Jewish hosts, they berated him for having transgressed this important boundary separating the free from the un-free, the Whites from the non-Whites. When the boy he had circumcised suffered from dangerous bleeding the next day, the White Jews admonished Sapir that this was a “sign from heaven” that he had acted wrongly; in the end, with the help of a doctor from the British hospital, Sapir was able to stop the bleeding and the baby recovered.38 Jacob Sapir wrote his travelogue, unlike his eighteenth-century predecessor Haim Azulai, in order to reach a broad European Jewish reading public. Following the printing of the first volume, he promoted his work and sold copies to readers during a three-and-a-half-year journey through France, Germany, Austria, and Russia,39 and in 1875, the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Levanon carried an advertisement announcing the publication of the second part of Even Sapir, to be obtained in Germany from the publishers of the newspaper in Mainz and “in Russia and Poland” from their agent in Vilna, Leib Levinson.40 Sapir was aware of the growing role of an emerging Jewish public sphere in the nineteenth century, and he fully intended to share his

Epilogue

insights with a broad audience. What is striking, however, is that Sapir, though himself an emissary for Jerusalem, did not use his book to advance the cause of the Holy Land. Instead, he sought to educate his readers about Jewish cultures unknown to them and drew a vivid, colorful picture whose focus was Jewish life in the diaspora. (This, incidentally, coincides with another development: in the decades between 1840 and 1880, as Abigail Green has pointed out, “Jews in Palestine ceased to be the primary focus of international Jewish solidarity,” and Jewish philanthropists increasingly directed their charity to other Jewish communities in distress, from Morocco to Damascus, and from Romania to Russia.)41 Thus we have come a long way from the Israelcentric approach of Moshe Hagiz in the early eighteenth century, for whom the Holy Land was the axis around which the Jewish world revolved, to the writing of someone like Jacob Sapir in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, though himself in the service of the Jewish yishuv in the Land of Israel, celebrated the cultural tapestry of a global diaspora community. The emissaries had long contributed to the creation of a pan-Jewish sensibility through their travels and personal interaction with different communities. Through the publication of his travel account Sapir also engaged directly with the growing Jewish public sphere of the nineteenth century that exposed readers in one part of the world to the experiences of Jews elsewhere and thus contributed to the synchronic experience of an interconnected, global Jewish community. In this sense, Sapir’s travelogue was written to convey a message to his intended readers as much as it was designed to provide an ethnographic representation of Jewish life in Yemen or India. The account of a far-flung diaspora of Baghdadi Jews, cosmopolitan merchants committed to maintaining their Jewish tradition and models of philanthropy, could serve as an example worthy of emulation, and the radical assimilation of European Jewish merchants in the Dutch East Indies as a warning against the dangers inherent in the temptations of the new world of the nineteenth century. The detailed account of Jewish dwellings in the villages of Yemen or of a wedding celebration in C ­ ochin mediated the foreignness of Jews in other lands and made them more familiar, inscribing them into the imaginary of the readers of ­Sapir’s text in Germany, Russia, or the Holy Land. At the same time,

271

272

Epilogue

of course, his travels—like the visits of dozens, even hundreds of Jewish travelers, merchants, and emissaries—irrevocably made the Jews of the West a part of Jewish life in places such as Yemen and India.42 The first volume of Sapir’s Even Sapir appeared in 1866 in a series published by Hevrat Mekitsei Nirdamim, a society advancing the Jewish Enlightenment, at the recommendation of the Orientalist scholar Albert Cohn. Cohn was a French Jew who was dispatched to the East in the 1850s, during the Crimean War, at the behest of the French Consistoire and the Rothschild family in order to encourage educational reforms among the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, including in Ottoman Palestine. Enjoying the support of Ottoman Jewish philanthropists like Abraham Camondo, Cohn’s mission led to the establishment of modern schools in Jerusalem, Izmir, and Istanbul, designed to promote Western education among Ottoman Jews.43 For Albert Cohn and his supporters in Europe, Palestine was going to play an important, symbolic role in their philanthropic enterprise. Zecharias Frankel, a German rabbi and leader of the positive-­historical school of Judaism, commented on the importance of philanthropy, the imperative of pan-Jewish unity, and the role of the Land of Israel in an article that appeared on the occasion of Cohn’s visit to Palestine in 1854: [Albert Cohn’s] project is far-reaching: it is not only designed to relieve the momentary great misery in Palestine, but to thoroughly fight the frequently recurring evil through the purchase of land and its cultivation by Israelites, the establishment of schools and vocational schools, etc. At the same time, it also intends to unite, not only the Jews of Palestine, but the Jews of the entire Orient with their brethren in the Occident. The Orient has many millions of Jews, who are almost forgotten in the Occident. . . . These Jews have a common center, to which they cling with pious love: Palestine. . . . This center alone can establish the connection between the coreligionists who are dispersed across Asia and those in the Occident. The time is behind us when cowardly and disgraceful self-denegation (Sichaufgeben) sought to suppress any mention of the Holy Land and any connection to those Jews. . . . This is the truly lofty plan that Mr. Cohn links to the provision of help to those who are suffering. The schools and institutions in Palestine should have an effect on all the Jews of the Orient,

Epilogue

to elevate their civil and political status, and at the same time, a new bond will enclose the Occidental and Oriental brethren (es soll sich zugleich ein neues Band um die morgen- und abendländischen Brüder schließen).44

Frankel did not acknowledge, or was even aware of, the pioneering role that traditional networks of beneficence had played since the late seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries in forging the pan-Jewish sensibility upon which the philanthropic projects of the nineteenth century would build. Unlike these modern, pan-Jewish endeavors such as the “civilizing mission” of the French-based Alliance Israél­ ite Universelle and the nationalist project of the Zionist movement, the eighteenth-century philanthropic network in support of the Holy Land was designed to pursue an ostensibly conservative agenda with no desire to transform Jewish society. The cumulative actions of the emissaries, however, had a profound impact on the way Jews perceived of themselves in the early modern period. The Istanbul Officials and their emissaries created a contact zone that facilitated the encounter of Jews with other Jews across cultural, political, and geographic divides, and that put notions of Jewish identity, peoplehood, and solidarity to the test. Neither pan-Jewish solidarity nor the connection to contemporary Palestine as a shared center of Jewish life were unchanging, primordial facts, but they were contested values negotiated in the early modern period, with the Istanbul-centered philanthropic network and its rabbinic emissaries from the Holy Land playing a crucial role.

273

Reference Matter

Notes

Abbreviations ACEL  Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebraica di Livorno. Pinkas Kushta  Pinkas of the Officials for Jerusalem in Istanbul, Jewish Theological Seminary, ms. 4008 = National Library of Israel, microfilm collection, F 29813. The page numbers refer to the numbers that appear at the top in the center of the page in the manuscript.

Introduction 1.  For the activities of the Istanbul Officials, see Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992), esp. 81–105. Historians have estimated the size of this group of immigrants as anywhere from 150 to 1,000. See ibid., 248–49n9. 2.  Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 183; Israel Bartal, Galut ba-arets: Yishuv Erets Yisra’el be-terem tsiyonut (Jerusalem, 1994), 64–73. 3.  Shadar (sg.), short for sheluha de-rabanan. The emissaries are also referred to as sheluhim (rather than the more common shelihim in modern Hebrew) (pl.); sg. shaliah. Among the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe the term ­meshulah was also used. 4.  The early modern period in Jewish history is generally identified as extending from the Spanish expulsion in 1492 to the eighteenth century. On the idea of an “early modern period” in Jewish history, see Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism (Oxford, 1985); and more recently the discussion by David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry (Princeton, NJ, 2010). 5.  The medieval period witnessed the rise of territorially defined Jewish subcultures, each with its own identity, instead of the earlier allegiance of Jewish communities around the Mediterranean and the Middle East to one of the rabbinic academies in Babylonia or Palestine. Reflecting the impact of diverse cultural environments and the distance from the centers of rabbinic learning in the East, different cultures of Talmudic learning emerged, for example, in the medi-

277

278

Notes to Introduction eval Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and northern Europe. See Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community (Ithaca, NY, 2008), esp. part 3; and Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia, 2011). Another example of this early modern transformation is the emergence of a unified Sephardic diaspora out of the various communities of medieval Spain following the expulsion of 1492. See Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York, 2013). 6.  Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Time in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 47. 7.  For a recent discussion of this topic, see the chapter “Jews on the Move” in Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 23–55. 8.  Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis (New York, 1971), 7–8. 9.  This has been the position taken most recently by Shlomo Sand in his The Invention of the Jewish People (London, 2009): “If world Jews were indeed a nation, what were the common elements in the ethnographical cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakesh, other than religious belief and certain practices of that belief?,” Sand asks. Only the remarkable premise that “religion” somehow is not part of “culture” allows Sand to claim that “there was no common cultural denominator among the communities of the Jewish religion,” leading him to the conclusion that the Jews were merely members of a “religious congregation” until Zionist thinking made them into an imagined national community. Ibid., 21. 10. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 9–10. 11.  Despite the infrequent visits of emissaries, Ashkenazi communities in Central and Eastern Europe were also engaged in fund-raising to support the Holy Land, to be sure. This topic still awaits more detailed studies and is the subject of ongoing research by Debra Kaplan and Joshua Teplitsky. 12.  No other contemporary trading diaspora “could match the capacity of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora and its crypto-Jewish counterpart to cut across and link rival empires, trade systems, and confessional blocs throughout the western Atlantic world,” observed Jonathan Israel in “Jews and Crypto-Jews in the Atlantic World Systems, 1500–1800,” in Richard Kagan and Philip Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, 2009), 3–17, at 4. For a broader discussion, see Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540– 1740) (Leiden, 2002). 13.  The most important contribution on these trading networks is Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT, 2009). On the concept of “port Jews,” see Lois Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, CA, 1999); David Sorkin, “The Port Jew: Notes toward a Social Type,” Journal of Jewish Studies 50 (1999): 87–97; David Cesarani, ed., Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime

Notes to Introduction Trading Centres, 1550–1950 (London, 2002); David Cesarani and Gemma Romain, eds., Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990 (London, 2006). 14.  Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA, 2011), 225–32. 15.  See David Myers, “Was There a ‘Jerusalem School’? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers and the Hebrew University,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 66–92. For a critical reading of Ya‘ari’s understanding of shelihut, in the case of the relation between emissaries from the Land of Israel and Bukharan Jewry, see Alanna Cooper, “Reconsidering the Tale of Rabbi Yosef Maman and the Bukharan Jewish Diaspora,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004): 80–115. 16. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, xii. 17.  Jacob Katz, “He‘arot sotsyologiyot le-sefer histori,” Behinot 2 (1952): 69–73. 18.  An exception is the excellent, article-length study by Israel Bartal, “Les émissaires d’Erets Yisra’el: entre la réalité d’un lien et l’abstraction d’une vision,” in Shmuel Trigano, ed., La Société juive à travers l’histoire (Paris, 1992), vol. 4: 107–21. 19.  Minna Rozen, Ha-kehilah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17 (Tel Aviv, 1984); Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century; Arieh Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim: hidush ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah ha-tesha‘-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 2007). 20.  See Uffenheim’s letters, both original and in transcription, in ACEL Filza de Minutas 11, 1789–93. 21.  Joel M. Podolny and Karen L. Page, “Network Forms of Organization,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 57–76, at 59. Podolny and Page juxtapose network forms of organization to that of a “a pure market,” where “relations are not enduring, but episodic,” and, on the other hand, to “hierarchies,” where “­relations may endure for longer . . . but a clearly recognized, legitimate authority exists to resolve disputes that arise among actors.” 22.  See Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, 13. Aslanian’s approach in turn is informed by Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947 (New York, 2000). 23.  I adapt here James Clifford’s understanding of diaspora in Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1997), 246. 24.  Abner Cohen, “Cultural Strategies in the Organization of Trading Diasporas,” in Claude Meillassoux, ed., The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (Oxford, 1971), 266–81. 25.  On the role of the shtadlan in different periods and places see, for example, for Central and Eastern Europe, Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 85–86 and passim; Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of Absolutism in ­Europe (Philadelphia, 1950), chap. 7. On the kahya as a salaried official representing the Jewish community to the authorities in the Ottoman Empire, see Yaron Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans (Tübingen, 2008), 203–4.

279

280

Notes to Introduction and Chapter One 26.  Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 1999), 171. 27. Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 172; Sherman Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries: The Jews in Palestine, 1799–1840 (Salt Lake City, 1992), 34. 28.  The term klal-Yisra’el appears in modern Hebrew, e.g. in Bialik and Agnon, and was used by the early Zionist Hibat Zion movement in Eastern Europe. See Abraham Even-Shoshan, Ha-milon he-hadash (Jerusalem, 1966–70), s.v. “klal yisra’el.”

Chapter One 1.  Haim Joseph David Azulai, Yosef Omets (Jerusalem, 1961), no. 19. 2.  Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 199–203. 3.  Israel Yuval, “Terumot me-Nürnberg li-Yerushalayim (1375–1392),” Zion 46 (1981): 182–97. 4. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 209–20. 5.  Abraham David, To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in 16thCentury Eretz-Israel (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1999). 6. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 223. 7.  Cited in Morris Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey in the XVIth Century as Reflected in the Legal Writings of Samuel de Medina (New York, 1952), 175. 8.  Karl Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758 (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 126. 9.  Suraiya Faroqhi, Herrscher über Mekka: die Geschichte der Pilgerfahrt (Düsseldorf, 2000), 102–25. 10.  Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany, NY, 2002). 11.  Oded Peri, Christianity Under Islam in Jerusalem: The Question of the Holy Sites in Early Ottoman Times (Leiden, 2001), 179–81. 12.  On charity and philanthropy in Ottoman Jewish communities, see Yaron Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans (Tübingen, 2008), 261–88; and idem, “Poverty, Paupers and Poor Relief in Ottoman Jewish Society,” Revue des études juives 163 (2004): 151–92. Istanbul itself was also active in the support of the Holy Land even before the Pekidei Kushta were first appointed in 1726; see Yaron BenNaeh, “Siyu‘ah shel kehilat Istanbul li-yehudei Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ah ha-sheva‘‘esreh ve-kishreihah ‘imam,” Cathedra 92 (1999): 65–106. For examples from medieval Spain, see Yom-Tov Assis, “Poor and Rich in Jewish Society in Mediterranean Spain,” Pe‘amim 46–47 (1991): 115–38; and idem, “Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Spanish Jewish Communities,” in Haim Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sepharad (Jerusalem, 1992), 318–45. For charity among the Jews of the medieval Islamic world, see Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton, NJ, 1995). For a comparative example from the Syrian city of Aleppo, see Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1989), 212–18. Marcus observes (ibid., 216–17), that the “idea of a collectively organized system of poor relief drawing its resources

Notes to Chapter One from taxes rather than voluntary contributions alone took its most elaborate forms in the small Jewish community. . . . Poor relief employing nonvoluntary means of redistribution appears as a feature specific to the non-Muslims, in particular the Jews.” On charity and welfare among the Western Sephardim in Amsterdam, see Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2012). 13.  On the Jewish community of early modern Venice, see for example the contributions in Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid, eds., The Jews of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001). 14. Eliezer Bashan, Sheviyah u-fedut ba-hevrah ha-yehudit be-artsot ha-yam ­ha-tikhon (1391–1830) (Ramat Gan, 1980). With the decline of the fortunes of ­Venice, its role was gradually taken over by Livorno in the late seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries. On captives in the Ottoman Empire, see Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London, 2006), 121–27; Pál Fodor, “Maltese Pirates, Ottoman Captives and French Traders in the Early SeventeenthCentury Mediterranean,” in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, eds., Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth–Early Eighteenth Centuries) (Leiden, 2007), 221–33. 15.  Miriam Bodian, “The Portuguese Dowry Societies in Venice and Amsterdam: A Case Study in Communal Differentiation within the Marrano Diaspora,” Italia 6 (1987): 30–61; idem, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 134–46; Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford, 2000), 178–81. 16.  Daniel Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. Italyani’ shebe-Venetsyah lema‘an ‘aniyei Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 5336–5503 (Tel Aviv, 1978); idem, “Pe‘ulat beit ha-kneset ha-­gedolah shebe-Venetsyah lama‘an ‘aniyei Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 1642–1789,” in Sefer Zikaron li-Shlomo Umberto Nakhon (Jerusalem, 1978), 196–208. 17.  On the Genizah period, see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Volume 1: Economic Foundations (Berkeley, CA, 1967), 327–32; Volume 2: The Community (Berkeley, CA, 1971), 137–38. For examples from the early modern Mediterranean region, see Bashan, Sheviyah u-fedut, especially chaps. 4 and 5. 18. Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans, 264; Bashan, Sheviyah u-fedut, 263–71. 19.  On the role of Livorno in the rescue of Jews falling into captivity, see Renzo Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa, 1591–1700 (Florence, 1990), 268–75. 20.  Giuseppe Laras, “La ‘Compagnia per il riscatto degli schiavi’ di Livorno,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 38 (1972): 87–107; Bashan, Sheviyah u-fedut, 251–60. 21.  It is telling that in the case of Istanbul a conflict arose when the Sephardim created a second hevrah in support of the Holy Land after the Greek-speaking Romaniote community had done so earlier and requested that the Sephardic members of the latter join the new society. See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 63–64; Minna Rozen, Ha-kehilah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17 (Tel Aviv, 1984), 275–76.

281

282

Notes to Chapter One 22.  The letter was published by Minna Rozen in her “Pe‘ulatam shel yehudim ravei hashpa‘ah be-hatser ha-sultan be-Kushta lema‘an ha-yishuv ha-yehudi bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17,” Michael 7 (1981): 395–430, at 416–17. Other communities in the Ottoman Empire also employed a salaried official called kahya to represent the community in their dealings with government authorities. See BenNaeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans, 203–5. 23.  Abraham David, “He-kesharim bein yehudei Tsefon-Afrika le-Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ot ha-15 veha-16,” Pe‘amim 24 (1985): 74–86, at 82. 24.  Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Ha-kesharim bein ha-kehilot ha-yehudiyot bi-Yerushalayim uve-Kahir ba-me’ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh,” Ha-mizrah he-hadash 44 (2004): 157–71, at 165. 25. Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. Italyani,’ 19–20; Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 65. 26.  The loan was 343 lire and 9 soldi and the tax was expected to raise 144 lire and 6 soldi each year. Only 37 lire and 12 soldi were recorded as having been collected by early 1650 for the Holy Land, however, and another 62 lire from the fund was given to an emissary from Palestine later that year. Thereafter no more references to the matter appear in the community account books. Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. Italyani,’ 36–38. 27. Ibid., 46; Carpi, “Pe‘ulat beit ha-kneset ha-gedolah shebe-Venetsyah,” 200–201. 28.  Jacob Hagiz, Sefat Emet/Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei (Jerusalem, 1987), 87. Subsequent citations from Sefat Emet and Eleh Mas‘ei refer to this edition, unless noted otherwise. 29. Ibid., 83. 30.  Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1973), 255–56. 31.  For the numbers in the 1690s, see Malki, Likutim, mahberet 1, ed. Eli‘ezer Rivlin (Jerusalem, 1923), 12; for 1770, see Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992), 174–75. 32. Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 251. 33. Ibid., 256–57. 34.  Jacob Barnai, “The Jerusalem Jewish Community, Ottoman Authorities, and Arab Population in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: A Chapter of Local History,” Jewish Political Studies Review 6 (1994): 7–45; a summary of the payments and the percentage of the community budget going to government officials appears on p. 27. 35. Malki, Likutim, mahberet 1, 15; Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 251. 36.  At the time, one kuruş = 120 akçe was roughly the equivalent of one Spanish real. See Şevket Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System,” in Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume 2: 1600–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 947–80, at 964. 37. Malki, Likutim, mahberet 1, 15. According to Malki, the numbers for the

Notes to Chapter One Catholic Church refer to the upkeep of convents “in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Judea and its environs, and all the way to Istanbul.” It is not clear from his text what the numbers for the Armenian and Greek Orthodox communities refer to, what the source of those contributions was, or where he obtained this information. 38. Ibid., 12. 39. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 83–84. 40.  Jacob Barnai, “Ha-nihul ha-kaspi shel kehilat Yerushalayim ba-mahatsit hasheniyah shel ha-me’ah ha-shemonah-‘esreh,” Shalem 7 (2001): 195–217. 41.  Jacob Barnai, “Kavim le-toldot kehilat Kushta ba-me’ah ha-18,” Miqqedem umiyyam 1 (1981): 53–66, at 63. These numbers, though, do not come from a community pinkas but from a responsum written by Abraham Avigdor, Zakhor le-Avraham (Istanbul, 1827). They are obviously rounded and it is not clear how reliable, or complete, these data are. 42. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 84. 43. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 343. Other scholars have argued that the numbers were significantly lower; see the references in Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 248–49n9. 44.  Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora (Philadelphia, 1969), 90. On the immigration of Judah Hasid and his group, see Samuel Krauss, “Die Palästinasiedlung der polnischen Hasidim und die Wiener Kreise im Jahre 1700,” in Abhandlungen zur Erinnerung an Hirsch Perez Chajes (Vienna, 1933), 51–94; Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 34. 45. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 103. 46.  It is not clear how reliable these figures are; it is also not certain whether the amounts are given in Ottoman kuruş, the currency the community in Izmir would have used, which is my assumption here. Letter from Izmir to Livorno, 28 Kislev 5493 (December 1732) (ACEL Filza de Minutas 2, 1730–40). 47. Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 110–14; Ya‘ari, ­Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 322–42, 374–76. On the debts of the Jerusalem community, see Amon Cohen with Elisheva Simon-Pikali and Ovadia Salama, Yehudim be-vet ha-mishpat ha-muslemi: hevrah, kalkalah ve-irgun kehilati bi-Yerushalayim ha-othmanit, ba-me’ah ha-18 (Jerusalem, 1996), esp. 153–251. 48.  Sefer ha-Takanot (Jerusalem, 1883), 25a. 49.  According to the letter of shelihut given to Rabbi Moshe Israel in 1727. See Abraham Ya‘ari, “R. Moshe Yisra’el u-shelihuto le-ma‘an Erets Yisra’el,” Sinai 25 (1949): 149–63, at 161. 50.  On the kitsba and para payments, see Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 97–99. 51.  Letter to the Officials in Izmir, 13 Heshvan 1744 (Pinkas Kushta, 62a). These sums coincide with those in the letter given to the emissary Moshe Israel in 1727, published in Ya‘ari, “R. Moshe Yisra’el u-shelihuto le-ma‘an Erets Yisra’el,” 161. 52.  Jacob Barnai, “Le-toldot ha-kesharim she-bein yehudei Izmir li-yehudei Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ot ha-17 veha-18,” Shalem 5 (1987): 95–114, at 105–6.

283

284

Notes to Chapter One 53.  Jacob Barnai gives the number of 30,000 Jews in Istanbul in the mid-­ eighteenth century in his “Kavim le-toldot kehilat Kushta ba-me’ah ha-18,” 59. 54.  The text of the letter appears in Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 587. 55.  “Tofes gezerat rabanei Kushta ‘al geviyat ha-para me-toshavei Kushta,” n.d. (Pinkas Kushta, 139a). 56.  David Ovadiah, Kehilat Sefrou, Maroko. Part 8: Ha-kehilah veha-shadarim (Jerusalem, 1992), 45–49. 57. Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 88–89. 58.  For an early challenge to the “decline” narrative, see Roger Owen, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century: An ‘Islamic’ Society in Decline? A Critique of Gibb and Bowen’s Islamic Society and the West,” Review of Middle East Studies 1 (1975): 101–12. 59.  Dina Rizk Khoury, “The Ottoman Centre Versus Provincial Power-­Holders: An Analysis of the Historiography,” in Suraiya Faroqhi, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006), 135–56, quotation at 136. 60. Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus; see also Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Jane Hathaway with Karl Barbir, The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800 (Harlow, England, 2008). 61.  Ara Kalaydjian, “The Correspondence (1725–1740) of the Armenian Patriarch Gregory the Chain-Bearer,” in Moshe Maoz, ed., Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period (Jerusalem, 1975), 562–67, at 562–63. 62.  Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge, 2001), 99. 63.  Yehoshu‘a (Shuki) Ecker, “Ha-bazergan shel ocak ha-yeniçerim—biografyah shel tafkid,” M.A. thesis (Tel Aviv University, 2002), on David Zonana, 27–48. 64.  On the role of Jews holding the office of Janissary paymaster as sponsors of rabbinic books, see ibid., 54–55; on yeshivot in Jerusalem, see Yaron BenNaeh, “Yeshivot Yerushalayim veha-yetsirah ha-ruhanit,” in Israel Bartal and Haim Goren, eds., Sefer Yerushalayim: be-shilhei ha-tekufah ha-‘othmanit (1800– 1917) ( ­Jerusalem, 2010), 329–48. The list of family names of Istanbul Officials in the course of the century follows that given by Arieh Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim: hidush ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah hatesha‘-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 2007), 420n24, with a few additions. 65.  See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 451–55. 66.  Christoph Neumann, “Political and Diplomatic Developments,” in Suraiya Faroqhi, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006), 44–62, at 53–54; Klaus Kreiser and Christoph Neumann, Kleine Geschichte der Türkei (Stuttgart, 2003), 253–60. On the Phanariotes, see Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1983), 53–57. 67.  Documents dated 12 Tamuz 1746 and 23 Tamuz 1746 (Pinkas Kushta, 122b,

Notes to Chapter One 67b); quoted from Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 86–88. Rumelia consisted of the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. 68.  K. K.= kehilah kedoshah, or “holy community.” 69.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 29 Tamuz 1746 (Pinkas Kushta, 68b). 70.  Letter to Solomon Rokeah in Venice, Kislev 1746 (Pinkas Kushta, 67a). 71. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 84. 72.  The communities in Poland-Lithuania were collecting funds for the Land of Israel before that date, to be sure, though on a smaller scale than those of Turkey or Western Europe, and they were not part of the itinerary of most emissaries visiting Europe in the eighteenth century. See Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 70–71. There were Ashkenazi emissaries to Poland following the ill-fated Ashkenazi immigration of 1700, and then Hasidic emissaries after 1777 and emissaries of the Perushim, disciples of the Gaon of Vilna, after their immigration to Palestine beginning in 1808. See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, esp. chaps. 8, 13, 16, 21. On the Gaon of Vilna and his followers, see Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, CT, 2013). 73. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 348. 74. Haim Joseph David Azulai, Ma‘gal tov ha-shalem, ed. Aharon Freiman (­Jerusalem, 1934), 53. 75.  Letter to Mordecai Rubio and Abraham Israel, 15 Heshvan 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 58b). 76.  See Daniel Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford, CA, 2002), 36–54; Jean-Pierre Filippini, “Livorno e gli ebrei dell’Africa del nord nel Settecento,” in idem, Il Porto di Livorno e la Toscana (1676–1814) (­Naples, 1998), vol. 3: 49–60. Livornese Jews also maintained close connections with the Ottoman Empire: Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei italiani nel Levante (Florence, 1949); Anthony Molho, “Ebrei e marrani fra Italia e Levante otto­ mano,” in Corrado Vivanti, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 11: Gli ebrei in Italia (Turin, 1996), vol. 2: 1009–43. 77.  See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 20–21. 78. Ibid., 65–67. On Eastern Europe, see Israel Heilperin, “‘Al yahasam shel ­ha-ve‘adim veha-kehilot be-Folin le-Erets Yisra’el,” Zion 1 (1931): 82–88. 79. Minna Rozen, “Kehilat Algiers—Merkaz le-isuf kaspei Erets Yisra’el ­bi-­Tsefon Afrika ba-me’ah ha-17,” Michael 18 (1978): 243–51. 80.  Jacob Emden, Megilat Sefer, transl. S. B. Leperer and M. H. Wise (Baltimore, 2011), 49–50. 81.  See Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT, 2009); Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford, CA, 2014); on Livorno as a center of Hebrew printing, see Francesca Bregoli, “Hebrew Printing in ­Eighteenth-Century Livorno: From Government Control to a Free Market,”

285

286

Notes to Chapter One in Joseph Hacker and Adam Shear, eds., The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia, 2011), 171–95. 82. These numbers according to documents identified in ACEL Filza de ­Minutas for those years. 83.  Letter from Istanbul Officials to Livorno, October 25, 1803 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 14, 1803–4). 84.  For the visits of these emissaries, copies of the letters, and the deliberations of the Livorno parnasim, see ACEL Filza de Minutas, in files covering this entire period. 85.  See the documents in ACEL Filza de Minutas 3, 1740–46. On the campaign in support of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia in general, see Baruch Mevorach, “Die Interventionsbestrebungen in Europa zur Verhinderung der Vertreibung der Juden aus Böhmen und Mähren, 1744–1745,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte 9 (1980): 15–81. 86.  Meetings of Livorno parnasim, 25 October 1750 and 13 December 1750 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51). 87.  Meeting of 25 August 1776 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 9, 1776–81). 88.  Letter from Tetuan to Livorno, dated 15 September 1781, discussed in the meeting of 26 November 1782. Regarding the visit of the emissary, Isaac Nahon: meeting of 13 April 1783 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 10, 1782–88). 89.  Meeting of 24 May 1772 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 8, 1769–75). 90.  Letter to parnasim, 11 July 1765 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 7, 1763–68). 91.  James Grehan, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus (Seattle, 2007), 37, 45, 46. 92. Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 30. 93.  Samuel Salem, Melekh Shalem (Salonika, 1769), cited in Israel Schepansky, Erets Yisra’el be-sifrut ha-teshuvot (Jerusalem, 1978), vol. 3: 703. Despite improvements in transport, as late as 1834 Zvi Hirsch Lehren of Amsterdam instructed Rabbi Israel of Shklov in Safed to send his letters to the British consul in Beirut who would send them on, by diplomatic post, to London, from where they would be forwarded to Amsterdam. Using this circuitous route, Lehren was convinced, was going to be much faster than sending letters through Istanbul. Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 134. 94.  Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 1 Elul 1748 (Pinkas Kushta, 73b). 95.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 12 Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 7a). 96.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 6 Nisan 1472 (Pinkas Kushta, 8a). 97.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 27 Iyar 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 9a). 98.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 28 Av 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 10a). A few weeks later, poor Jewish refugees from Izmir began to stream into Istanbul, putting another strain on the philanthropic efforts of the Jews in the imperial capital, and the Jewish community of Izmir decided to send an emissary of its own to Europe in order to collect money: Letter to Eliyahu Rolo, 1 Elul 1742; letter to Meir Benveniste, 12 Tevet 1743 (Pinkas Kushta, 11a; 13a).

Notes to Chapter One 99.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 12 Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 7a). 100. Pekidei Kushta to Livorno, n.d., ACEL Filza de Minutas 3, 1740–46. Abraham ben Asher began his mission in the summer of 1741; see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 389. 101.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 27 Iyar 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 9a). 102.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 25 Av 1767 (Pinkas Kushta, 134a). 103.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 15 Av 1749 (Pinkas Kushta, 80a). 104.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 16 Iyar 1751 (Pinkas Kushta, 94a). 105.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, end of Iyar 1751; letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 25 Sivan 1751 (Pinkas Kushta, 96b; 97a). 106.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, end of Adar I 1758 (Pinkas Kushta, 24a). According to the so-called Pact of Umar, Islamic law prohibited the construction of new churches or synagogues, and though the reference in this letter was to the renovation (or rebuilding) of an existing structure, this also would have required a special authorization (firman) from the imperial authorities, usually obtained at great expense for the community. For the text of the Pact of Umar, see Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (Philadelphia, 1979), 157–58. For a discussion of the Pact of Umar and its stipulations, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 52–75. See also Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans, 105; Antoine Fattal, Le status légal des ­non-musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut 1958); Karl Binswanger, ­Untersuchungen zum Status der Nicht-Muslime im Osmanischen Reich des 16. Jahrhunderts, mit einer Neudefinition des Begriffes ‘Dhimma’ (Munich, 1977). 107.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 4 Nisan 1758 (Pinkas Kushta, 25a). 108. According to one source there were some 180 talmidei hakhamim in Jeru­salem in 1758, out of a population of not more than 3,000 (Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 130). In 1770, there were thirteen different batei midrash (study houses) operating in Jerusalem (Ben-Naeh, “Yeshivot Yerushalayim,” 133). 109.  Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 17 Iyar 1754 (Pinkas Kushta, 115a). Despite their assertion that this was the practice “everywhere” in the Ottoman Empire, the matter was contentious and conflicts between the community leadership and rabbinic scholars over taxation had been common throughout the seventeenth century. See Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans, 396–400. 110.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 15 Av 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 87a). The same letter also mentioned, again, that everyone, including the talmidei hakhamim, was to pay his own poll tax, rather than the community footing the bill. 111.  Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 20 Av 1754 (Pinkas Kushta, 117b). 112.  Letter to the rabbis of Jerusalem, 20 Av 1754 (Pinkas Kushta, 117a–117b). 113.  Even so, the Istanbul Officials were not able to resolve their conflict with the rabbis in Jerusalem for good. In 1778, for example, they felt the need to reiterate the primacy of lay leadership in overseeing the financial affairs of the Jerusalem kolel, writing: “From 1 Heshvan 5539 [October 1778], . . . we order that officials be

287

288

Notes to Chapter One appointed from among the householders (ba‘alei batim [i.e., not rabbis]) to . . . conduct the affairs of the kolel. . . . And from that day on, all the kolel’s affairs will be conducted by them.” They added that this decree affected only the political and financial leadership (pekidut) of the community, whereas the rabbinic council of the shiv‘a tovei ha-‘ir retained the power to oversee the religious affairs of the community. Quoted in Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 422n36. Conflicts about the political role of rabbinic scholars in Jerusalem are known from an earlier period as well. Raphael Mordecai Malki, himself one of the most prominent rabbis in Jerusalem in the seventeenth century, wrote that the talmidei hakhamim of the holy city were “righteous, pious, unparalleled in holiness, meticulous in the observance of commandments,” but also “have assumed power and proved unwilling to share it.” He denounced their “lust for power, disrespect, and unwillingness to treat all men with dignity.” See Minna Rozen, Jewish Identity and Society in the Seventeenth Century: Reflections on the Life and Work of Refael Mordekhai Malki (Tübingen, 1992), 133–34. 114.  Letter to Abraham Alhadef, 26 Tevet 1753 (Pinkas Kushta, 108b). 115.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 12 Tevet 1754 (Pinkas Kushta, 120b). 116.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, end of Shevat 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 125a). 117.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, end of Shevat 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 125b). Ironically, about sixty years later, the opposite concern was raised when, in 1814, Zvi Hirsch Lehren of Amsterdam warned in a letter of some false emissaries and advised the members of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem that in the future they should use a seal to authenticate all letters (Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 124). 118.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 1 Adar II 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 126b). 119.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 23 Av 1756 (delayed until 4 Elul 1756) (Pinkas Kushta, 128b). Samanon had been asked to be in charge of the cash box, Velasco and Rahamim ha-Kohen of relations with the Muslim authorities, and de Boton of overseeing the operations in the chambers of the officials. Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 1 Adar II 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 126b). Bein ha-shemashot is the period between sunset and the appearance of three stars that is neither day nor night. 120.  Letter to Rahamim ha-Kohen, 1 Elul 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 130b). 121.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 23 Av 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 128a). 122.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 27 Av 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 129a). 123.  Letter to Officials in Jerusalem, 23 Av 1756 (delayed until 4 Elul 1746) (Pinkas Kushta, 128b). 124.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 27 Av 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 129a); letter from A[braham] Meyuhas to the Rabbis of Jerusalem, 3 Elul 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 130a). 125.  Letter to the rabbis in Jerusalem, 27 Av 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 129a–129b). 126.  Meir Benayahu, Rabi Hayim Yosef David Azulai (Jerusalem, 1959), 379–

Notes to Chapter One 420, provides an account of the controversies in the 1760s as well as the several texts, including rabbinic responsa, discussing the issue. 127. Benayahu, Rabi Hayim Yosef David Azulai, 391. 128. Letter to Rabbi Solomon Algazi in Jerusalem, 11 Nisan 1748 (Pinkas Kushta, 33b). 129.  The passage from Pereyra’s foreword (in Portuguese) is quoted from G ­ érard Nahon, “‘Yeshivot’ hiérosolymites du XVIIIe siècle,” in idem, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident (Paris, 1993), 419–46, at 432. The text of the “­Escamoth do esguer Beth Jahacob de Jerusalaim” and the stipulations of the yeshiva Magen David, of 1767, appear there, at 438–42 and 443–46. 130.  David ibn Zimra, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Radba"z (Jerusalem, 1972), part 1, no. 177. 131.  Moshe Mitrani, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Mabi"t (Venice, 1629), part 3, no. 79. 132. See Encyclopedia Judaica, second edition, s.v. “Hekdesh,” vol. 8: 779. 133.  Haim Abraham Gagin, Hukei Haiym (Jerusalem, 1843), no. 11. 134.  Thus, unlike other scholars, he had ruled in a responsum I cited earlier that the Talmudic rule according to which a husband could divorce his wife if she refused to join him in moving to live in the Land of Israel was valid in his own time. See de Medina’s responsum in Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey, 174–75. 135.  Samuel de Medina, She’elot u-teshuvot (Salonika, 1594), no. 167. 136.  Quoted in Israel Schepansky, Erets Yisra’el be-sifrut ha-teshuvot (Jerusalem, 1968), vol. 2: 299–302. 137.  Quoted in ibid., vol. 3: 793. 138.  Lazzaro Jomtob Uffenheim in Innsbruck to Livorno, 8 Tamuz 5552 (28 June 1792); Livorno to Uffenheim in Innsbruck, 10 August 1792 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 11, 1789–93). 139.  Lazzaro Jomtob Uffenheim in Fürth to Livorno, 2 Elul 5552 (20 August 1792) (ACEL Filza de Minutas 11, 1789–93). 140.  Lazzaro Jomtob Uffenheim in Innsbruck to Livorno, 18 Av 5553 (27 July 1793) (ACEL Filza de Minutas 11, 1789–93). 141. Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realm of the Sultans, 285–88; Haim Gerber, “­He-yehudim u-mosad ha-hekdesh ha-muslemi (waqf) ba-imperiyah ha-­othmanit,” Sefunot 17 (1983): 105–31. 142. Singer, Ottoman Beneficence, 18. Also see Barnai, “Ha-nihul ha-kaspi shel kehilat Yerushalayim.” 143. Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 10 Tevet 1744 (Pinkas Kushta, 16b). The “wars of the gentiles” is a reference to the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–48. 144.  Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 29 Tevet 1759 (Pinkas Kushta, 26b). 145.  Letter to Shalom ‘Iraqi, 20 Shevat 1742. The full text is quoted in Yosef Tobi, “Peniyat Pekidei Kushta el Rabi Shalom ‘Iraqi, nesi yehudei Teiman b ­ i-shenat 1742,” Shalem 1 (1978): 257–69; the passages cited appear there at 265–67. See also Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 384.

289

290

Notes to Chapter One 146.  On Agosi, see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 384–85. 147.  Letter to Rabbi Laniado in Aleppo, 21 Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 48b). 148.  Letter to Ovadia Parache in Basra, Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 49a). 149.  Letter to Rabbi Laniado in Aleppo, 28 Shevat 1743 (Pinkas Kushta, 50a). 150.  Letter to Rabbi Tsalmona, 6 Shevat 1744 (Pinkas Kushta, 32b). For another example of the Pekidei Kushta sending money through the services of an Ottoman official, see letter to Officials in Jerusalem, 1 Adar II 1756 (Pinkas Kushta, 126b). 151.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 17 Iyar 1755 (Pinkas Kushta, 122a). The shaykh was the tax farmer who had the right to collect taxes (iltizām) in a specified area. See Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 8. 152.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 29 Tevet 1759 (Pinkas Kushta, 26b). 153.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 1 Elul 1762 (Pinkas Kushta, 46b). 154.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 11 Tishrei 1752 (Pinkas Kushta, 107a). 155.  Rozen, “Pe‘ulatam shel yehudim ravei hashpa‘ah,” 400, 425–26. Another example of providing letters of introduction across religious communities were the letters from church officials and European diplomats carried by rabbinic emissaries on their fund-raising missions to Europe, thus relying on extra-communal connections to enhance the reputation of the individual and to assure relations of trust. Haim Joseph David Azulai mentions in his travelogue that he brought letters carrying “signatures from Hebron and Istanbul and the rabbis of Italy, and the signature of the ambassador of the king of France, and the signature of the head of the bishops in Jerusalem” (Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 19). Still other examples of cross-cultural cooperation include the involvement of the Jewish leaders of Istanbul in support of the Jerusalem governor, Mehmet Pasha, and the Franciscans in a conflict that pitted them against Greek Orthodox Christians in the 1630s (Rozen, “Pe‘ulatam shel yehudim ravei hashpa‘ah,” 404). For their part, the Karaites of Jerusalem employed the services of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in order to transfer donations from the Karaites on the Crimean Peninsula to the Holy Land (Haim Gerber, “Le-toldot ha-yehudim be-Kushta ba-me’ot ha-17–18,” Pe‘amim 12 [1982]: 27–46, at 42). 156. Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, 192. 157. Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 1999), 227–28. 158.  Letter to David Ashkenazi, 29 Kislev 1740 (Pinkas Kushta, 48a). 159.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 17 Av 1747 (Pinkas Kushta, 71b). 160.  Letter to Avshalom ha-Levi and Aharon ha-Levi (Izmir), 13 Sivan 1749 (Pinkas Kushta, 76a). Another example was a bill of exchange for 250 kuruş sent to Edirne, to be paid “to the English merchant, Mr. Damerell, at thirty days of sight,” in lieu of the contributions owed for the benefit of Jerusalem which had not been received yet. Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 17 Av 1755 (Pinkas Kushta, 57a). 161.  Moshe Mizrahi, Admat Kodesh, part 1 (Istanbul, 1742), Hoshen mishpat, no. 61, 126b.

Notes to Chapters One and Two 162.  Jacques Savary, Le parfait négociant (Paris, 1679), 453; quoted in Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 126. 163.  Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2008), 195, 226. On the Ottoman Empire and trade with Europe, see Edhem Eldem, “Capitulations and Western Trade,” in Suraiya Faroqhi, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006), 283–325.

Chapter Two 1.  For an overview, including a description of the documentation carried by the emissaries and the different areas of shelihut, see Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 1–21. 2.  Letter to the rabbis of Jerusalem, 22 Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 29b–30a). 3.  Raphael Bekhor Shmuel Meyuhas, Mizbah Adamah (Salonika, 1777), Yoreh de‘ah, no. 227, 15b. 4.  Eliezer Papo, Pele Yo‘ets (Jerusalem, 1994 [first edition: Istanbul, 1824]), 31. 5.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 7 Tevet 1743 (Pinkas Kushta, 12b). 6.  A rare exception was Abraham Segre, emissary for Safed, who had taken on his shelihut without the promise of a fixed profit. Document submitted to Massari in Livorno, n.d. (1753?) (ACEL Filza de Minutas 5, 1752–58). 7.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 1751 (?) (Pinkas Kushta, 92a). 8.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 3 Heshvan 1766 (Pinkas Kushta, 131a). 9. Ibid. 10.  Isaac ha-Kohen was promised 504 kuruş per year to become the head of the Hesed le-Avraham yeshiva in 1749. Letter to Isaac ha-Kohen, 22 Adar 1749 (Pinkas Kushta, 75a). For the comparison, see Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, “­ Jewish ­Brokers in Constantinople during the 18th Century According to Hebrew Documents,” in Ariel Toaff and Simon Schwarzfuchs, eds., The Mediterranean and the Jews: Banking, Finance and International Trade (XVI–XVIII Centuries) (Ramat Gan, 1989), vol. 1: 75–104, at 79. 11. Jonah Navon was offered 80 kuruş per year, and Isaac Tsedakah was offered 50 kuruş. Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 1 Adar 1751 (?) (Pinkas Kushta, 93b). 12.  Letter to Elijah Samanon in Salonika, 1 Tamuz 1749 (Pinkas Kushta, 76b). 13.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 22 Elul 1745 (Pinkas Kushta, 20a). Nisim Berakha was indeed mentioned later as a member of the Neve Shalom Yeshiva. See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 393; and Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992), 131. 14.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 12 Tevet 1741 (Pinkas Kushta, 7a). 15.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 27 Iyar 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 9a). 16.  Francesca Trivellato, “Sephardic Merchants in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Toward a Comparative Historical Approach to Business Cooperation,”

291

292

Notes to Chapter Two in Richard Kagan and Philip Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore, 2009), 100, 102. 17.  Trust is defined by Piotr Sztompka as “a bet about the future contingent actions of others.” Piotr Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge, 1999), 25. 18.  As Gunnar Dahl has observed in his study of commercial culture in late medieval Italy, “interaction was necessary for trust, and trust a must for business. However, trust constantly had to be refueled through social contacts, and by behaviour that confirmed that people were still trustworthy.” Gunnar Dahl, Trade, Trust, and Networks: Commercial Culture in Late Medieval Italy (Lund, 1998), 293–94. 19.  Vincent Buskens, Social Networks and Trust (Boston, 2002), 15–22. 20.  Historians who have studied such letters have been interested in what can be learned from them about the situation in the Land of Israel at the time and have not always paid sufficient attention to the methodological problems of historical interpretation that result from the fact that the purpose of these letters was to create empathy and encourage generous donations, and that they paint therefore by necessity a rather one-sided, bleak picture of Jewish life in Ottoman Palestine. Minna Rozen has published a manuscript with 126 such letters from the seventeenth century; Rozen, Ha-kehilah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17 (Tel Aviv, 1984), 363–562. 21. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 376–82. 22.  The text of the letter was published by Abraham Ya‘ari, “R. Moshe Yisra’el u-shelihuto le-ma‘an Erets Yisra’el,” Sinai 25 (1949): 159–63. 23. Ibid., 159. 24. Ibid., 160. 25. Ibid., 161. 26. Ibid., 162–63. 27. Ibid., 163. 28. For examples of such pinkasim: from the pinkas of Moshe ha-Levi and ­Joseph ha-Kohen, emissaries in Turkey in 1678–84, in Jacob Moshe Toledano, Sarid u-falit (Tel Aviv, n.d. [1945]), 43–52; from the pinkas from Haim Joseph David Azulai’s second mission in the 1770s, in Meir Benayahu, Rabi Hayim Yosef David Azulai (Jerusalem, 1959), 453–64; from the pinkas of Jonah Moshe Navon and Jonah Sa‘adiah Navon in the early 1800s, in Abraham Ya‘ari, “Pinkas shelihutam shel R. Yona Moshe Navon ve-R. Yona Sa‘adia Navon,” Sinai 25 (1949): 220–30. 29.  Ya‘ari, “Pinkas shelihutam shel R. Yona Moshe Navon ve-R. Yona Sa‘adia Navon,” 224–25. 30. Ibid., 225. 31. Ibid., 225–26. 32.  In addition to the igeret kolelet and the pinkas, still other documents carried by emissaries included the conditions of the mission that specified where the emissary was expected to go, the pay he could expect to receive, and other arrange-

Notes to Chapter Two ments, for example stipulations about how the community would provide for the livelihood of the emissary’s family while he was gone. 33.  Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem (CAHJP), AHW/31a. On donations from Altona/Hamburg/Wandsbek to the Holy Land, see Debra Kaplan, “Connecting Individuals and Communities: Seventeenth-­ Century Donations from the Holy Roman Empire to the Holy Land,” unpublished paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chicago, December 2012. 34.  For this and the following, minutes of the meeting on 8 June 1784, ACEL Filza de Minutas 10, 1782–88. 35. Ibid. 36.  Typical was a note such as the one appended by Jacob Nunes Vais, dated 25 October 1800, who testified that he had carefully examined the documents provided by the emissaries Abraham Rubio and Michael Cohen of Hebron and had found them to be in order (ACEL Filza de Minutas 13, 1799–1803). In 1747, the credentials of Abraham Gedaliah, emissary from Hebron, were “examined by S[enhor] H[akham] Lusena, head of the yeshivah,” and confirmed to be authentic. Meeting on 10 August 1747 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51). 37.  Meeting on 25 March 1749 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51). 38.  Meeting on 6 December 1750 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51). 39.  Letter to Livorno from Brody, 1 Heshvan 5526 (16 October 1765). The case was discussed in Livorno on 5 February 1771 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 8, 1769–75). 40. Account (relazione) regarding the case of Israel Pollacco, 7 May 1795 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 12, 1794–99). 41. Haim Joseph David Azulai, Ma‘gal tov ha-shalem, ed. Aharon Freiman (­Jerusalem, 1934), 19. 42. Ibid. 43.  On his visit to Fürth, see ibid., 16–18. 44. Ibid., 22, 25. 45.  Ashkenazi’s mission is mentioned in Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 385. 46.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 6 Nisan 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 8a). 47.  Letter to R. Samuel Laniado in Aleppo, Kislev 1740 (Pinkas Kushta, 48a). 48.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 9 Iyar 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 8a). See also letter to Meir Benveniste, 27 Iyar 1742 (Pinkas Kushta, 9a). 49. According to letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 22 Elul 1745 (Pinkas Kushta, 20a), the Torah scholars of Jerusalem were to collect 279 kuruş from Nisim Berakha’s shelihut. Since emissaries typically received 10 percent of the ­revenue, Berakha would have raised about 2,790 kuruş during his mission, which apparently lasted from 1742 to 1745. 50.  Letter to Meir Benveniste, 12 Shevat 1743 (Pinkas Kushta, 13a). 51.  Letter to the Jerusalem Officials, 12 Shevat 1743 (Pinkas Kushta, 13b). 52.  It is interesting to note that Abraham Ya‘ari mentioned David Ashkenazi’s mission in his monumental work on shelihut and noted that “the Pekidei Kushta

293

294

Notes to Chapter Two were not happy with his comportment” because he had neglected to inform them how much money he had actually collected. Nowhere did Ya‘ari say anything, however, about the fraud committed by the emissary and simply noted that David Ashkenazi was later (in 1758) mentioned as one of the members of the Neve Shalom yeshiva in Jerusalem (it is not clear whether he had been a member before his mission and kept his position despite his problems, or whether he had mended his relation with the Istanbul Officials in subsequent years and was appointed to the yeshiva later on). One reason may lie in the fact that Ya‘ari generally cited only from the (relatively few) letters in Pinkas Kushta written in Hebrew, but not from those in Ladino, which constitute the vast majority of the documents. But it seems that something more was at stake for Ya‘ari, who presented the history of the shelihut from the days of the Mishnah to the modern period as a sign of an unceasing bond between a unified Jewish people and their homeland. In his account, conflicts were relegated to the margins and challenges to shelihut—and thus to the ties between the Jews and their homeland—were identified with the evil forces of “assimilation.” The rabbinic emissaries, however, were represented by Ya‘ari as faithful guarantors of the Jewish connection to the Holy Land, and rabbis embezzling funds did not seem to fit the overarching goal of Ya‘ari’s narrative. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 385. 53.  On de Corona, see ibid., 396–97. 54.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 10 Shevat 1761 (Pinkas Kushta, 42b). 55.  Daniel Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. Italyani’ shebe-Venetsyah lema‘an ‘aniyei EretsYisra’el ba-shanim 5336–5503 (Tel Aviv, 1978), 22–23. 56.  David Kaufmann, Aus Heinrich Heines Ahnensaal (Breslau, 1896), 153. 57. Ibid., 137. 58.  An account of his travels, as well as excerpts from his travelogue, is in ibid., 100–160, 283–309; see also Fritz Heymann, Der Chevalier von Geldern (Amsterdam, 1937), 245–359; Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 446–49. 59. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 448. 60. Ibid., 448–49. 61.  Letter from Raphael Israel Kimhi to Yeshurun Hai Penso, 23 Shevat 1730, in David Benveniste, “Igrot ‘al sheluhei Erets Yisra’el be-Corfu, 1722–1789,” Sefunot 15 (1971–1981): 41–75, at 61–64. 62.  Corfu had diverted money from the Holy Land fund before: in 1728, the island received a visit from an itinerant Moroccan rabbi, not from the Holy Land, who apparently had come upon hard times and had set out on a mission to support himself. He had collected letters of recommendation from rabbis in Livorno, Alexandria, and Izmir, and when he arrived in Corfu the ma‘amad (governing board) of the community was determined to help him. Claiming that no other funds were available, the community leaders decided by a majority vote to award six gold ducats from the funds for the Holy Land to the Moroccan scholar, something that would surely have met with the disapproval of the Istanbul Officials or the rabbinic authorities in the Land of Israel. Benveniste, “Igrot ‘al sheluhei Erets Yisra’el be-Corfu,” 53–54.

Notes to Chapter Two 63.  On Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona’s mission, see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 396–97. 64.  Capitulations were agreements between the Ottoman state and various European powers that permitted foreigners to reside and do business in the Otto­ man Empire, exempting them from Ottoman taxes and customs, and placing them under the jurisdiction of the consul of their respective homelands. The first such capitulations were issued to Genoese traders but were granted to many other European nations in the early modern period. By the eighteenth century, an increasing number of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects managed to obtain certificates (berat) that placed them under the protection of a European power and thus came to benefit from the special privileges of the capitulations. See Daniel Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2000), 77–78. 65.  Michael Molho, “Yahasei Saloniki ‘im Yerushalayim,” Sinai 49 (1961): 284– 87, at 285. 66.  Letter to the Officials Aharon and Samuel Amarillo and Benveniste ­Gattegno in Salonika, 17 Elul 1749 (Pinkas Kushta, 38b). 67.  Letter to Jacob Ashkenazi, end of Tevet 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 85b). 68.  Letter to Jacob Ashkenazi, 1 Adar I 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 86a). 69.  Letter to Elijah Hodali, Larissa, 1 Adar I 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 86a). 70. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 107. 71. Ibid., 103. The importance of using flattering language and of showing reverence toward the philanthropists of the diaspora was also illustrated when, in the nineteenth century, the emissary Joshua Bensussan visited Bombay. He felt that the wealthy merchant Abdallah David Sassoon had slighted him when he did not receive the emissary right away and told him to go and see him in his office a few days later, and he lost his temper. In an angry letter to Sassoon, the shaliah chastised the wealthy philanthropist: “Everything that I wrote to you previously was just flattery for the sake of tikun ‘olam (‘mending the world’) and for the benefit of the poor of Hebron.” Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Ha-shaliah me-Hevron mistabekh beBombay,” ‘Et-mol 215 (February 2011): 6–9, at 8. 72.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 6 Shevat 1744 (Pinkas Kushta, 14b). 73. Toledano, Sarid u-falit, 27–29. 74.  Meeting of 17 February 1742 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 3, 1740–46). 75.  Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2012), 19. 76.  Simon Schwarzfuchs, ed., Le Registre des délibérations de la Nation juive portugaise de Bordeaux (1711–1787) (Paris, 1981), 334. 77. Ibid., 336. 78. Ya‘ari, Shelihut Erets Yisra’el, 451–55. Ya‘ari does not mention Moda‘i’s visit to Bordeaux. 79.  Excerpts from the letters in support of Haim Moda‘i’s shelihut to the diaspora appear in ibid., 452–54. An Italian version, a letter to the community in Mantua, was published by Shlomo Simonsohn, “Sheluhei Tsefat be-Mantova ba-me’ot

295

296

Notes to Chapter Two ha-17 veha-18,” Sefunot 6 (1962): 327–54, at 346–47. A version of the letter from the Istanbul Officials to Livorno in Spanish, dated 15 Sivan 5522 (6 June 1762), is in ACEL Filza de Minutas 7, 1763–68. 80.  It should be noted, however, that there were limits to the personal appeal even of a shaliah of Moda‘i’s caliber as well. In Livorno, for example, the parnasim proposed granting 900 pieces to the emissary: 600 to rebuild Safed, 200 for Safed in general, and 100 for the emissary’s travel expenses. Raphael Ergas proposed awarding 1,100 instead, whereas Isaac de David Attias, Samuel Leon, and Eliezer Recanati suggested a lower overall contribution of only 600. The last proposal— the least generous—was the one eventually approved (Meeting on 8 February 1763, ACEL Filza de Minutas 7, 1763–68). 81.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 15 Av 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 87a). 82. Schwarzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 308, 387, 429. 83.  ACEL Filza de Minutas 2, 1730–40; 4, 1747–51; 5, 1752–58; 6, 1758–63; 7, 1763–68. 84.  ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51; 6, 1758–63. 85.  Simonsohn, “Sheluhei Tsefat be-Mantova,” 331, and the full text of the letter at 339. 86. Ibid., 341–42. 87.  Moshe Israel’s letter to the Corfu community was published by Benveniste, “Igrot ‘al sheluhei Erets Yisra’el be-Corfu,” 54–55. The letter from Moshe Israel to de Fonseca was published by Yitshak Ben-Zvi, Mehkarim u-mekorot (Jerusalem, 1965), 183–84. 88.  Abraham Yitshak Katz, “Shelosha sheluhei Tsefat be-Italyah, 1813–1821– 1818,” Sefunot 7 (1963): 229–61, 232 and the text of the letter at 240–41. 89.  Salo Baron, “Le-toldot ha-halukah u-fidyon ha-shevuyim ba-me’ah ha-17,” Sefer ha-shanah li-yehudei Amerika 6 (1942): 167–79, at 173. 90.  Regarding the visits of emissaries to Corfu between 1774 and 1789, see Benveniste, “Igrot shel sheluhei Erets Yisra’el be-Corfu,” 49–51, 65–71. 91.  Letter to Mordecai Rubio and Abraham Israel, 15 Heshvan 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 59a). 92. Schwarzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 525–26. 93. Ibid., 561. 94. Ibid., 571. 95.  Meeting on 4 March 1753 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 5, 1752–58). 96.  Meeting of 8 May 1757 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 5, 1752–58). 97.  Meeting of 20 August 1767 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 7, 1763–68). 98.  Diego de Aghilar to Livorno, 18 June 1750 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 4, 1747–51). 99.  Meeting of 25 December 1774 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 8, 1769–75). 100.  Meeting on 15 October 1793 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 11, 1789–93). 101.  Dov Brilling, “Ha-gezerah ‘al ma‘ot E[erets] Y[Israel] be-Ostriyah b ­ i-shenat 1723,” Zion 12 (1947): 89–96.

Notes to Chapter Two 102.  Moshe Hagiz, Sefat Emet/Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei (Jerusalem, 1987), 103. 103. Ibid., 96, 101. This was the case for Hagiz himself, to be sure, who had set out as an emissary to collect funds for his own yeshiva, rather than as the official emissary for the Jerusalem community. 104. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 120. 105. Ibid., 13. The codex was owned by the Ulma family of Pfersee until 1772 and is today in the Bavarian National Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) in ­Munich, Cod. heb. 96. 106. In 1879, a portion of Azulai’s travelogue was printed for the first time under the title Ma‘gal tov in Livorno. A (not always reliable) English translation has been published by Benjamin Cymerman, The Diaries of Rabbi Ha’im Yosef David Azulai (Jerusalem, 1997). There is also a new Italian translation: Alberto Moshe Somekh, ed. and transl., Rav Chayim Yossef David Azulay, Ma‘agal Tov (Il buon viaggio) (Livorno, 2012). On Azulai and his travels, see Benayahu, Rabi Hayim Yosef David Azulai; Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 569–80; Moshe Hai Gaon, Yehudei ha-mizrah be-Erets Yisra’el (reprint Jerusalem 1999, first published 1928), part 2, 28–34. In an introduction to the second part of his travelogue, ­Azulai explained that he wrote his travelogue to acknowledge all the benevolent and miraculous acts of God that he experienced during his long travels. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 49. 107. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 34. 108. Ibid., 84. 109. Ibid., 99, 107. 110. Ibid., 67–68. 111. Ibid., 122–23. 112. Ibid., 44. 113. Ibid., 33. 114. Ibid., 44–45. 115. Ibid., 156–58, 82–83, 80. 116. See Matthias B. Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephar­dic Culture (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 76–88, and the literature cited there. 117. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 42–43. 118. Ibid., 30, 31. 119. Ibid., 39. 120. Ibid., 40. 121. Ibid., 71, 100. 122. Ibid., 50. 123. Ibid., 53–54. 124. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 29. 125.  There were other cases of Jews traveling to Spain after the expulsion, to be sure, in particular in the course of the seventeenth century. See, for example, Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, 2003).

297

298

Notes to Chapter Two 126.  Ricchi published an autobiographical sketch at the beginning of his commentary on the Psalms, Hazeh Tsiyon, which was published posthumously in Livorno in 1742, including a moving epilogue by his son, Abraham Ricchi, who told of his father’s violent death in Italy. Hazeh Tsiyon (Jerusalem, 2003), 20–27. 127.  Mas‘ud Benesti was sentenced to one year in prison and subsequent exile from all of Tuscany, and Sa‘id Ebencaliffa was exiled from Tuscany immediately (ACEL Filza de Minutas 5, 1752–58). 128. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 12. 129. Ibid., 165. 130. Ibid., 10–11. 131. Ibid., 30. 132.  Haim Ya‘akov, Sama de-hayei (Amsterdam, 1739), Yoreh de‘ah, no. 7, 24b. David ibn Zimra, in the sixteenth century, addressed a similar question, namely whether it was allowed for an ‘oleh, a pilgrim or immigrant to the Holy Land, to wear non-Jewish clothing for his travel. David Ibn Zimra, She’elot u-teshuvot ­ha-Radba"z (Livorno, 1652), no. 65, 18a. 133. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 53. 134.  In early modern Venice the distinction between Levantini (Eastern Se­ phardim) and Ponentini (Western Sephardim) was common, though not always as clear-cut as the terms suggest. See Benjamin Arbel, “Jews in International Trade: The Emergence of the Levantines and Ponentines,” in Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid, eds., The Jews of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001), 73–96. A decision of the parnasim of Livorno in 1756 made explicit reference to “Levantine or Arab dress” (vestiario levantino ô arabo) in regulating the public display of silver and gold by “foreign women” (senhoras mulheres estrangeiras) (Meeting on 1 January 1756, ACEL Filza de Minutas 5, 1752–58). 135. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 8–9. 136.  On Modena’s Ari Nohem, see Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton, NJ, 2011). 137.  I will return to the role of the emissaries in the defense of rabbinic orthodoxy in the next chapter. On Shabbatai Zvi and the Sabbatean movement, see the classical study by Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi (Princeton, NJ, 1973); see also Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, 2004). 138.  See Pawel Maciejko, “The Jews’ Entry into the Public Sphere: The Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy Reconsidered,” Jahrbuch des Simon Dubnow Instituts 6 (2007): 135–54. 139. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 23–24. 140.  Ya‘ari, “R. Moshe Yisra’el u-shelihuto le-ma‘an Erets Yisra’el,” 140. 141. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Filippini, “Livorno e gli ebrei dell’Africa del nord nel Settecento,” in Jean-Pierre Filippini, Il Porto di Livorno e la Toscana (1676–1814) (Naples, 1998), vol. 3: 49–60. Livornese Jews also maintained close connections with the Ottoman Empire: Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei italiani nel Levante (Florence, 1949); Anthony Molho, “Ebrei e marrani fra Italia e ­Levante

Notes to Chapter Two ottomano,” in Corrado Vivanti, ed., Storia d’Italia, Annali 11: Gli ebrei in Italia (Turin, 1996), vol. 2: 1009–43. 142. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 62. 143. Ibid., 57. 144. Ibid., 65. Early during his visit to Tunis, Azulai tells that he was approached by a group, or “sect,” of kabbalists (ket ha-mekubalim) who wanted to discuss Kabbalah with him. He declined, claiming he knew little of the subject, and after a subsequent altercation between the community leader Judah Tanuji, Azulai’s host, and the kabbalists, the latter were imprisoned and their kabbalistic books confiscated by Tanuji. Unfortunately Azulai’s brief account does not provide enough context for us to know who exactly this “sect of kabbalists” refers to or what the conflict behind their imprisonment might have been. Ibid., 58. 145. Ibid., 63. 146. Ibid., 60. 147. Ibid., 57. 148. Ibid., 61. For a similar situation in Ottoman communities of earlier centuries, see Joseph Hacker, “The Intellectual Activity of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus, eds., Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 95–135. 149.  Yaron Tsur, “La Culture religieuse à Tunis à la fin du XIIIe d’après le récit du voyage de Haïm Yossef David Azoulay,” in Denis Cohen-Tannoudji, ed., Entre Orient et Occident: Juifs et Musulmans en Tunisie (Paris, 2007), 63–76. 150. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 57, 63. 151.  There is, of course, a divergent history of Talmudic learning in medieval Ashkenaz as opposed to the Sephardic/Mediterranean world, recently studied in detail by Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia, 2011). Eighteenth-century maskilim (and “proto-maskilim”) who sought to modernize the Ashkenazi curriculum likewise pointed to the difference between an Ashkenazi preoccupation with Talmud study and a Sephardic preference for practical halakhah. 152.  Nahum Slouschz, Travels in North Africa (Philadelphia, 1927), 97. 153. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 56. 154.  Shlomo Deshen, “The Emergence of the Israeli Sephardi Ultra-Orthodox Movement,” Jewish Social Studies 11:2 (2005): 77–101, esp. 85–86. Cf. idem, The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago, 1989), chap. 6. 155.  Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco (Detroit, 1998), 209–14. 156.  Ephraim Hazan, “Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el ba-shirah uva-piyut shel yehudei Tsefon-Africa,” Pe‘amim 24 (1985): 99–116, esp. 110–13. 157.  David Ovadiah, Kehilat Sefrou, Maroko. Part 8: Ha-kehilah veha-shadarim (Jerusalem, 1992), 176–79; see also Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 585. 158.  The text of Verdugo’s poem appears in Hazan, “Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el

299

300

Notes to Chapters Two and Three ba-shirah uva-piyut,” 109. On poems in praise of sheluhim, see also Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 39–41. 159.  Ironically, following the migration of Moroccan Jews to the State of Israel, the inverse process could be observed in the “translocation” of saints from Morocco to Israel. See Yoram Bilu, “Moroccan Jews and the Shaping of Israel’s Sacred Geography,” in Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Toren, eds., Divergent Jewish Cultures (New Haven, CT, 2001), 72–86. 160. Ovadiah, Kehilat Sefrou, 57–61. 161. Ibid., 64–65. 162. See Itshak Avrahami, Pinkas he-kehilah ha-yehudit ha-portugezit be-­ Tunis, 1710–1944 (Lod, 1997); Lionel Lévy, La Nation juive portugaise: Livourne, ­Amsterdam, Tunis, 1591–1951 (Paris, 1999); Lucette Valensi, “Multicultural Visions: The Cultural Tapestry of the Jews of North Africa,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews (New York, 2002), 887–931; Haim Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa (Leiden, 1981), vol. 2: 80–146; Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands (Philadelphia, 1979), 416–22. 163. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 64. 164. Ibid., 57. 165.  On the arrival of earlier generations of Spanish Jews in North Africa and their relations with the Arabic-speaking Jews (musta‘rabim) there, see Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa (Leiden, 1974), vol. 1: 384–88, 403–10. 166. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 64. 167. Lévy, La Nation juive portugaise, 73. The French consul Boyer, in Tunisia 1729–33, notes that the tuwansa dressed “like Turks,” meaning like the Muslims, “while the Livornese wear hats and wigs after the Christian fashion.” Hirschberg, History, vol. 2: 98. 168. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 55. 169. Ibid., 56. 170. Ibid., 55. 171.  Meals in Ottoman homes were usually eaten using a spoon, but no tablecloths, napkins, knives, forks, or individual plates were used, as in eighteenth-century Western Europe. Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1987), 37–41. 172.  Samuel Romanelli, Travail in an Arab Land, translated by Yedida Stillman and Norman Stillman (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1989), 38. See Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Ma‘arav be-‘ayin ma‘aravit: Yehudei Maroko be-shilhei ha-me’ah ha-shemonah ‘esreh ‘al pi Masa ba-‘Arav li-Shemu’el Romanelli,” Pe‘amim 135 (2013): 125–44.

Chapter Three 1.  Moshe Hagiz, Sefat Emet (Amsterdam, 1707), 2a. 2.  The full text of the ban declared against Hagiz’ Sefat Emet appears in Yitshak Shemuel Imanuel, “Pulmus Nehemyah Hiya Hayon be-Amsterdam: te‘udot ­me-ginzei ha-kehilah ha-portugesit be-Amsterdam,” Sefunot 9 (1965): 209–46, at 223.

Notes to Chapter Three 3.  Yitshak Shemuel Imanuel, “Siyu‘an shel kehilot ha-sefaradim be-Amsterdam uve-Curação la-arets ha-kedoshah uli-Tsefat,” Sefunot 6–7 (1962): 401–24, at 403, citing Abraham Ya‘ari, Yeshivot Pereira bi-Yerushalayim uve-Hevron (Jerusalem, 1953), 187–202. 4.  Carlebach calls Morpurgo the “voice of moderation” in the anti-Sabbatean campaign spearheaded by Hagiz in the 1710s. See Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy (New York, 1990), 133–37 and passim. 5. For Hagiz’ early life, see ibid., 37–57; and Minna Rozen, Jewish Identity and Society in the Seventeenth Century: Reflections on the Life and Work of Refael Mordekhai Malki (Tübingen, 1992), 28–37. 6.  Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 417–18. 7. Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy. 8.  Minna Rozen, ed., Horvot Yerushalayim (Tel Aviv, 1981), 78–86. 9.  See Bracha Sack, Be-sha‘arei ha-kabalah shel rabi Moshe Cordovero (Beersheba, 1995), 299–317, on the influence of Cordovero’s ideas on Abraham Azulai (see below) and Nathan Shapira; idem, “The Influence of Cordovero on Seventeenth-Century Jewish Thought,” in Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus, eds., Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), 365–79. 10.  Nathan Shapira, Tuv ha-Arets (Venice, 1655), author’s introduction. 11. Hagiz, Sefat Emet (1707), 2a and 2b, respectively. 12. Ibid., 2a. 13.  The English translation of the verse according to the JPS translation of the Bible. 14.  Jacob Hagiz, Sefat Emet/Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei (Jerusalem, 1987), 34–36. All subsequent citations from Sefat Emet and Eleh Mas‘ei refer to this edition. 15.  He chose to ignore, however, the interpretation provided by Ibn Ezra, the author of another classic of medieval Jewish biblical commentary, which suggested a different reading that was closer to the one of Hagiz’ Amsterdam critic. 16.  The Vulgate translates “in omni loco in quo memoria fuerit nominis mei veniam ad te et benedicam tibi.” See Biblia de Ferrara, ed. Moshe Lazar (Madrid, 1996). Compare the earlier Spanish versions, such as Escorial I.j.4: “en todo lugar en que nonbren mi nonbre” (Escorial Bible I.j.4, ed. O. H. Hauptmann [Philadelphia, 1953]), or Escorial I.ii.19: “en todo lugar que menbrar ami nombre” (Escorial Bible I.ii.19, ed. Mark Littlefield [Madison, 1992]). 17. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 11. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Ibid., 18. 20.  Shalom Rosenberg, “Emunat Hakhamim,” in Twersky and Septimus, eds., Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, 285–341. See also the contributions in Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish, eds., Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times (Detroit, 2008). 21. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 39. 22. Ibid., 89.

301

302

Notes to Chapter Three 23. Ibid., 67. 24. Ibid., 33. 25. Ibid., 87. 26. Ibid., 67. 27.  Uriel Acosta, The Remarkable Life of Uriel Acosta, an Eminent Freethinker; With the Reasons for Rejecting All Revealed Religion (London, 1740), 18–23. 28.  Yosef Kaplan, “‘Karaites’ in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in idem, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden, 2000), 234–79. 29.  Emden and Franks quoted in Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 2011), 85, 94. 30.  Jizchak Fritz Baer, Galut (Berlin, 1936), 96–98. 31. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 88. 32.  Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto (New York, 1978), 37. Another author frequently invoking Hagiz’ writings, in this case to prove his thesis of a pervasive secularization among German Jewry in the eighteenth century, was Azriel Shohat, ‘Im hilufei tekufot: reshit ha-haskalah be-yahadut Germanyah (Jerusalem, 1960). The recent study by Feiner, Origins of Jewish Secularization, likewise refers extensively to the writings of Hagiz. 33.  Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford, 2000), 6. 34. Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, 114–16. 35.  Yosef Kaplan, “The Social Functions of the Herem,” “Deviance and Excommunication in the Eighteenth Century,” and “The Place of the Herem in the Se­phardi Community of Hamburg,” in idem, An Alternative Path to Modernity, 108–95. 36.  For an example from the seventeenth century, see Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews” (Cincinnati, 2005). 37. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 41. 38. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 216. 39.  Elliott Horowitz, “The Early Eighteenth Century Confronts the Beard: Kabbalah and Jewish Self-Fashioning,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 95–115, at 105, 110. 40. Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “Relations et réseaux intercommunautaires dans la diaspora séfarade d’Occident au XVIIIe siècle,” Ph.D. dissertation (Sorbonne, Paris, 1999); idem, “La Circulation du personnel rabbinique dans les c­ ommunautés de la diaspora séfarade au XVIIIe siècle,” in Esther Benbassa, ed., Transmission et passages en monde juif (Paris, 1997), 313–34. 41. Gérard Nahon, “Les relations entre Amsterdam et Constantinople au XVIIIe siècle d’après ‘le Copiador de Cartas’ de la nation juives portugaise d’Amsterdam,” in idem, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident (Paris, 1993), 185–202, at 185; Oliel-Grausz, “La Circulation du personnel rabbinique,” 328. 42.  Haim Joseph David Azulai, Ma‘gal tov ha-shalem, ed. Aharon Freiman (Jerusalem, 1934), 139.

Notes to Chapter Three 43. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 85. 44. Ibid., 88. 45.  Imanuel, “Siyu‘an shel kehilot ha-sefaradim be-Amsterdam uve-Curação,” 416. On Yitshaki’s mission, see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 353–58. 46. Yaron Ben-Naeh, “Siyu‘ah shel kehilat Istanbul li-yehudei Erets Yisra’el ­ba-me’ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh ve-kishreihah ‘imam,” Cathedra 92 (1999): 65–106, at 78–79. 47. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 137. According to the practice in Amsterdam and many communities in Italy, one or two sponsors (padrinos) from the local elite accompanied the emissaries on their visits to other community leaders and wealthy individuals to support them in their mission. See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 53. 48. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 141. 49. Ibid., 28. 50. Ibid., 36. 51. Ibid., 35–36. See Azulai’s report on his examination of the shohatim of Bordeaux in Simon Schwarzfuchs, ed. Le Registre des délibérations de la Nation juive portugaise de Bordeaux (1711–1787) (Paris, 1981), 270–71. 52. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 109. 53. Ibid., 116–17. 54. Ibid., 31. On the country houses of the wealthy Jewish elite in London at the time, see Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830 (Ann Arbor, 1999), 126–27. 55. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 37. 56. Ibid., 114. 57. Ibid. 58. Schwarzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 113–14. Evelyne Oliel-Grausz mentions this case as an example of the multidirectional flow of information in the “espace de la diaspora judéo-portuguese” in her “La Diaspora séfarade au XVIIIe siècle: communication, espaces, réseaux,” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian 43 (2004): 55–71, at 58. See also Oliel-Grausz, “Relations et résaux intercommunautaires dans la diaspora séfarade d’Occident au XVIIIe siècle,” 507–12. 59.  Simon Schwarzfuchs, Introduction, Le Registre des délibérations, 7. 60. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 115. On the Gradis family of Bordeaux, see Richard Menkis, “Patriarchs and Patricians: The Gradis Family of Eighteenth Century Bordeaux,” in Frances Malino and David Sorkin, eds., From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870 (Oxford, 1990), 11–45. 61. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 116. 62.  Nahon, “Les Emissaires de la Terre Sainte dans les communautés judéoportugaises du sud-ouest de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in idem, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident (Paris, 1993), 371–417, at 410. 63. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 36. 64. Ibid., 35.

303

304

Notes to Chapter Three 65.  Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley, CA, 2003), 29–30. 66.  François-Georges Pariset, ed., Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle (Bordeaux, 1968), quoted in Schwarzfuchs, Introduction, Le Registre des délibérations, 46. 67.  David Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia, 2004), 64–104. 68.  Schwarzfuchs, Introduction, Le Registre des délibérations, 5. 69.  Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1978), 23 and 124n92. 70. Schwarzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 433–34. 71.  According to Schwarzfuchs, “La Nation raporta longtemps sur les émissaires des quatre communautés de Terre Sainte . . . le respect et la considération dont elle privait le rabbinat local.” With regard to the local rabbinate, “La Nation, par l’intermédiaire de ses élus et dirigeants, se considère donc comme l’expression d’un certain consensus religieux, et ne voit dans le rabbin qu’un maître et un expert que l’on consultera pour recueillir son avis” (Schwarzfuchs, Introduction, Le Registre des délibérations, 31, 33). 72. Scharzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 221, 429, 485. 73.  Haim Joseph David Azulai, Yosef Omets (Jerusalem, 1961), no. 10. 74. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 110–12. 75.  Nathan Shapira, Yayin ha-meshumar: be-‘inyan isur stam yeinam (Venice, 1660); Haim Jacob ha-Kohen, Imrei Shabat (Calcutta, 1874). Other examples can be found in Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 104–26. 76.  Aharon Gaimani, “Rabbinic Emissaries and Their Contacts with Yemenite Jewry,” Hebrew Union College Annual 69 (1998): 101–25. 77. Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, 278. For Katz’ position, see his Out of the Ghetto; on the origins of modern Orthodoxy in Central Europe, see Michael Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in Jack Wertheimer, ed., The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era (New York, 1992), 23–84. 78.  See Jacob Katz’ review of Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, in Zion 59 (1994): 521–24. 79.  David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 149. Feiner, Origins of Jewish Secularization, 190–204, 241–50, and passim, also speaks of the “Orthodox” response to the challenges of modern secularism and freethinking Jews of the eighteenth century, but he does not distinguish between maskilim (adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment), the traditional rabbinate, and a full-fledged Orthodoxy when he discusses the various “conservative” responses to the decline of the traditional order. 80.  Jacob Barnai, “The Spread of the Sabbatean Movement in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Sophia Menashe, ed., Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: The Pre-Modern World (Leiden, 1996), 313–38. 81. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 146.

Notes to Chapter Three 82.  Altonaischer Mercurius, 8 April 1796. The news item was dated “Florence, March 20.” A copy of the newspaper is in ACEL Filza de Minutas 12, 1794–99. The hoax was picked up elsewhere as well; the community archive in Livorno preserves another, French newspaper clipping (it is not clear from which paper). 83.  Letter to Lampronti in Florence, 11 May 1796 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 12, 1794–99). 84.  Neuer Kurier aus Ungarn, Beilage, 26 June 1796. Copy in ACEL Filza de Minutas 12, 1794–99. The letters from Livorno reproduced in the newspaper were dated May 16. 85.  Briefe der Herren Ober-Rabbinen und Aeltesten der Juden-Gemeinden in Italien zur Widerlegung eines wider sie verbreiteten äusserst verläumderischen Gerüchts (Hamburg, 1796), 3, 6, 7 (German and Hebrew). 86.  For Eastern Europe one should add, of course, the scandal of the Frankist movement as another radical expression of discontent and rebellion against traditional rabbinic authority and communal power. See Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia, 2011); Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666–1816 (Oxford, 2011); Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2004); on Jewish converts to Christianity at the time, see Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became German: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, 2007). 87.  This was not the only controversy between modernizers and their opponents fought out in public in the late eighteenth century. On a controversy that rocked the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam in the late 1790s and the publication of Yiddish pamphlets by both sides, see Feiner, Origins of Jewish Secularization, 224–26, and especially Jozeph Michman and Marion Aptroot, Storm in the Community: Yiddish Polemical Pamphlets of Amsterdam Jewry, 1797–1798 (Cincinnati, 2002). 88.  The text of the relevant sections of Stiles’ diary was published by G. A. Kohut, Ezra Stiles and the Jews (New York, 1902), 114–33; cited below as Ezra Stiles. 89.  Ezra Stiles, 129–30. 90. Scharzfuchs, Le Registre des délibérations, 282. After completing his mission in Europe, Carigal passed through Livorno where he asked the community for financial support, this time not for the community of Hebron but to meet his own needs (ACEL Filza de Minutas 6, 1758–63. Appeal to Livorno parnasim, s.d. [1760?]). 91.  Ezra Stiles, 129–30. 92. Ibid., 114, 117, 125. 93. Ibid., 126. For more on Ezra Stiles, the Jews, and Stiles’ relation with Carigal, see Michael Hoberman, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst, MA, 2011), 161–201. 94.  Excerpts of the text were published by Cecil Roth, “The Jews of Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century,” Jewish Historical Society of England. Miscella-

305

306

Notes to Chapter Three nies, Part 2 (1935), 99–104. See Richard Popkin, “Rabbi Nathan Shapira’s Visit to Amsterdam in 1657,” Dutch Jewish History 1 (1984): 185–205; Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, NJ, 2008), 109–11. While Roth and Jacob Katz suggested that the pamphlet was written by Henry Jessey, Popkin argues that it was more likely written by Dury. 95.  Cited in Carlebach, Pursuit of Heresy, 264. 96.  I have not been able to identify who Fabre (or Fabri) was. M. Liber, in his edition and French translation of the passages dealing with Azulai’s visit to Paris, points out that there was no member by that name in the Académie des Sciences in the eighteenth century and suggests that he may have been an employee at the Académie. M. Liber, “Le Séjour d’Azoulai à Paris,” Revue des Etudes Juives 65 (1913): 243–73, at 259. 97. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 121. 98. Ibid., 124. 99.  Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 2002), 87–104; idem, Origins of Jewish Secularization, 167–173. 100.  Haijm Isaac Karigal, A Sermon Preached at the Synagogue, in Newport, Rhode Island (Newport, Rhode Island, 1773), 3. 101. Ibid., 7. 102. Ibid., 8. 103. Feiner, Origins of Jewish Secularization, 143–51 and passim. 104. Karigal, A Sermon, 8. 105. Ibid., 8–9. 106. Ibid., 11. 107. Ibid., 12. 108. Ibid., 9–10. 109.  Laura Leibman, “From Holy Land to New England Canaan: Rabbi Haim Carigal and Sephardic Itinerant Preaching in the Eighteenth Century,” Early American Literature 44 (2009): 71–93, at 76. 110. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 24–25. 111.  Quoted in Moshe Idel, “The Land of Israel in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Lawrence Hoffman, ed., The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives (Notre Dame, IN, 1986), 170–87, at 179. 112. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 29, 43. 113.  Moshe Weinfeld, The Promise of the Land (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 221. 114.  Idel, “The Land of Israel in Medieval Kabbalah,” 181. 115.  Quoted in Marc Saperstein, “The Land of Israel in Pre-Modern Jewish Thought: A History of Two Rabbinic Statements,” in Lawrence Hoffman, ed., The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives (Notre Dame, IN, 1986), 188–209, at 202. 116.  Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 111a. The English translation according to the Soncino edition, ed. Isidore Epstein (London, 1936). 117.  Zeev Harvey, “Derashah la-rish[on] le-[tsiyon] Yisa Berakhah ‘al ma‘alat Erets Yisra’el,” in Zeev Harvey, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Haim Saadoun, and Amnon

Notes to Chapter Three Shiloah, eds., Tsiyon ve-tsiyonut be-kerev yehudei Sefarad veha-mizrah (Jerusalem, 2002), 227–38, at 230. 118.  Quoted in at Aviezer Ravitzky, “Erets hemda ve-harada: ha-yahas ­ha-­­du-‘erki le-Erets Yisra’el bi-mekorot Yisra’el,” in Aviezer Ravitzky, ed., Erets Yisra’el ba-hagut ha-yehudit ba-‘et ha-hadashah (Jerusalem, 1998), 1–41, at 12. 119. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 32. 120. Ibid., 34. 121.  Abraham Azulai, Hesed le-Avraham (Amsterdam, 1688), ma‘ayan 3, nahar 2. 122. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 49. On the day of resurrection, Hagiz explains further, the dead will ascend through this opening and the souls of those buried in the Land of Israel will be resurrected first and those buried abroad have first to find their way to the Holy Land. 123.  Pekidim in Istanbul to Livorno, 15 August 1758 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 6, 1758–63). Another, not kabbalistic but legal, argument advanced by Hagiz and found in many other texts celebrating the enduring importance of the Land of Israel appeared in Hagiz’ later book, Eleh Mas‘ei. There he explained that still today the beginning of the new month of the Jewish calendar and thus the determination of when to observe the holidays depended on the exclusive right of the rabbinic court in Jerusalem to declare the sighting of the new moon. If the Jews in the diaspora were following a fixed calendar they were only allowed to do so, he argued, because there were still Jews living in Jerusalem who could testify to the sighting of the new moon. Hagiz, Eleh Mas‘ei, 126–27. 124. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 69. 125.  David Benveniste, “Igrot ‘al sheluhei Erets Yisra’el be-Corfu, 1722–1789,” Sefunot 15 (1971–1981): 41–75, at 57. On the expression of the idea of atonement toward the end of the seventeenth century, see Ben-Naeh, “Siyu‘ah shel kehilat Istanbul,” 78; Rozen, Jewish Identity and Society, 140; Eliezer Bashan, “Ha-­kesharim ha-mesoratiyim bein yehudei mizrah la-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el,” Pe‘amim 1 (1979): 15–22, at 21. 126.  Jacob Shealtiel Ninio, Zera‘ Ya‘akov; Derashot ve-shu"t (Jerusalem, 1912), 19a–19b. 127.  Shulhan ‘Arukh, Yoreh de‘ah, Hilkhot Tsedakah, 251.3. 128.  Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metsi‘a, 71a. 129.  Sifrei, Deuteronomy, Re’eh, 116. 130.  See, for example, the discussion in a responsum from 1862 cited by Azriel Hildesheimer in She’elot u-teshuvot Rabi ‘Azri’el (Tel Aviv, 1969), no. 221. 131.  Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot matnot ‘aniyim, 3. 132.  Moshe Mitrani, She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Mabi"t (Venice, 1629), part 3, no. 105. 133.  On Sirkes’ opinion, see Yoel Sirkes, Bayit Hadash (Cracow, 1631–40), a commentary on the fourteenth-century law code by Jacob ben Asher, Arba‘a Turim. 134.  Samson Morpurgo, Shemesh Tsedakah (Venice, 1743), part 1, Yoreh de‘ah, no. 19; dated 1695. 135. Azulai, Yosef Omets, no. 19.

307

308

Notes to Chapter Three 136. Ibid. 137. Luis Landau, “Ha-transformatsyah shel ha-sipur ha-talmudi ba-Me‘am Lo‘ez,” Pe‘amim 7 (1981): 35–49; idem, “Me‘am Lo‘ez—masoret ve-hidushah ­be-sifrut ha-sefaradit-yehudit,” Shevet va-‘am 5 (1984): 307–21. More generally on the Me‘am Lo‘ez, see Moshe David Gaon, Maskiyot levav ‘al Me‘am Lo‘ez (Jerusalem, 1933); Michael Molho, Le Meam-Loez: Encyclopédie populaire du sépharadisme levantin (Salonika, 1945); David Gonzalo Maeso and Pascual Pascual Recuero, eds., Me‘am lo‘ez: el gran comentario bíblico sefardí (Madrid, 1964); Arnold Goldberg, Me‘am Lo‘ez: Diskurs und Erzählung in der Komposition. Hayye Sara, Kapitel 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984). 138. Azulai, Hesed le-Avraham, ma‘ayan 3, nahar 23 (emphasis mine). Thus this passage also appears in Shapira, Tuv ha-Arets, 37b. 139.  Jacob Huli, Me‘am Lo‘ez Bereshit (Istanbul, 1730), Va-yehi, chapter 1, 264b (emphasis mine). 140. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 39–41. In reality, though, similar criticism was leveled against the elites of other cities as well, for example in a piyut by Menahem de Lonzano who chastised the wealthy of Istanbul for spending their money on the building of palatial residences rather than the support of the Jews in the Land of Israel. Menahem de Lonzano, Shetei Yadot (Venice, 1618), 139a, referred to in Ben-Naeh, “Siyu‘ah shel kehilat Istanbul,” 79. Lonzano himself was a “private emissary,” i.e., not dispatched by a community but traveling on his own account. On Lonzano, see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 232; Daniel Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. ­Italyani’ shebe-Venetsyah lema‘an ‘aniyei Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 5336–5503 (Tel Aviv, 1978), 27–28. 141. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 68. 142. Ibid., 69. 143.  Israel Bartal and Yosef Kaplan, “‘Aliyat ‘aniyim me-Amsterdam le-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh,” Shalem 6 (1992): 175–93; Yosef Kaplan, “Amsterdam and the Ashkenazic Migration in the Seventeenth Century,” Studia Rosenthaliana 23 (1989): 22–44; Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 183. 144.  Bartal and Kaplan, “‘Aliyat ‘aniyim,” 190. 145.  Simone Lässig makes this point in a different context, her discussion of Jewish philanthropy in nineteenth-century Germany. Lässig, “Bürgerlichkeit, Patronage, and Communal Liberalism in Germany, 1871–1914,” in Thomas Adam, ed., Philanthropy, Patronage, and Civil Society: Experiences from Germany, Great Britain, and North America (Bloomington, IN, 2004), 198–218. 146.  On the role of the Portuguese-Sephardic communities of the West in the modernization of philanthropy and the concern for efficiency and betterment, see Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 95–96. On “reforming the Jewish poor” in eighteenth-­ century England, see Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 227–47. 147.  Alan Kidd, “Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm,’” Social History 21 (1996): 180–92, at 186–87.

Notes to Chapters Three and Four 148.  Minna Rozen has observed that the Jerusalem Jewish community of the seventeenth century felt besieged and inferior yet, in the course of the century, became more assertive in its demand for support from the diaspora. Minna Rozen, Ha-kehilah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17 (Tel Aviv, 1984), 282–84. 149. Erich Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, 2002), 244, 246.

Chapter Four 1.  Haim Joseph David Azulai, Ma‘gal tov ha-shalem, ed. Aharon Freiman (Jerusalem, 1934), 14. 2. Ibid., 15. 3. Ibid., 20. 4. Ibid., 19–20. 5. On the German-Jewish communities of the eighteenth century see, for example, Mordechai Breuer, “Frühe Neuzeit und Beginn der Moderne,” in Michael Meyer, ed., Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, Volume 1: 1600–1780 (­Munich, 1996), 85–247; J. Friedrich Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2001); Azriel Shohat, ‘Im hilufei tekufot: reshit ha-haskalah be-yahadut Germanyah (Jerusalem, 1960). 6. Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 123. 7. Ibid., 15. 8. Ibid., 25. 9.  Letter of the rabbis in Cairo to the rabbis in Venice, printed in Venice, 1693. The text was published by Yesha‘yahu Sonne, “‘Od ‘al yahasam shel ha-ve‘adim veha-kehilot be-Folin le-Erets Yisra’el,” Zion 1 (1936): 252–55. 10. Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 313–19; Yaron Ben-Naeh, “‘Ve-khi lo aheihem anahnu?’: yahasei Ashkenazim u-Sefaradim bi-­ Yerushalayim be-sof ha-me’ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh,” Cathedra 103 (2002): 33–52. 11. Sonne, “‘Od ‘al yahasam shel ha-ve‘adim veha-kehilot be-Folin le-Erets Yisra’el,” 254. 12.  Abraham ben Mordecai ha-Levi, Ginat Veradim (Istanbul, 1712), “Yore de‘ah,” kelal 3, no. 9. 13. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 313. 14. Ha-Levi, Ginat Veradim, Yore de‘ah, 3:9. 15.  Ibid.; see also Israel Heilperin, ed., Pinkas Va‘ad Arba‘ Aratsot (Jerusalem, 1945), 464. 16. Ha-Levi, Ginat Veradim, Yore de‘ah, 3:9. 17.  On the question of Ashkenazi unity in the early modern period, see Elisheva Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz in the Writings of Jacob Katz,” in Jay Harris, ed., The Pride of Jacob: Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work (Cambridge, 2002), 65–83; on the modern period, see Steven Aschheim, Brothers and ­Strangers: The East European Jews in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982).

309

310

Notes to Chapter Four 18.  Daniel Schroeter, “Orientalism and the Jews of the Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 4 (1994): 183–96. 19.  On the role of halakhah and the Shulhan ‘Arukh for the formation of early modern Jewish identities, see Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shulhan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 251–76. 20. Ha-Levi, Ginat Veradim, Yore de‘ah, 3:9. 21.  Ibid. (emphasis mine). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25.  “An information concerning the present state of the Jewish Nation in Europe and Judea,” according to the excerpts published by Cecil Roth, “The Jews of Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century,” Jewish Historical Society of England. Miscellanies, Part 2 (1935): 99–104, at 100–101. On tensions between the Portuguese Sephardic communities and the Ashkenazi poor, see Yosef Kaplan, “­Yahasam shel ya-yehudim ha-sefaradim veha-portugalim la-yehudim ha-ashkenazim be-­ Amsterdam ba-me’ah ha-17,” in Temurot ba-historiyah ha-yehudit ha-hadashah (Jerusalem, 1988), 389–412; idem, “Amsterdam and Ashkenazic Migration in the 17th Century,” Studia Rosenthaliana 23 (1989): 22–44; idem, “The Self-Definition of the Sephardic Jews of Western Europe and Their Relation to the Alien and the Stranger,” in Benjamin Gampel, ed., Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World (New York, 1997), 121–45; Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “Portugais et tudesques dans les communautés juvies d’Europe occidentale au XVIIIe siècle: entre défiance et solidarité,” Yod 35 (1992): 27–44; Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 125–31. 26.  Yomtov Tsahalon, She’elot u-teshuvot (Venice, 1694), quoted in Ben-Naeh, “‘Ve-khi lo aheihem anahnu?,’” 49–50. 27. Eliezer Bashan, Sheviyah u-fedut ba-hevrah ha-yehudit be-artsot ha-yam ­ha-tikhon (1391–1830) (Ramat Gan, 1980), 244. 28.  Daniel Carpi, Pe‘ulat ‘K. K. Italyani’ shebe-Venetsyah lema‘an ‘aniyei Erets Yisra’el ba-shanim 5336–5503 (Tel Aviv, 1978), 48–49. 29.  Hagiz’ father-in-law, Raphael Mordecai Malki, had also criticized the practice of communities in the diaspora privileging “their own” when collecting support for the Holy Land, rather than benefiting the scholars and the poor of the Land of Israel in general. See Minna Rozen, Jewish Identity and Society in the Seventeenth Century: Reflections on the Life and Work of Refael Mordekhai Malki (Tübingen, 1992), 152. 30.  Jacob Hagiz, Sefat Emet/Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei (Jerusalem, 1987), 92–94. Examples of the lista from Amsterdam from the years 1705–6, 1720–21, and 1728– 29 appear in Gérard Nahon, “Amsterdam et Jérusalem au XIIIe siècle: état des sources et des questions,” in idem, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident (Paris, 1993), 203–34, at 224–31. Nahon (ibid., 221–22), says that the lista disap-

Notes to Chapter Four peared in the Amsterdam community records after 1729, but it must have still existed, if perhaps on a smaller scale, because the Pekidim in Istanbul continued to refer to the “lista de Amsterdam” in subsequent decades as well. Still in the nineteenth century, we hear about the lista of the Sephardic community in Amsterdam: see, for example, the letters from Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam to Pekidei Kushta, 11 Av and 12 Elul 1828, in Joseph Joel Rivlin and Benjamin Rivlin, eds., Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5588 (Jerusalem, 1970), 218, 237. 31. Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 132–46; idem, “The ‘Portuguese’ Dowry Societies in Venice and Amsterdam: A Case Study in Communal Differentiation within the Marrano Diaspora,” Italia 6 (1987): 30–61; Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford, 2000), 178–81. 32.  Quoted in Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 134. 33.  Minna Rozen, “Kehilat Algiers—Merkaz le-isuf kaspei Erets Yisra’el bi-­ Tsefon Afrika ba-me’ah ha-17,” Michael 18 (1978): 243–51, at 244. 34. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 104–5. 35. Hagiz, Eleh Mas‘ei, 129. 36. Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 90. 37. Hagiz, Eleh Mas‘ei, 129–30. 38.  Moshe Mizrahi, Admat Kodesh, part 2 (Salonika, 1753), Yoreh de‘ah, no. 8. 39. Abraham ben Samuel Meyuhas, Sedeh ha-Arets (Livorno, 1788), part 3, Yoreh de‘ah, no. 14. 40.  On the idea of the immigrants in the Land of Israel as “branches” (­senifim) of their diasporic home communities, see Israel Bartal, Galut ba-arets: Yishuv Erets Yisra’el be-terem tsiyonut (Jerusalem, 1994), 15, 51–2; Israel Bartal and Yosef Kaplan, “‘Aliyat ‘aniyim me-Amsterdam le-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh,” Shalem 6 (1992): 175–93, at 186. 41.  Jacob Barnai, “Le-toldot ha-ashkenazim be-Erets Yisra’el bein ha-shanim 1720–1777 veha-temikhah ha-kalkalit bahem,” Shalem 2 (1976): 193–230, at 195. 42.  Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century: Under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1992), 172. 43.  Bernard Brilling, “Die Tätigkeit des Jerusalemer Sendboten Pethachja b. Jehuda Wahl Katzenellenbogen in Westeuropa (1735–1750),” in Festschrift Dr. I. E. Lichtigfeld, Landesrabbiner von Hessen, zum 70. Geburtstag (Frankfurt, 1964), 20–49, at 23–25; the text of the document by the Frankfurt rabbis and “Jerusalemscollectoren,” in which they cite the agreement with the Pekidim (“den gelehrten Rabbinern und Herren aus Constantinopel”), is on 32–33. 44.  On his visit in Fürth, see Azulai, Ma‘gal tov, 16–18. 45. Ibid., 18. 46.  Jacob Emden, Shevirat luhot ha-on (Altona, 1756), quoted in Ya‘ari, S­ heluhei Erets Yisra’el, 526–27.

311

312

Notes to Chapter Four 47. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 527. 48.  Quoted in ibid., 530. 49.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 15 Av 1750 (Pinkas Kushta, 87a–87b). 50.  The text of this letter is in Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 533. 51.  Letter to K. K. Tarnopol, 1755 or 1756 (?) (Pinkas Kushta, 36a). 52.  Letter to the Officials in Jerusalem, 20 Av 1754 (Pinkas Kushta, 116a). 53.  The rebuilding of the Jewish community in Tiberias and the confrontation between Zahir al-Umar and the governor of Damascus are described in detail in Zimrat ha-arets (Mantua, 1745), by Haim Abulafia’s son-in-law Jacob Berab. See also Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1973), 30–53. 54.  Thus reports Moshe Yerushalmi in his travelogue published in 1769. Jacob Barnai, “Hidush ha-yishuv ha-yehudi bi-Teveryah bi-shenat 1740 u-mashma‘uto ha-historit,” Shevet va-‘am 3 (1978): 35–62, at 39–40. 55. These kupot would later be known as Kupot R. Meir Ba‘al ha-Nes. Ya‘ari (Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 58–59) attributed this to Ventura himself; Barnai (“Hidush ha-yishuv,” 45) argues that the practice of naming the Tiberias funds after R. Meir Ba‘al ha-Nes dates from the nineteenth century. In Eastern Europe, in any event, the term Kupat R. Meir Ba‘al ha-Nes referred to the funds for the Land of Israel in general, not only Tiberias (Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 60). 56.  Letter to the Rabbis in Jerusalem, 21 Shevat 1744; Letter to K. K. Turin, 21 Shevat 1744 (Pinkas Kushta, 31b, 61a). 57.  Meeting on 21 March 1802 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 12, 1799–1803). 58.  Istanbul Officials to Livorno, 15 October 1803 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 13, 1803–4). 59. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 531. 60.  Quoted in ibid., 532; originally published by Mordecai Samid, Gilyonot 11 (1941): 258–60. 61.  See Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 632–34. 62.  The text was published by Mordecai Kosover, “Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Palestine,” in Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, ed., Homenaje a Millás-Vallicrosa (Barcelona 1954), 753–88, at 787. 63.  Quoted in Yehoshua Kani’el, “Ma’avakim irguniyim ve-kalkaliyim bein ha‘edot bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-19,” in Perakim be-toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi bi-Yerushalayim (Jerusalem, 1976), vol. 2: 97–126, at 101. 64.  For examples of cooperation between the communities, see Yehoshu‘a Kaniel, Be-ma‘avar: ha-yehudim be-Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ah ha-19 bein yashan v­ e-hadash u-vein yishuv Erets ha-kodesh le-vein ha-tsiyonut (Jerusalem, 2000), 109–19. 65. Ibid., 100–103, 105. 66.  Sherman Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries: The Jews in Palestine, 1799–1840 (Salt Lake City, 1992), 120–21. 67. Ibid., 123. 68.  Meir Benayahu, “Kuntres ‘al halukat kaspei Erets Yisra’el be-artsot ­Ashkenaz le-Rabi Yosef David ‘Ayash,” Sura 1 (1954): 103–55, at 113–14.

Notes to Chapter Four 69.  The note regarding ‘Ayash’s apostasy was published first by Yitshak Rivkind, “Dapim bodedim,” Yerushalayim (1928): 111–78, at 146–47. See also Benayahu, “Kuntres,” 111; Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 683–85. 70.  For a brief overview of hazakah, see Menachem Elon and Isaac Levitats, “Hazakah,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, second edition (Detroit, 2007), vol. 8: 486– 91, and the literature cited there. 71.  The text of Joseph David ‘Ayash’s pamphlet in Benayahu, “Kuntres,” 112–55, at 145. 72.  Benayahu, “Kuntres,” 119, 124. 73. Ibid., 151–52. 74. Ibid., 133, 135. 75. Ibid., 125–27. 76. Ibid., 131–32. 77.  The text of the letter was published by Eliezer Rivlin, “Takanot ha-‘izvonot bi-Yerushalayim uve-E[rets] Y[isra’el],” Azkarah (Jerusalem, 1937), 559–619, at 605–9. 78.  See Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 188–93. On the conflicts over the estates of those who passed away without leaving heirs in the Holy Land, see Kaniel, “Ma’avakim irguniyim ve-kalkaliyim,” 111–16. 79.  Rivlin, “Takanot ha-‘izvonot,” 607. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82.  See the description in the letter from Jerusalem to Livorno, dated late 5586 (1826); the Livorno archive preserved an Italian translation prepared by Abraham Piperno, dated 10 December 1827 (ACEL Fila de Minutas 19, 1826–28). See also Arieh Morgenstern, Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel (Oxford, 2006), 68–72. 83.  Rivlin, “Takanot ha-‘izvonot,” 607–8. 84.  The text of the herem as it was sent to the Sephardic communities of Europe is in the Livorno archive: ACEL Filza de Minutas 19, 1826–28. Incidentally, the copy of the herem was filed in the wrong place: it was dated ‫ירושלם‬, the numerical equivalent of 586. Whoever added the document to the folder covering the year 1826 (which would correspond to the Hebrew year 5586) had overlooked the addition “li-ferat gadol ” (“by the full era”), i.e., one needs to subtract 5, the value of‫ה‬, so the year would be [5]581, or 1821. This suggests that the minutes of the meetings of the governo of the Jewish community in Livorno were collected and eventually assembled into folders, together with letters and documents that were relevant to the issues decided upon by the governo, long after the fact. On the herem of 1821, see also Arieh Morgenstern, Ha-shivah l­i-Yerushalayim: hidush ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah h­ a-tesha‘-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 2007), 153. 85.  Haim David Shlomo Zerafa, Sh[e’elot] u-T[eshuvot] Sha‘ar Shelomo (Livorno, 1878), no. 130, 102a. 86. Ibid., 103a.

313

314

Notes to Chapter Four 87. On hezkat ha-yishuv, see Isaac Levitats, “Herem ha-yishuv,” Encyclopedia Judaica, second edition, vol. 9: 17–18. 88. Zerafa, Sha‘ar Shelomo, 103a. 89. Ibid. 90.  A similar accord was signed by the Perushim, the Hasidim, and the Se­ phardim of Safed in 1825, allowing Ashkenazi sheluhim to visit the “cities of Sefar­ad” in Turkey, Europe, the Maghreb, the Middle East, Yemen, and India, and Sephardic sheluhim to visit Ashkenazi communities in Eastern and Central Europe, and stipulating that new income generated by these emissaries would be shared by the Sephardic (40 percent) and the Ashkenazi (60 percent) communities. For the text of this agreement, see Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 765–67. 91. The text of the agreement was published by Yitshak Rivkind, “Dapim bodedim, mefitsim or ‘al korot ha-yishuv be-E[rets] Y[isra’el] ba-me’ah ha-shishit,” Yerushalayim (1928): 111–78, at 154–55. On the various agreements negotiated between the different communities, see Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 155–66. 92. Morgenstern, Hastening Redemption, 51. 93.  Mordechai Eliav, “Yahasim bein-‘adatiyim ba-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ah ha-19,” Pe‘amim 11 (1982): 118–34; see the table at 121. 94.  Britain established a consulate in Jerusalem in 1839, France and Sardinia in 1843, the United States in 1844, Austria in 1849, and Russia in 1858. Shim‘on Shamir, “Matai hithilah ha-‘et ha-hadashah be-toldot Erets Yisra’el,” Cathedra 40 (1986): 139–58, at 149. See also Mordecai Eliav, “Reshimat konsulim bi-­ Yerushalayim be-shilhei ha-shilton ha-‘othmani,” Cathedra 28 (1983): 161–76. 95.  Jacob Barnai, “Ma‘amadah shel ha-rabanut ha-kolelet bi-Yerushalayim batekufah ha-othmanit,” Cathedra 13 (1979): 47–69. 96.  The conflict about shehitah is described in detail by Yehoshua Yelin, who was involved in the controversy, in his Zikhronot le-ven Yerushalayim (reprint, Jerusalem 1991), 99–112. 97.  Ha-Levanon, 26 April 1866. 98.  Yismah lev, Even ha-‘ezer (1878), quoted in Kani’el, “Ma’avakim irguniyim ve-kalkaliyim bein ha-‘edot bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-19,” 121. 99.  Ha-Or, 4 November 1892. 100. Yelin, Zikhronot, 100. 101.  Albert Hyamson, ed., The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine, 1838–1914, 2 volumes (London, 1939), vol. 2: 342. 102.  The text of Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov was published by Yehudah Ratsabi, “Kuntres Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov,” in Yerushalayim: Riv‘on le-heqer Yerushalayim ve-toldoteiha 2 (1949): 147–74. On the public reading of the text and the omission of the signatures, see Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, 170. 103.  ‘Edut le-Yisra’el (Jerusalem, n.d.), the approbations appear on 3b–4b. For the main accusations in ‘Edut le-Yisra’el, see Jacob Barnai, “Ha-‘edah ha-ma‘aravit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-19,” in Perakim be-toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi biYerushalayim (Jerusalem, 1973), vol. 1: 129–40, at 133.

Notes to Chapter Four 104.  Barnai, “Ha-‘edah ha-ma‘aravit.” 105.  The conflict is described in some detail in ibid. Cf. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 737–38; Rachel Shar‘abi, Ha-yishuv ha-sefaradi bi-Yerushalayim be-shilhei ha-tekufah ha-othmanit, 1893–1914 (Tel Aviv, 1989); idem, “Hitbadlut ‘edot ha-­ mizrah meha-‘edah ha-sefaradit 1860–1914,” Pe‘amim 21 (1984): 31–49. 106.  Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, 171–72. 107. Hyamson, British Consulate in Jerusalem, vol. 1: 163–64. 108.  In subsequent decades, compromises were negotiated and renegotiated to set the terms for distributing funds raised abroad. See the documents published in Abraham Almaliah, “Le-toldot ha-ma‘aravim bi-Yerushalayim,” in Abraham Moshe Luncz, ed., Luah Erets Yisra’el 14 (1909): 53–88, especially at 66–71, 75–80. See also Jacob Barnai, “Kuntres Ha-ma‘alot li-Shelomo: le-toldot ‘adat hama‘aravim bi-Yerushalayim,” Shevet va-‘am 2 (1973): 208–14. It should be noted that the very idea of a distinct and unified Moroccan Jewish identity—which could be juxtaposed to a Sephardic identity—was in itself somewhat of a novelty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and certainly no less a contested and contingent category than “Sephardic.” See Daniel Schroeter, “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities,” Jewish Social Studies 15 (2008): 145–65. One can only speculate to what degree the separation of the Moroccans from the Sephardic community structure in Jerusalem was mirroring what Deshen has described as a “trend away from Sephardic practice” among Jews in Morocco in the nineteenth century. See Shlomo Deshen, The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in ­Sherifian Morocco (Chicago, 1989), 121. 109.  For example, Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, 152, 166. 110. Ibid., 153. In the following, the authors of Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov note that the Sephardic community claims this income is needed for taxes and other community expenses, not to sustain individual Torah scholars or the poor. 111. Ibid., 154. 112. Ibid., 168. 113. Ibid., 154. 114. Ibid., 158–60. 115. Ibid., 153. 116. Ibid., 155; also 157. 117.  We do have such examples from other Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, where conflict was expressed precisely in terms of social class rather than ethnicity. See Avner Levi, “Shavat Aniim: Social Cleavage, Class War and Leadership in the Sephardic Community—The Case of Izmir 1847,” in Aron Rodrigue, ed., Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership (Bloomington, IN, 1992), 183–202; idem, “Ha-temurot be-manhigut ha-kehilot ha-sefaradiyot ­ha-merkaziyot ba-imperyah ha-othmanit ba-me’ah ha-19,” in Minna Rozen, ed., Yemei ha-sahar (Tel Aviv, 1996), 237–71. 118.  See André Levy, “A Community That Is Both a Center and a Diaspora: Jews in Late Twentieth Century Morocco,” in André Levy and Alex Weingrod,

315

316

Notes to Chapters Four and Five eds., Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places (Stanford, CA, 2005), 68–96. 119.  Mishpat le-Elohei Ya‘akov, 157. 120.  Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Introduction,” in idem, Le Registre des délibérations de la Nation juive portugaise de Bordeaux (1711–1787) (Paris, 1981), 9–10. 121.  Anthony Smith, National Identity (London, 1991), 24. 122. See Izchak Bezalel, “Ha-hituv shel ‘edot Yisra’el: shitat ha-hituv, hashinuyim bahen u-me’afyeneihen,” Pe‘amim 111–12 (2007): 5–34; Mordecai Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-anshei Ho"d: Yehudei Germanyah ve-yishuv Erets Yisra’el bame’ah ha-19 (Tel Aviv, 1970); Israel Bartal, “‘Al demutah ha-rav-‘adatit shel hahevrah ha-yehudit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-19,” Pe‘amim 57 (1993): 114–24; Mordecai Eliav, “Yahasim bein-‘adatiyim ba-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ah ­ha-19,” Pe‘amim 11 (1982): 118–34; Natan Efrati, Ha-‘edah ha-sefaradit bi-­Yerushalayim (1840–1917) (Jerusalem, 1999); Shar‘abi, Ha-yishuv ha-sefaradi biYerushalayim; idem, “Hitbadlut ‘edot ha-mizrah meha-‘edah ha-sefaradit 1860– 1914”; Kaniel, B ­ e-ma‘avar, 91–185; Barnai, “Ha-‘edah ha-ma‘aravit.” 123.  Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, ed., Sefer ha-or (Jerusalem, 1890), 2–3. On the quest for unity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the late nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, see also Efrati, Ha-‘edah ha-sefaradit bi-­ Yerushalayim, 46–55.

Chapter Five 1.  Zvi Hirsch Lehren (The Hague) to Pekidei Kushta, end of Adar 1827, in Joseph Rivlin and Benjamin Rivlin, eds., Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim meAmsterdam, 5586–5587 (Jerusalem, 1965), 163. On the events of 1826 and their impact on the Jewish community of the Ottoman capital, see Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York, 2014), 6–8. 2.  There is a rich literature on this period in Ottoman history. See, for example, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Prince­ ton, NJ, 2008); Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2000); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford, 2002 [1961]); Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 1994); Robert Mantran, ed., Histoire de l’Empire ottoman (Paris, 1989). 3.  Carmona was among those who had signed the confirmation of Lehren’s appointment by the Pekidei Kushta in 1814. Avraham Moshe Luncz, Ha-halukah: Mekorah, hishtalshelutah, takanoteihah, ve-sidreihah (Jerusalem, 1917), 150. 4.  Yehoshu‘a (Shuki) Ecker, “Ha-bazergan shel ocak ha-yeniçerim—biografyah shel tafkid,” M.A. thesis (Tel Aviv University, 2002), 89–96. 5. Arieh Morgenstern, “Ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim be-Amsterdam vehayishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el ba-mahatsit ha-rishonah shel ha-me’ah ha-19,” Ph.D. dissertation (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981), 1–3; Luncz, Ha-­

Notes to Chapter Five halukhah, 149–51; Arieh Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim: hidush ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el be-reshit ha-me’ah ha-tesha‘-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 2007), 117–21. 6.  Jozeph Michman, “Hithavut ha-mosad ‘Pekidei ve-Amarkalei de-‘arei hakodesh’ be-Amsterdam,” Cathedra 17 (1983): 69–84, at 74–75. On the Jewish community of the Netherlands in this period, see R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “Enlightenment and Emancipation from c. 1750 to 1814,” and idem, “Arduous Adaptation, 1814–1870,” in J. C. H. Blom, R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schöffer, eds., The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford, 2002), 164–229. 7.  Morgenstern, “Ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim,” 3–4; Michman, “Hithavut,” 77. 8.  Israel Bartal, Galut ba-arets: Yishuv Erets-Yisra’el be-terem tsiyonut (Jerusalem, 1994), 67. On the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s, see Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Oxford, 1988), 132–42. 9. Ben-Tsiyon Gat, Ha-yishuv ha-yehudi be-Erets Yisra’el bi-shenot 1840–1881 (Jerusalem, 1963), 99; Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, 2010), 118, 209–10; Sherman Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries: The Jews in Palestine, 1799–1840 (Salt Lake City, 1992) 345. 10.  Arieh Morgenstern has claimed that for Lehren, as before for the Pekidim in Istanbul, messianic expectations were a crucial factor in his involvement in the philanthropic network for Erets Israel; see for example Morgenstern, Ha-shivah liYerushalayim, 91, 115. I do not see any strong evidence for this in the case of the Istanbul Officials, however. Morgenstern’s argument may be stronger in the case of Lehren, though Morgenstern also acknowledges Lehren’s opposition to any kind of messianic activism and thus the large-scale immigration of Jews to the Holy Land. Ibid., 144. On the discussion of the role of messianism and Ashkenazi settlement in Erets Israel, prompted by Morgenstern’s theses, see the contributions by Arieh Morgenstern, Menahem Friedman, Jacob Katz, and Isaiah Tishby, “Tsipiyot meshihiyot ve-yishuv Erets-Yisra’el ba-mahatsit ha-rishonah shel ha-me’ah ha-19,” Cathedra 24 (1982): 51–78. 11.  Zvi Hirsch Lehren (The Hague) to Pekidei Kushta, end of Adar 1827, in Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5586–5587, 163–64. 12.  Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam to the Ashkenazi communities in the Holy Land, 3 Av 1829, in Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5589 (Jerusalem, 1979), 241–44; Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries, 422n46; Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 171–73; Luncz, Ha-halukhah, 152, mistakenly dated this compromise to 1823. As more Ashkenazim from Western Europe immigrated to Palestine in the course of the nineteenth century, a new sub-group emerged, the Kolel Ho"d (Holland ve-Deutschland), consisting of immigrants from Germany and the Netherlands. A new compromise was thus reached according to which the Ashkenazim were divided in a way that granted one-fourth of the funds to the Dutch and German congregation. According to the account

317

318

Notes to Chapter Five published by the ­Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in 1854, a total of close to 10,000 florins was distributed as follows: Sephardim in Jerusalem Sephardim in Safed Sephardim in Hebron Sephardim in Tiberias

1,964.01 fl. 833.22 714.18 476.14

Kolel Ho"d Perushim in Jerusalem Hasidim in Safed and Jerusalem Hasidei Volhyn in Tiberias Hasidei Rusiya in Tiberias Hasidei Habad in Hebron

2,004.15 1,547.44 1,388.74 535.64 178.55 357.11 9,999.20 fl.

(Or Emet, published in 1854 by the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam, part 2, 33; reproduced in Ahavat Tsiyon ve-anshei Ho"d: Yehudei Germanyah ve-yishuv Erets Yisra’el ba-me’ah ha-19 [Tel Aviv, 1970], 149.) 13.  Zvi Hirsch Lehren (The Hague) to Pekidei Kushta, end of Adar 1827, in Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5586–5587, 164. In fact, as Lehren was sure to point out, the Ashkenazi community of Amsterdam had been so opposed to the distribution of the funds among Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Jerusalem that, in 1825, they had decided to circumvent the Pekidim ve-Amarkalim in Amsterdam altogether and sent their contributions to Vilna instead; Lehren asked that the funds be returned and divided among the communities according to the compromise. “Seeing our efforts on behalf of the Sephardic kolel,” he admonished the Pekidei Kushta, now defending the interests of the Ashkenazim in the Holy Land, “it is clear and right that the Sephardic communities in all places should also do good for the kolel of the Ashkenazim, for also the Ashkenazim in all these countries do good for the kolel of the Sephardim.” Ibid., 166. 14.  Zvi Hirsch Lehren (The Hague) to Pekidei Kushta, end of Adar 1827, in ibid., 164–65. 15. Zvi Hirsch Lehren to the rabbis of Jerusalem and R. Solomon Moshe Suzin, 11 Nisan 1827, in ibid., 186–88. 16.  Lehren worried, however, that a new compromise reached in Tiberias allowing Ashkenazi emissaries to visit the Sephardic communities of the diaspora might undermine the ban on shelihut to Western Europe. Previously, he noted, the emissaries on their way to visit the large Sephardic communities of Western Europe passed through the Ashkenazi communities on their way, something they could no longer do because of the ban on shelihut. Thus, he insisted, sending emissaries to the Sephardim of Amsterdam and London would do more damage than good and would generate more costs than revenue. Instead he offered to negotiate an arrangement with the Sephardic community of Amsterdam similar to what had been achieved among the Ashkenazim of Holland and Germany, ensuring regular

Notes to Chapter Five contributions to the Holy Land and obviating the need for sending any emissaries at all to Western Europe. Zvi Hirsch Lehren to Joseph David Abulafia in Tiberias, 5 Shevat 1828, in Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5588, 70. 17.  Pekidim ve-Amarkalim to Pekidei Kushta, 1 Shevat 1828, in ibid., 67. 18.  Lehren to Pekidei Kushta, 21 Iyar 1828, in ibid., 149–51. 19.  Lehren to Pekidei Kushta, 11 Av 1828, in ibid., 220. 20. Ibid. 21.  Pekidim ve-Amarkalim to Pekidei Kushta, 12 Elul 1828, in ibid., 235–36. 22.  Lehren to Pekidei Kushta, 11 Av 1828, in ibid., 219. 23.  Lehren to Hasidim in the Holy Land (Safed), 15 Heshvan 1825, in Igrot haPekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5586–5587, 48. 24. Ibid. 25.  Arieh Morgenstern, “The Correspondence of Pekidim and Amarcalim of Amsterdam as a Source for the History of Erez Israel,” in Jozeph Michman, ed., Dutch Jewish History (Jerusalem, 1984), 433–63, at 439. 26.  Morgenstern, “Ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim,” 11–12; Morgenstern, ­Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 127–31. 27.  Lehren (The Hague) to Moshe Frankel in Hamburg, 9 Shevat 1827, in Igrot ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5586–5587, 136; see Shaul Stampfer, “Ha-‘pushke’ ve-gilguleihah—kupot Erets Yisra’el ke-tofa‘ah hevratit,” ­Cathedra 21 (1981): 89–102. 28.  Morgenstern, “Ha-Pekidim veha-Amarkalim,” 14–16; Morgenstern, Hashivah li-Yerushalayim, 133–39. 29.  Lehren to Officials in Frankfurt/Main, 5 Av 1828, in Igrot ha-Pekidim vehaAmarkalim me-Amsterdam, 5588, 217–18. 30.  ACEL Filza de Minutas 19, 1826–28. 31.  Letter from Jerusalem to Livorno, dated 5589 (1829) (ACEL Filza de Minutas 20, 1829–32). 32.  References to (or copies of) those letters in ACEL Filza de Minutas 20, 1829–32; 22, 1836–37; 23, 1840–41. 33.  Yossef Charvit, La France, l’élite rabbinique d’Algérie et la Terre Sainte au XIXe siècle (Paris: 2005), 180. 34.  Haim Abraham Gagin incidentally also enjoyed the support of Zvi Hirsch Lehren and his organization in Amsterdam and Lehren decided to transfer the donations for Jerusalem collected in Western Europe to Gagin rather than into the hands of the Navon family, who had come out, in 1839, in favor of Moses Montefiore’s plans to buy land and develop Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 110–11, 325–30. 35.  Abraham Camondo and Mandolino Fua to Portuguese congregation in Amsterdam, dated Istanbul, 12 March 1867, in Abraham Haim, ed., Te‘udot min ha-osef shel Eliyahu Elyashar (Jerusalem, 1971), 64. 36.  Quoted in Morgenstern, Ha-shivah li-Yerushalayim, 176–77. 37. Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-Anshei Ho"d, 145, 151.

319

320

Notes to Chapter Five 38. On this shaliah, see Lilac Torgeman, “Ha-rav Natan ‘Amram—shadar ­kehilat Hevron,” M.A. thesis (Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 2011). 39.  For the text of the letter provided by the Chabad-Hasidim in Hebron to their emissary, see Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 686–87. On the situation in Palestine in 1834, see Gudrun Krämer, Geschichte Palästinas (Munich, 2002), 86–87; and on Egyptian rule in Palestine, see Moshe Ma‘oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in idem, ed., Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period (Jerusalem, 1975), 142–63, on Hebron in 1834, 147. 40.  Referring to three of the blessings recited at the beginning of the morning prayers. Nathan ‘Amram, Igeret Malkat Sheva (Amsterdam, 1842), 1a. 41. Nathan ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret (Hamburg, 1843), 38; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets (Salonika, 1853), 7a. 42. Nathan ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret (Hamburg, 1843), 38; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets (Salonika, 1853), 7a. 43. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 40; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets, 8a. 44. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 40; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets, 8b. 45. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 39; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets, 7b. 46. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif’eret, 41–42; idem, Kedushat ha-Arets, 9a. 47. ‘Amram, Kedushat ha-Arets, 5a. 48. Ibid., 5b. 49. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 689; Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-Anshei Ho"d, 145. 50. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 1. 51.  Michman, “Hithavut,” 73. 52. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 2. 53.  Meeting of 20 August 1839 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 22bis, 1838–39). 54. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 2. 55. Ibid., 43 (emphasis mine). 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 687n20. 58. ‘Amram, Igeret ha-Emunah veha-Tif ’eret, 17. According to ibid., 5, 500 caras would have been about 11,500 kuruş at the time. 59. Ibid., 13, 17. 60. Ibid., 24–25. 61. Ibid., 14, 21. 62.  Two years into his mission, ‘Amram sent a letter to Navon that he was ready to pay back the loan, obviously from the money collected on his shelihut, but when the latter sent a bill of exchange to Marseilles, ‘Amram was nowhere to be found. Later, after Navon had heard that the shaliah was sending money to his family, to the community in Hebron, and to pay other creditors in Alexandria, he issued another bill of exchange which reached ‘Amram in Livorno. Reflecting the shift in currency rates, he was now supposed to honor a bill of exchange worth the equivalent of 4,000 kuruş within seven days, something that he was unable to

Notes to Chapter Five do. Distressed, ‘Amram produced the account book of his shelihut to show that he was unable to come up with this sum and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a three-month extension. He does not say what happened in the end, but it appears that he defaulted on his debt. Ibid., 5, 29. 63.  Abigail Green, “Sir Moses Montefiore and the Making of the ‘Jewish International,’” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 287–307, at 288. 64.  Newspapers in Hebrew followed soon, for example Ha-Magid in 1856 and Ha-Levanon in 1863. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, 1997). On the rise of the Jewish press, see also the short overview by Israel Bartal, “‘Mevaser u-modi‘a le-ish yehudi’: ha-‘itonut ha-yehudit ke-afik shel hidush,” Cathedra 71 (1994): 156–64. On the Ladino press, see Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture (Bloomington, IN, 2012), 21–136, and Sarah Stein, Making Jews Modern (Bloomington, IN, 2000). On transnational communication and the question of a European public sphere, see Jörg Requate and Martin Schulze, eds., Europäische Öffentlichkeit: Transnationale Kommunikation seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2002). 65.  Mark Baker, “Imagining the Jewish Nation: Midrash, Metaphor, and Modernity in Hamagid, a Hebrew Newspaper,” Prooftexts 15 (1995): 5–32, at 24. 66.  Havatselet, 2.1, 22 September 1871; 2.2, 10 October 1871; 2.3, 29 October 1871; 2.4, 27 October 1871; 2.6, 10 November 1871. 67.  Havatselet, 2.25, 5 March 1872. 68.  El Coreo de Viena, 1 May 1872, 4a–5a. I am grateful to Katja Smid for sharing a copy of this text with me. 69.  Havatselet, “Emet me-erets titsmah,” 2.31, 31 May 1872. 70.  El Tiempo, 5 April 1897. I am grateful to Julia Cohen for pointing me to this source. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 15 April 1897. 73. Ibid., 29 April 1897. 74.  On the role of German Jewry, and in particular the German Jewish press, in the public criticism of Lehren and the traditional system of halukah, see Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-Anshei Ho"d, 144–69. 75. Raphael Kirchheim, “Die Rechnungsablage des amsterdamer Comité’s über die Palästina-Spenden,” Literaturblatt des Orients, supplement of Der Orient, 28 February 1843. 76. Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-Anshei Ho"d, 148–49. On the problematic legal situation of the fund-raising for the Land of Israel in the Habsburg Empire, see the anonymous article from Vienna (“von W.”) on the title page of Der Orient, 28 November 1843. 77. Green, Moses Montefiore, 235. 78.  On Moses Montefiore’s much-diminished role in the 1865 fund drive, see ibid., 325. 79.  Ha-Magid, 23 August 1865.

321

322

Notes to Chapter Five 80.  Der Israelit, 16 August 1865. 81. Ibid., 8 November 1865. 82. Eliav, Ahavat Tsiyon ve-Anshei Ho"d, 151. 83.  Der Israelit, 6 September 1865. 84. Ibid. 85.  Quoted in Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries, 153. 86. Ibid., 34. 87.  Yitshak Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim (Jerusalem, 1969), 83. 88. Ibid., 85, 87–88. 89. Ibid., 88, 96. 90. Ibid., 83, 95, 96. 91.  Haim Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim (Jerusalem, 2001), 7. 92. Ibid., 81. 93. Ibid., 56. 94. Ibid., 13. 95. Ibid., 27. 96. Ibid., 19. The letters of talmidei hakhamim actually have the numerical value of 612: by fulfilling the one commandment of giving charity to a talmid hakham, one had fulfilled, as it were, all 613 commandments. 97. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 27. 98. Ibid., 31–32. 99. Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 98. See Ta‘anit 5a in the Babylonian Talmud. 100. Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 111. 101. Ibid. 102. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 39. Farhi also pointed out the great responsibility of those who lived in the Holy Land and warned against the danger of transgressing the divine commandments “in the palace of the king.” Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 91. 103. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 74. 104. Ibid., 66–71. 105. Ibid., 67 (emphasis mine). 106. Ibid., 68. 107. Ibid., 73. The Talmudic tradition appears in Ketubot 111a. 108. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 82. 109.  To be sure, Palache also had words of praise for Zvi Hirsch Lehren, for example in his Birkat Mo‘adeikha le-Hayim, cited in Shim‘on Ekstein, Sefer Toldot ha-Habi"f (Jerusalem, 1999), 318. 110. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 85. 111.  Elsewhere, he warned that anyone settling in the Land of Israel must do so “for the sake of heaven,” in order to fulfill the divine commandment, and not for any material reasons nor in order to escape any kind of trouble he was facing in his home town. Palache, Tokhahat Hayim, cited in Ekstein, Toldot Habi"f, 336–37. 112. Palache, Artsot ha-Hayim, 67.

Notes to Chapter Five 113.  Ibid., xlv (emphasis mine). 114. Ibid., 26. Also on this matter, however, Haim Palache’s position was ambiguous. Thus he permitted the use of the name of Rabbi Me’ir Ba‘al ha-Nes to raise funds even when the purpose was to assist the poor of a city other than ­Tiberias, and even for a city outside the Land of Israel, a position with which other authorities disagreed vehemently. See Ekstein, Toldot ha-Habi”f, 324–26. 115. Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 100. 116. Ibid., 102. 117. Ibid., 103. 118. Ibid., 106. 119. Ibid., 107. Farhi gave a detailed account of the various charitable expenses of the Jerusalem community; ibid., 100–105. 120.  Arieh Morgenstern, Hastening Redemption: Messianism and the Resettlement of the Land of Israel (Oxford, 2006), 148–64. 121.  Quoted in Morgenstern, “The Correspondence of Pekidim and ­Amarcalim of Amsterdam,” 457. 122. Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 107. 123.  “The Jews in the Land of Israel belong to the world of yetsirah [“formation”] and are called ‘sons,’ the sons of the living God, and outside the Land they are of the world of ‘asiyah [“making”] and they are in the category of servants [of God],” Farhi explained, but those who provide support for the Jews of the Holy Land too “deserve to be called ‘sons,’ for through their efforts . . . they make the settlement of the Land possible.” Farhi, Tuv Yerushalayim, 93–94. It seems clear to me that Farhi was addressing primarily an audience of readers in the diaspora, defending the importance and legitimacy of shelihut and promoting the notion of pan-Jewish solidarity with the Land of Israel. Zvi Zohar has suggested that Farhi’s book (and other works like it) were actually meant for Jewish readers in Palestine itself in order to reassure them and to discourage emigration, not as propaganda to encourage support for the Land of Israel in the diaspora. Zvi Zohar, “Benei palatin shel melekh: ta‘am ha-hayim ha-yehudiyim be-Erets Yisra’el ‘al-pi ketavim shel hakhamim sefaradim-mizrahim me-Erets Yisra’el 1777–1849,” in Aviezer Ravitsky, ed., Erets Yisra’el ba-hagut ha-yehudit ba-‘et ha-hadashah (Jerusalem, 1998), 326–58. Israel Bartal accepts Zohar’s claim in his “Merkaz ba-shulayim: temurot bi-mekomah shel Yerushalayim be-toda‘at ha-yehudim,” in Israel B ­ artal and Haim Goren, eds., Sefer Yerushalayim: be-shilhei ha-tekufah ha-‘othmanit (1800–1917) (Jerusalem, 2010), 63–72, at 64. However, I see no evidence for Zohar’s claim in Farhi’s text. Given that Farhi himself had been a shaliah and that his book was modeled, I would argue, on Hagiz’ Sefat Emet, it seems clear that his intended audience was primarily readers in the diaspora and the intention was to strengthen the ideological basis for the philanthropic support provided to the yishuv in the Holy Land. 124.  Jacob Katz identified Alkalai as one of the “true forerunners” of Zionism. See Jacob Katz, “The Forerunners of Zionism,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita

323

324

Notes to Chapter Five Shapira, eds., Essential Papers on Zionism (New York, 1996), 33–45. On Alkalai, see Jennie Lebel, “‘Holeh ahavat Yerushalayim’: R. Yehudah Alkala‘i—ha-reka‘ ha-politi veha-kehilati li-fe‘ulato,” Pe‘amim 40 (1989): 21–48; Norman Stillman, Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity (Luxembourg, 1995), 49–64; Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover, 1995), 71–82; on religious Zionism more generally, see Yosef Salmon, Religion and Zionism: First Encounters (Jerusalem, 2001); Ehud Luz, Parallels Meet: Religion and Nationalism in the Early Zionist Movement (Philadelphia, 1988). 125.  Judah Alkalai, “Nehamat ha-Arets” [1866], in Yitshak Rafael, ed., Kitvei ha-rav Yehudah Alkala‘i (Jerusalem, 1974), 696; English translation of the quote from Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago, 1996), 27. 126.  Alkalai, “Minhat Yehudah,” in Kitvei ha-rav Yehudah Alkala‘i, 202. 127. Ibid., 199–200. 128.  Alkalai, “Mevaser Tov,” in Kitvei ha-rav Yehudah Alkala‘i, 360. 129.  Israel Klausner, ed., Ha-ketavim ha-tsiyoniyim shel ha-rav Tsvi Kalisher (Jerusalem, 1947), 40; cited in Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology, 76. 130.  It is mentioned in passing, though, in Elena Romero, La creación literaria en lengua sefardí (Madrid, 1992), 117. I discuss Altaras’ book in greater detail in “Jewish Nationalism in Ladino: Jacob Moshe Hay Altarats’ Zikhron Yerushalayim,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010): 146–59. 131.  Jacob Altaras, Zikhron Yerushalayim (Belgrade, 1887), 4–5. 132. Ibid., 100. 133. Ibid., 48–49. 134. Ibid., 171. 135. Ibid., 132. 136. Ibid., 98–99 (emphasis mine). 137.  Nora Şeni, “Camondo,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 4: 382. See also Aron Rodrigue, “Abraham de Camondo of Istanbul: The Transformation of Jewish Philanthropy,” in David Sorkin and Frances Malino, eds., From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870 (Oxford, 1990), 46–56. Rodrigue gives slightly different years for Camondo (1780–1873). Isaac Camondo was the first signatory of a letter provided to the emissary David Yekutiel ha-Kohen of Jerusalem, addressed to the community in Livorno and dated 10 November 1825 (ACEL Filza de Minutas 19, 1826–28). 138.  Nora Şeni, “The Camondos and their Imprint on 19th-Century Istanbul,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994): 663–75. 139.  Rodrigue, “Abraham de Camondo.” 140.  On ninteenth-century philanthropy, see Eli Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen (Münster, 2005); Nora Seni, Les inventeurs de la philanthropie juive (Paris, 2005); Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity (Stanford, CA, 2006); Björn Siegel, Österreichisches Judentum zwischen Ost und West (Frankfurt, 2010).

Notes to Epilogue

Epilogue 1.  Jacob Sapir, Even Sapir (Mainz, 1876; reprint, Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 2: 50. 2.  Sapir went on two other missions, this time on behalf of the Bikur Holim society in Jerusalem, to Egypt and Europe, in 1869, and to Russia, in 1873. See Yehiel Nahshon and Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, “Saphir, Jacob,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 18: 36–37, at 37. Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 821, gives the year 1864 for Sapir’s second mission. 3. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 95. 4. Ibid., 48. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. Ibid., 42–43. Another Jewish traveler of the early nineteenth century, David De-Beit Hillel, had made the rather implausible claim that the Benei Yisra’el were descendants of the Khazars, who had converted to Judaism in the medieval period. Walter Fischel, ed., Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands (Jersey City, 1973), 121. 7.  On the relation between travelogues and ethnography, see Caroline Brettell, “Introduction: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 33:2 (1986): 127–38, and the other contributions to that issue of the journal. 8.  Noah Gerber, Anu o sifrei ha-kodesh shebe-yadeinu? (Jerusalem, 2013), 44. Nahum Sokoloff may have exaggerated a bit when he saw in Even Sapir “a touch of Haskalah (Enlightenment) and even of national sentiment,” claiming Jacob Sapir in a way as a precursor of Zionism which he decidedly was not. Nahum ­Sokoloff, History of Zionism, 1600–1918, 2 vols. (London, 1919), vol. 2: 291. 9. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 50–54, 86–90, 92–93. 10.  Abraham Ya‘ari, ed., Masa‘ Teiman (Jerusalem, 1944). Noah Gerber has recently provided an excellent analysis of Sapir’s chapters on Yemen in the context of European-Jewish Haskalah and Orientalist writing on Yemenite Jewry. See Gerber, Anu o sifrei ha-kodesh shebe-yadeinu?, 28–51. 11. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 35–128. Sapir includes India, Ceylon, Singapore, and Java under the title Hodu (“India”). On the Jews of India, see Joan Roland, Jews in British India: Identity in a Colonial Era (Columbia, SC, 1993); idem, “Baghdadi Jews in India and China in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jonathan Goldstein, ed., The Jews of China (Armonk, NY, and London, 1999), vol. 1: 141–56; Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, The Last Jews of Cochin (Columbia, SC, 1993); Nathan Katz, Who Are the Jews of India? (Berkeley, CA, 2000); J. B. Segal, A History of the Jews of Cochin (London, 1993). 12.  Abraham Ya‘ari, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1951), 173, 393. 13. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 99. 14. Ibid., 56, 90. 15. Ibid., 97. 16. Ibid., 56. 17. Ibid., 35, 97. 18. Ibid., 52, 97–98, 116.

325

326

Notes to Epilogue 19. Ibid., 37–38. 20. Ibid., 112. 21. Ibid., 99. 22. Ibid., 39–40. 23. Ibid., 36. 24. Ibid., 102–4. 25.  This trend would be even more pronounced in subsequent generations in the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora of South and Southeast Asia. See Ruth Fredman Cernea, Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma (Lanham, MD, 2007). 26. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 36. 27.  For example, ibid., 40. 28. Ibid., 119–23. 29. Ibid., 119. 30. Ibid., 120–21. 31. Ibid., 123. 32.  On the question of race, slavery, and Jewish-Black relations in the Western Sephardic diaspora, see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2004). 33. Sapir, Even Sapir, vol. 2: 68. 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Ibid., 67. 36. Ibid., 68. 37. Ibid., 70–71. 38. Ibid., 71–72. 39.  Ha-Levanon, 11 March 1869. 40. Ibid., 16 June 1875. 41.  Abigail Green, “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c. 1840–c. 1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (2008): 535–58, at 544–45. 42.  Cf. Mark Baker’s study of the Hebrew paper Ha-Magid and modern Jewish travel literature, “Imagining the Jewish Nation: Midrash, Metaphor, and Modernity in Hamagid, a Hebrew Newspaper,” Prooftexts 15 (1995): 5–32. 43. Gerber, Anu o sifrei ha-kodesh shebe-yadeinu?, 33. See also Yochai BenGhedalia, “Empowerment: Great Powers, Jewish Philanthropy and European Identity,” in Arnold Suppan and Maximilian Graf, eds., From Austrian Empire to Communist East Central Europe (Vienna, 2010), 65–72. On Albert Cohn and the establishment of new schools, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 38–46. 44. Zecharias Frankel, “Die gegenwärtige Lage der Juden in Palästina,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 7 (May 1854): 291–92.

Glossary

Erets Yisra’el. “Land of Israel,” the term used in traditional Jewish sources in reference to what European writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called Palestine. The four “holy cities” in which most of the Jews of ­eighteenth-century Palestine lived were Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. kahal (also, kahal kadosh). “Congregation” (or “Holy Congregation”). kehilah (pl. kehilot). “Community,” usually in reference to the entire Jewish community of a particular city. kolel (pl. kolelim). In eighteenth-century Palestine, the official Jewish community of a city, for example the Sephardic community of Jerusalem. By the nineteenth century, groups of Jewish immigrants from Europe often organized themselves into independent kolelim, for example the kolel of the Jews from Germany and Holland or the kolel of the Hungarian Jews. kuruş. An Ottoman currency unit, also referred to as the Ottoman piaster (and as grush in Ladino sources), a silver coin introduced in the late seventeenth century: 1 kuruş = 40 paras or 120 akçes. The Ottoman kuruş remained relatively stable until the late eighteenth century but its silver content and value declined significantly thereafter. One pound sterling equaled about 8 Ottoman kuruş in the 1760s, 9–10 kuruş in the 1770s, 15 kuruş by 1898, and 25 kuruş by 1820. Source: Şevket Pamuk, “Evolution of the Ottoman Monetary System,” in Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume 2: 1600–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 947–80, at 968. ma‘amad. The governing council of a Jewish community; among the Sephardic Jews of Western Europe sometimes spelled “mahamad.” pakid (pl. pekidim). A community official. para. See kuruş. parnasim (sg. parnas). The lay leaders of a Jewish community. Pekidei Kushta. The “Istanbul Officials,” a group of lay notables in Istanbul overseeing the financial affairs of the Jewish communities in Palestine and the fundraising operations on their behalf beginning in the 1720s.

327

328

Glossary Pekidim ve-Amarkalim. A philanthropic organization to raise support for the Jews in Palestine, established in 1810 in Amsterdam and active mostly in Western Europe. pidyon shevuyim. “Ransoming of captives,” the religious duty to ransom Jews held as captives or as slaves. pinkas. Record or account book kept by Jewish communities, organizations, and officials. polisa. Bill of exchange. shadar (pl. shadarim). Abbreviation of sheluha de-rabanan, a rabbinic emissary dispatched by a Jewish community or a Jewish organization in Palestine on a fund-raising mission among Jews in the diaspora. shaliah (pl. sheluhim). Emissary. See shadar. shelihut. The mission of a shaliah (emissary). shtadlan. Representative of a Jewish community to the governing authorities. takanah (pl. takanot). A legally binding regulation promulgated by a competent communal authority, either the rabbinic leaders or the governing body of the community. talmid hakham (pl. talmidei hakhamim). Torah scholar. tsedakah. Charity. yishuv. The Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Modern Jewish historiography often distinguishes between the “old yishuv” (before the Zionist movement) and the “new yishuv” (established by Zionist immigrants).

Index

Abdülaziz, Sultan, 259 Abdülmecid, Sultan, 259 Abendana, Jacob, 126 Aboab, Immanuel, Nomología O Discursos Legales, 126 Abraham, Abraham Bekhor, 226 Abulafia, Haim, 31, 132, 192–93 Abulafia, Joseph David, 220 Acculturation, 126, 131, 139–40. See also Assimilation Agosi, Nisim, 62–63 Agriculture, 250, 253 Aghilar, Diego de, 39, 84, 100 Ajiman, Isaiah, 215 Alfandari, Jacob, 33 Alfandari, Shabbatai, 33 Algazi, Solomon, 54 Algazi, Yom Tov, 97, 141, 156 Algeria, 226 Algiers, 37, 202–3 Alhadef, Abraham, 48–49 ‘Aliyah (immigration), 248–58 Alkalai, Judah, 243–44, 248, 254–58 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (newspaper), 234 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 5, 11, 213, 236, 259, 260, 273 Almosnino, Bekhor, 110, 115 Altaras, Jacob Moshe Hay, 243–44, 256–58; Zikhron Yerushalayim, 256 Amarillo, Aharon, 92 Amarillo, Samuel, 92 Ambron, Abraham, 144 ‘Amram, Haim ben Solomon, 233, 320n62 ‘Amram, Nathan ‘Amram ben Haim, 227–34 Amsterdam: Azulai in, 133–35; as center of philanthropic network, 1, 37, 215–25,

228; elites in, 134–35; Hagiz in, 119–21, 123–24, 127, 132; as Jewish center, 132; philanthropic activities in, 95, 99, 132–33, 186, 216–17; religious tensions in, 130–31, 166; treatment of the poor in, 166 Amsterdam Officials. See Pekidim ve-Amarkalim Arabic language, 267 ‘Arabistan, missions to, 36 Archives Israélites (newspaper), 234 Arieh, Abraham, 193 Armenian Patriarchate, Jerusalem, 31–32 Asher, Abraham ben, 42, 52, 72, 99, 193 Ashkenazi, Abraham, 234 Ashkenazi, Abraham Solomon Zalman, 226 Ashkenazi, Asher, 195 Ashkenazi, David, 85–88, 293n52 Ashkenazi, Eliezer, 33 Ashkenazi, Haim, 114 Ashkenazi, Hakham Tsvi, 37 Ashkenazi, Jacob, 73, 157 Ashkenazi, Moshe, 33 Ashkenazim: divisions among, 212–13, 317n12; Dutch, 216; emigration to Jerusalem in 1700 by, 26–27; emissaries from, 83; ethnic solidarity of, 169–207; fund-raising among and for, 170–79, 181–82, 185–207, 217–19; Istanbul Officials and, 185–95; in Jerusalem, 171, 173–74, 176, 185, 196–97, 199–200, 204; as model for Maghrebis, 210; role of, in philanthropic network, 5–6; Sephardim vs., 169–207; Talmudic study among, 299n151 Asseo, Aharon, 60, 64 Asseo, Moshe, 33

329

330

Index Assimilation, 130, 142, 267 Atonement, 153–54, 156–59, 163–65 Attias, Jacob, 135 Avshalom, Haim, 67 ‘Ayash, Joseph David, 197–99, 226 Ayllon, Solomon, 98, 121, 131 Azulai, Abraham, 123, 157, 164, 195, 244 Azulai, Haim Joseph David, 53; books and manuscripts as interest of, 102–3, 109; Christian acquaintances of, 147–48; contributions collected by, 97; credentials of, 84–85, 290n155; defense of rabbinic tradition by, 133–37, 142–45; expenses of, 97; fund-raising justified by, 15, 192; Ma‘gal tov, 9; Maghrebi origins of, 208; missions of, x, 36, 102–8, 110–18, 169; on philanthropic contributions to the Land of Israel, 162–63; problems encountered by, 84–85, 94, 186; and rabbinic scholarship, 109, 111–13, 299n144; recruited as rabbi of Amsterdam, 132; and science, 104; son of, 195; travelogue of, 9, 84, 102–7, 109, 111–13, 116, 133–41, 297n106; in Tunis, 110–18; and Western Sephardim, 133–41 Azulai, Haviv, 236–37 Azulai, Isaiah, 99 Babylonian Talmud, 102, 160 Baer, Jitzchak, 130 Baghdadi Jews, 265–67 Bagiaio, Haim Rahamim, 94, 97 Baker, Mark, 234 Banking, 259 Barbir, Karl, 30–31 Barkat, Abraham, 97 Barkey, Karen, 69 Barnai, Jacob, 8, 24, 40, 143 Bartal, Israel, 166, 184 Barukh, Joseph, 33 Batavia, 267–68 Bayezid I, Sultan, 17 Bayit Hadash, 163 Bayonne, 136, 139–40 Beards, 131–32 Begayo, Rahamim. See Bagiaio, Haim Rahamim Beit Ya‘akov yeshiva, 120 Beit Yosef (code of law), 113 Beneficence. See Philanthropy Benei Yisra’el, 262, 325n6

Benevolent societies, 19, 21 Benisti, Mas‘ud, 106, 298n127 Benjamin, Israel Joseph, 261–62 Benoliel, Solomon, 80 Bensussan, Joshua, 295n71 Benveniste, Haim, 57 Benveniste, Meir, 41–42, 44–45, 86 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 213–14 Berab, Jacob, 16 Berakha, Nisim, 41–42, 74–75, 86 Beratlis (Jewish merchants of European origin), 92–93 Bereshit Rabbah, 153 Bergman, Eliezer, 253 Betteljuden (beggar Jews), 170 Bible, translations of, 124–25, 164 Bills of exchange, 67–69, 221, 224 Bitul torah (wasting time by not studying Torah), 104 Black Jews of Cochin, 268–70 Bombay, 261, 264–67 Bonan, Mas‘ud, 82, 97 Bonfil, Jacob, 82 Books and manuscripts, 102, 108–9. See also Printing, Hebrew Bordeaux, 95–96, 99–100, 135, 137–41, 211 Bosmut, Joseph, 111 Breitbart, Isaac ben Neta, 216 Breslau, 37 Bribes, 23, 24, 65, 107 Bula, Moshe, 52, 200 Burial taxes, 24, 25 Buskens, Vincent, 76 Cairo: philanthropic activities in, 1, 21, 27; rabbinic court in, 177 Calcutta, 264–67 Camondo, Abraham, 226–27, 231, 252, 258–60, 272 Camondo, Isaac, 258–59 Capitulations, 92, 295n64 Captives, ransoming of. See Redemption of captives Carigal, Haim Isaac, 145–46, 148–53 Carlebach, Elisheva, 2, 121, 143 Carmona, Isaac Çelebi Bekhor, 215 Caro, Joseph, 16, 113, 160 Cemeteries, taxes on, 24 Center, periphery’s relations with, 69, 80, 113–15, 152 Charity, 14

Index Christians: Bible translations of, 125; Hebraists, 126, 147; in Jerusalem, 13; Jews’ relations with, 135–36; millenarians, 147; Palestinian holy places of, 31; role of, in funds transfer, 66–67; taxes on, 17, 23–24. See also Conversos Circumcision, 270 Clothing, 107–8, 116–17, 131, 265 Cochin, 268–70 Cohen, Abner, 11 Cohen, Raphel, 148 Cohen, Yoel, 144, 145 Cohn, Albert, 272 Collection boxes (pushke), 224 Colon, Joseph, 15 Committee of Officials for the Land of Israel, 1. See also Pekidei Kushta (Istanbul Officials) Communication: pace of, 40–42, 50, 237– 38; problems with, 222–23, 229 Conque, Abraham, 80 Consistoire, 226 Contact zones, 2–3, 108–10 Conversos, 2, 125, 126, 129, 140 Coreo de Viena (newspaper), 235 Cordovero, Moses, 16, 123 Corfu, 91, 98–99, 294n62 Corona, Jacob Ashkenazi de, 92–93, 97 Council of the Four Lands, 37 Covo, Hezekiah Joseph, 115 Crau, Marquise de, 147–48 Credentials, emissaries’, 82–84. See also Letters of introduction Crémieux, Adolphe, 234, 256 Crimean War, 239–40, 259 Crypto-Sabbateanism, 109, 121, 123, 126, 131 Cultural exchange, 108–10. See also Acculturation Da Costa, Uriel, 126, 129 Dahl, Gunnar, 292n18 Damascus, 30–31, 40 Damascus Affair, 234, 256 Da Modena, Leone (Judah Arieh), 21 Dana, Isaac ibn, 134 Da Silva, Hezekiah, 26, 120, 132–33 De Boton, Moshe, 48, 50, 288n119 De Fonseca, Jacob Aboab, 98 De Medina, David, 82 De Medina, Samuel, 16, 56–57 Deutsch, Ignatz, 241

Diaspora and diasporic communities: emissaries’ relations with, 10; endowments from, 53–58; globalization of, 3, 7, 265; information about Land of Israel available to, 223, 229–30; interconnections of, 3, 14; Land of Israel’s relation to, 7–8, 14, 16, 57–58, 102, 124, 130, 138, 155–60, 163–64, 184, 203, 243–52; philanthropic contributions from, 15–16, 24, 26, 35, 43, 94, 158; philanthropic rationales concerning, 42, 166–68; self-concern of people in, 167, 200; simultaneous experience of, 2; trust between emissaries and, 11–12, 76. See also Periphery, center’s relations with Dinur, Ben-Zion, 26 Distribution keys, 193, 217, 220 Divan, Amram, 62 Divan, Judah ben Amram, 77, 114 Djizya (poll tax on non-Muslims), 23–24 Donors: intentions of, 55; motivations of, 54, 59, 79, 158, 166–67; recording names of, 77–80 Dowry societies (Dotar societies), 19, 180 Dress, 107–8, 116–17, 131, 265 Dury, John, 147 Eastern Europe, 224, 305n86 Eastern Question, 205 Ebencaliffa, Sa‘id (Ibn Khalifa), 106, 298n127 Education, reform of, 259–60, 272 Efendi, Sheyhülislam Ebu’s-Su‘ud, 59 Egypt, 226, 227 Elbaz, Judah, 115 Eleazar (rabbi), 156 Eliav, Mordechai, 241 Elyashar (rabbi), 237 Embezzlement, 12, 49, 66, 88, 235. See also Fraud Emden, Jacob, 37, 130, 148, 187–88 Emissaries, 71–118; activities of, 2; advocacy of, for the Land of Israel, 153–57; appointment of, 71; Ashkenazi, 83–84; backgrounds of, 71; community response to, 81–85; contributions collected by, 97; credentials of, 82–84; cultural exchange via, 108–10; deaths of, 106, 114; defense of rabbinic tradition by, 142–52; difficulties and dangers faced by, 104–8; documents carried by, 77–80,

331

332

Index 82–84, 186, 292n32; early examples of, 15–16; expenses and compensation of, 26, 38, 72–74, 96–97, 218–19, 232–33, 235–36, 253, 292n32; graves of, as pilgrimage sites, 114; illegitimate activities of, 11–12, 16, 86–88, 187–88, 235–37 (see also Embezzlement; Fraud); impact and effectiveness of, 96, 98–101, 112; incentives of, 72–74; inhospitality to, 169–70, 177–78, 186–87; interactions and rhetoric of, 90–95, 295n71; Istanbul Officials’ relations with, 11–12, 74–81, 85–88, 293n52; in Livorno, 38; manipulation of network by, 88–90; network of, 35–38; and pan-Judaism, 4–5; public opinion of, 234–42; sanctity ascribed to, 113–14; scholarship of, 111–13; scholarship on, 7–9, 13; Sephardic, 84; in service of diasporic Jews, 159; sponsors accompanying, 303n47; travels of, 102–8, 110–18; trust in, 11–12, 74–81, 234, 238; Western Sephardic encounters of, 133–41. See also Missions Endowments, 53–60; discretion in administration of, 56–57; duration of, 55–56; intentions in establishing, 55, 90–91; management of, 53–54, 59–60; motivations for establishing, 54, 59; Muslim, 17, 59; patronage relations created by, 54, 57–58; principles governing, 55–56; sources of, 53 English language, 148, 152 Enlightenment. See Jewish Enlightenment Erets Israel. See Land of Israel Ethnic solidarity, among Jewish groups, 174–207, 209–11 Europe: intervention of, in Ottoman affairs, 205–7; Jerusalem consulates of countries from, 314n94; Jews of, vs. non-European Jews, 174–75; missions to, 35–36; trust in people of, 65–67. See also Eastern Europe; Western Europe Exchange rates, 68 Eybeschütz, Jonathan, 109–10, 121, 188 Fabre (Christian friend of Azulai), 147, 306n96 Falk, Haim Samuel, 148 Farhi, Haim, 201 Farhi, Isaac, 242–54, 258; Tuv Yerushalayim, 243, 245, 248, 251, 323n123

Faruh, Muhammad ibn, 122 Feiner, Shmuel, 149, 304n79 Feivish, Shneur, 187–88 Feivush, Tsadok, 195 Fernandes, Samuel Alesandro, 139 Fez, 21, 30 Finzi, Abraham, 48 Food, 117–18. See also Kosher meat France, Portuguese Jews in, 140 Franco, Rahamim, 227 Francos (Jews of European origin living in the Levant), 72, 92, 259 Frankel, Jonathan, 234 Frankel, Moshe, 224 Frankel, Zecharias, 272–73 Frankfurt on the Main, 37, 185, 191, 198 Frankist movement, 305n86 Franks, Abigaill Levy, 130 Fraud, 49, 86–87, 236–37, 293n52. See also Embezzlement Freemasonry, 116 Freud, Sigmund, 4 Frumkin, Israel Dov, 234 Fua, Mandolino, 226–27 Fund-raising: account books for, 79–81; establishment of network for, 35–40; general letters for, 77–79; by Istanbul Officials, 27–29, 34–38; in Livorno, 39–40; newspapers as tool for, 239–41; prohibition of, 101; taxes are means of, 21, 28–29; and transfer of funds, 60–64, 66–68, 224–25. See also Missions; Philanthropy Fürth, 186–87, 194 Gabai, Ezekiel, 215 Gabella (indirect taxes), 26, 94–95 Gagin, Haim Abraham, 56, 226, 231 Gagin, Shalom Moshe Hay, 205–6 Galante, Moshe, 120 Galante, Yedidiah, 88 Galilee, 31, 192 Gaon, Vilna, 196, 213, 216 Gattegno, Benveniste, 92 Gedalia, Abraham, 97 Gedaliah, Rahamim, 115 Geldern, Simon von, 88–90 General letters, 77–79, 81, 292n20 Gerber, Noah, 263, 325n8 Germany: Dutch Jews join those of, 213, 317n12; emissaries’ problems in, 84, 170

Index Giat, Abraham ben, 46 Gizbar kelali (official for fund-raising oversight), 19, 22 Gordon, David, 262 Gottlober, Abraham Baer ha-Kohen, 234 Governo (community board), 81–82 Gradis, Abraham, 138–40 Gradis, Benjamin, 95, 135 Great Britain, 266–67 Greek Orthodox Christians, 31–33 Green, Abigail, 234, 240, 271 Grehan, James, 40 Gruen, Erich, 167–68 Habgesund, Wilhelm, 267 Hagai, Solomon ibn, 30 Hagiz, Jacob, 120 Hagiz, Moshe: on budget problems in Jerusalem, 22–23, 25–26; and Christian Hebraists, 147; defense of rabbinic tradition by, 120–21, 123, 125–28, 130–33, 143; Eleh Mas‘ei, 181–82; and ideological foundations of Land of Israel and philanthropic network, 119–28, 153–57, 245; on immigrants in Land of Israel, 27; life of, 120–21; Maghrebi origins of, 208; Mishnat Hakhamim, 126; on missions and philanthropic contributions to the Land of Israel, 35, 101–2, 127–28, 157–59, 162, 165–67, 197, 198; Parashat Eleh Mas‘ei, 121; Sefat Emet (Language of Truth), 22, 119–21, 123, 125–27, 131, 165, 179, 182, 197, 243; on unity of the Jewish people, 179–85, 212 Haifa, 210 Ha-Kohen, Abraham Baer, 227 Ha-Kohen, Barukh, 231 Ha-Kohen, David Yekutiel, 225 Ha-Kohen, Haim, 75 Ha-Kohen, Judah, 110 Ha-Kohen, Moshe Haim, 83, 171–73 Ha-Kohen, Rahamim, 50–51, 52–53, 288n119 Ha-Levanon (newspaper), 205 Ha-Levi, Abraham ben Mordecai, 172–74, 176–77, 192; Ginat Veradim, 172–73, 177, 181, 201, 210 Ha-Levi, Aharon Bekhor Elija, 67 Ha-Levi, Elijah, 46–47 Ha-Levi, Haim, 232 Ha-Levi, Jacob, 133 Ha-Levi, Judah, Kuzari, 126

Ha-Levi, Meir, 231 Ha-Levi, Mordecai, 112, 172 Ha-Levi, Raphael Bekhor Israel, 115 Ha-Magid (newspaper), 240 Hamid, Jacob ibn, 80 Handwriting, 9–10, 83–84 Hasid, Judah, 26–27 Hasidim, 185, 213, 216 Hasin, David, 114 Haskalah. See Jewish Enlightenment Hason, Abraham ben, 98 Hassan, Solomon, 81 Havatselet (newspaper), 234 Hayon, Nehemiah Hiyya, 121 Hazan, Jacob, 133 Hazan, Jacob Le-Beit, 97, 141 Hazan, Joseph, 200 Hazan, Solomon, 99 Hebraists, Christian, 126, 147 Hebrew language, 10, 51, 77, 81, 83, 123–24, 127, 213–14, 240, 243 Hebron: endowment involving, 56, 58–59; funds distributed to, 2, 193, 217; intercity rivalries involving, 192; Istanbul Officials and, 30–31 Hefez-Gentili, Asher, 131 Hefez-Gentili, Moshe, 131 Hefez-Gentili, Venturina, 131 Heine, Heinrich, 89 Hekdeshot. See Endowments Helbo, Joseph Ish, 16 Hevrat Erets Yisra’el, 21 Hevrat Mekitsei Nirdamim, 272 Hevrat Pidyon Shevuyim, 178 Hezkat ha-yishuv (right of settlement), 199, 202 Hillel, David De-Beit, 261, 325n6 Hirschell, Solomon, 218–19 Historicism, 150–52 Hodali, Elijah, 93 Holland, 213, 216, 317n12 Holy Land. See Land of Israel Horowitz, Elliott, 131 Horvot Yerushalayim, 122, 123 Housing, 196 Huli, Jacob, 164–65 Hürrem Sultan, 17, 59 Idel, Moshe, 155 Idels, Samuel (Maharsha), 112 Ideology: of Erets Israel, 13–14; underlying

333

334

Index philanthropic network, 121–23, 167–68, 221–22, 225, 242, 251–52 Igeret kolelet (emissaries’ letter of introduction), 77–79, 81, 292n20. See also Letters of introduction Immigration (‘aliyah), 248–58 India, 261–62, 264–70 Inheritance, 200 Intermarriage, 196, 270 ‘Iraqi, Shalom Al-, 61–62 Isaac of Acre, 154 Israel. See Land of Israel Israel, Abraham, 73, 97, 100 Israel, Elijah, 97 Israel, Menasseh ben, Conciliador, 126 Israel, Moshe, 42, 77–78, 98, 110 Israelit (newspaper), 240–42 Israel of Shklov, 196, 200–201, 216 Istanbul: as center of philanthropic network, 1, 12–13, 18, 36–37, 43–44; modern transformation of, 259; philanthropic activities in, 27–29, 78, 94; as port city, 36 Istanbul Officials. See Pekidei Kushta Italy, unity of Jewish people in, 199 Izmir: as center of philanthropic network, 36–37; philanthropic activities in, 27–28, 78; as port city, 36 Jacob, Shimon bar, 133 Janissary corps, 32, 215, 259 Jazzar, Ahmad Pasha al-, 31 Jerusalem: Ashkenazim in, 171, 173–74, 176, 185, 196–97, 199–200, 204; budget problems in, 22–27, 42–46, 49–52, 122, 171–72; consulates in, 314n94; Damascus in relation to, 40; funds distributed to, 2, 191, 193; hardships suffered in, 201, 227; immigration in early eighteenth century, 26–27; intercity rivalries involving, 192; Istanbul Officials’ relations with, 30–31, 42–53, 221; Jewish population in, 23, 26, 185, 192, 204; Maghrebi Jews in, 207–10; Ottoman beneficence granted to, 17; payments to officials in, 23–24, 65; philanthropic contributions to, 25–26; as symbolic home of Jews, 159, 162 Jerusalem school of historiography, 7–8 Jerusalem Temple: contributions and sacrifices related to, 198, 256; diasporic attachment to, 167–68; Jewish presence in

Holy Land after destruction of, 119, 122, 153, 162, 241; sanctity of, 124, 154, 244 Jewish Chronicle (newspaper), 234 Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), 104, 123, 142, 148–52, 216–17, 260, 272 Jewish identity: diversity within, 3–4, 277n5; early modern, 2–7; ethnicity and geography as factors in, 174–75, 199; and Pan-Judaism, 190–91; philanthropy and, 2–3, 6–7, 211–13; synchronic sense of, 2, 223; and unity of the Jewish people, 177, 179–85; Western Sephardim and, 141. See also Pan-Judaism Jewish law, adherence to, 105 Judah, Gershom ben, 223 Judeo-Arabic language, 265 Judeo-Spanish. See Ladino Kabbalah: Azulai and, 111, 147–48, 299n144; beard’s importance in, 132; and Land of Israel, 122–23, 147, 155, 157, 162–64, 246–48 Kalischer, Zvi Hirsch, 256 Kaplan, Yosef, 166 Karaites, 130, 290n155 Katz, Jacob, 3, 8, 130–31, 143 Katzenellenbogen, Petahyah, 185–86 Kidd, Alan, 167 Kimhi, David, 33 Kimhi, Israel, 91 Kimhi, Raphael, 97 Kirchheim, Raphael, 238–39 Kitsba (fixed payment), 28 Knights of Malta, 20 Kolel Ho"d, 213, 317n12 Kosher meat, 205–6 Kotover, Haim Aharon, 194 Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), 10, 29, 51, 81, 98, 148, 164, 238, 243, 256 Landau, Ezekiel, 148, 194 Land of Israel: atonement provided by suffering in, 153–54, 156–59, 163; benefits and dangers of living in, 156–57, 164–65, 244–45, 248–49; diasporic communities’ relation to, 7–8, 14, 16, 57–58, 102, 124, 130, 138, 155–60, 163–64, 184, 203, 243–52; Egyptian occupation of, 226; endowments benefiting, 53–60; famine in (1854), 240–41; ideological promotion and support of, 4–5, 7–8, 13–14, 119–23,

Index 128, 152–57, 167–68, 242–52, 271; immigration to, 248–58; intercity rivalries in, 192–93; Istanbul Officials’ relations with, 226; Jewish population in, 185, 204, 244; Kabbalah and, 122–23, 147, 155, 157, 162– 64, 246–48; meaning of, 14; Ottoman conquest of, 16; philanthropic contributions to, 15, 21–22, 157–65, 251–58; physicality of, 153–56, 244–45, 247; sanctity of, 14, 56, 114, 119, 122, 125, 147, 153–56, 162, 202, 228, 242–47, 253–54; settlement of, as commandment, 162–63; spiritualization of, 155, 245–47. See also Jerusalem Language: Arabic, 267; in emissary-community interactions, 90–95, 295n71; English, 148, 152; Hebrew, 10, 51, 77, 81, 83, 123– 24, 127, 213–14, 240, 243; Judeo-Arabic, 265; Ladino, 10, 29, 51, 81, 98, 148, 164, 238, 243, 256; in newspapers, 234; and pan-Judaism, 213–14; Portuguese, 10, 81, 123; pronunciations, 142; translations of the Bible, 124–25; used in philanthropic correspondence, 9–10, 81, 83–84; of Western Sephardic literature, 126 Laniado (rabbi), 62–64, 85 Laws and restrictions on Jews, 107 Lehmann, Marcus, 240 Lehren, Akiba, 240 Lehren, Zvi Hirsch, 8–9, 215–25, 227–32, 238–39, 242, 250, 252, 253, 317n10, 318n16 Leser, Eliezer, 89 Letters, privacy of, 223 Letters of introduction, 66, 71, 77–79, 81, 89–90, 290n155, 292n20. See also Credentials, emissaries’ Levantini (Eastern Sephardim), 108, 118, 178–79, 298n134 Levi, Yair, 83 Levinson, Leib, 270 Lip, Reuben Judah, 83 Listas (stipulated recipients of philanthropic contributions), 179–80, 310n29, 310n30 Livorno: as center of philanthropic network, 37–38; defense of rabbinic tradition in, 144–45; emigrants to Tunis from, 115–17; emissaries in, 81–85, 100–101; philanthropic activities in, 39, 42–43, 58–59, 95, 100–101, 193, 225–26; as port city, 36, 37; and redemption of captives, 20 London East India Company, 20

Lopes, Solomon, 137 Lopez, Aaron, 148 Lost tribes of ancient Israel, 262 Lumbroso, Isaac, 116, 117 Luria, Isaac, 16, 111, 123, 217 Luzzato, Moshe Haim, 121 Lvov, 37 Maghrebi Jews: ethnic identity and solidarity of, 209–11, 315n108; missions to, 35–36; as Sephardim, 175, 207–11, 315n108 Magiar, Samuel, 226 Maharsha. See Idels, Samuel Mahmud II, Sultan, 215 Maimaran, Meir, 30 Maimonides, 113, 137, 160, 161 Mainz, 241–42 Malka, Moshe, 235–36 Malki, Raphael Mordecai, 24–25, 120, 288n113, 310n29 Mann, Aharon Zelig, 227, 238 Mantua, 97–98 Marcus, Abraham, 280n12 Maria Theresa, Empress, 39 Maskilim. See Jewish Enlightenment Matalon, Raphael Jacob, 216 Me‘am Lo‘ez (Bible commentary), 164–65 Meir, Jacob, 226 Meir, Joshua, 192 Mendel, Menahem, 196 Mendelssohn, Moses, 151 Mercantilism, 101 Messianism, 26, 109, 123, 126, 143, 246–47, 256–57, 317n10 Metz, 185–86, 188 Meyuhas, Abraham, 52 Meyuhas, Abraham ben Samuel, 183–84 Meyuhas, Benjamin Moshe, 30 Michael, Moshe ben, 94 Michman, Jozeph, 216 Millenarians, Christian, 147 Minervi, Jacob, 224 Mishpat le-Elohei Ya’akov, 207–11 Missions: abolishment and persistence of, in Western Europe, 218–23, 225–32; arguments for and against, 74, 95, 100– 102, 128–29, 228–31, 242–52; for benefit of Maghrebi Jews, 208; conditions of, 71–72, 292n32; costs of, 74, 95–102, 218–19; duration of, 72; geographic areas of, 35–36; letters describing, 77–79;

335

336

Index and pan-Judaism, 3, 271–73; persistence of, into nineteenth century, 225–26, 242; principle behind, 4; and the public sphere, 232–42; resistance to abolishment of, 225–32; routes for, x, 36–37; scholarship on, 7–9, 13; SephardicAshkenazi agreements over, 203–5, 318n16. See also Emissaries; Fund-raising Mitrani, Moshe, 55, 57, 160 Mizrahi, Israel Meir ben Joseph, 77 Mizrahi, Nisim Haim Moshe, 68, 183 Moda‘i, Haim, 33, 82, 95–97, 99, 100 Modena, Leone, 109 Modern Hebrew, 213 Modernization, 221, 238, 272 Molho, Joseph, 236 Montefiore, Moses, 196, 208, 217, 234, 239–41, 250, 253, 256, 257 Moore, Noel Temple, 206 Moral hazard, 43 Morgenstern, Arieh, 8–9, 224, 317n10 Morpurgo, Samson, 120–21, 161, 162 Moses, 129 Muslim society and Muslims: construction and renovation of non-Muslim religious buildings, 45, 287n106; endowments in, 17, 59; Istanbul Officials and, 64–66; Jews’ roles and treatment in, 23–24, 42, 45, 52–53; and purchase of meat from Jews, 205–6; scholarship of, 112 Nachmanides, 162 Nahum, Menahem, 155 Napoleon, Louis, 216 Nathan, Abraham, 120 Nationalism, 5, 213, 257–58, 273 Navon, Bekhor, 73–74 Navon, Ephraim, 101, 145 Navon, Jonah Moshe, 80, 226 Navon, Jonah Sa‘adia, 80 Navon, Joseph, 206 Navon, Judah Bekhor Raphael, 226 Nes, Meir Ba‘al ha-, 261, 312n55 Netherlands. See Holland Networks, defined, 11 New Christians, 131, 140 Newport, 145, 148, 152–53 Newspapers, 234–42 Nieto, David, 148 Ninio, Jacob Shealtiel, 158–59 Nisim (rabbi), 73–74

Non-Jews: encounters with, 107–8; roles of, in philanthropic network, 64–67. See also Christians; Muslim society and Muslims North Africa, emissaries’ graves as pilgrimage sites in, 114 Officials for the Land of Israel. See Pekidei Kushta (Istanbul Officials) Oral Torah, 126, 129–30 Orient (newspaper), 239 Orthodoxy. See Rabbinic tradition Ottoman Empire: customs in, 300n171; elites in, 33; Jewish unity and divisions in, 182–83; modernization of, 215; Muslim holy places overseen by, 17; networks involving, 69; provinces of, 30–31; role of, in philanthropic network, 16 Pact of Umar, 287n106 Paghishetzi, Hovhanness Vartabed, 32 Palache, Haim, 243–53, 258; Artsot haHayim, 243, 245, 251 Palachi, Haim Abraham, 231 Palestine. See Land of Israel Panijel, Raphael Meir, 142 Pan-Judaism: Ashkenazim resistance to, 6; challenges to, 4, 176, 201; global interconnectedness and, 3, 7, 13, 148, 152, 213, 222, 263–65, 271; ideal of, 177, 204, 207, 212; Istanbul Officials and, 4–6, 185, 190, 273; Jewish identity and, 190–91; language and, 213–14; meaning of, 14; modern orthodoxy and, 143; nineteenth-century revival of, 213; philanthropic network as factor in, 2–5, 7, 241–42, 258; public sphere and, 234–42; as responsibility and obligation, 162, 167; synchronic sense of, 223, 263, 271; Western Sephardim and, 133, 141. See also Unity, of the Jewish people Parache, Ovadia, 61–64 Para payments, 28–29 Parsis, 261 Pasha, Ibrahim, 227 Pato, Shimon Gomes, 133 Paymasters, 32 Pekidei Kushta (Istanbul Officials), 1, 26–35; Amsterdam Officials’ relations with, 217–25; conditions of communication for, 40–42, 50; correspondence of, 9–10;

Index displacement of, 31; distinguishing features of, 18; and distribution of funds, 191, 193; distrust of, 58–59; duties of, 32, 33; elite status of, 32–33; emissaries’ relations with, 11–12, 74–81, 85–88, 293n52; establishment of, 27, 30; fund-raising by, 27–29, 34–38; institutional connections of, 6; Jerusalem’s relations with, 42–53, 221; Land of Israel’s relations with, 226; local representatives of, 35; and messianism, 317n10; on missions, 231–32; in nineteenth century, 252; and pan-Judaism, 4–6, 185, 190, 273; persistence of, into nineteenth century, 225–26; power and authority of, 10–12, 29, 33–34, 43– 48; rabbinic relations with, 46–48, 51–52, 287n113; resignation threats made by, 45–48; and Sephardic-Ashkenazi rivalry, 185–95; trust as issue for, 48–53, 58–61. See also Philanthropic network Pekidim ve-Amarkalim (Amsterdam Officials): defense of rabbinic tradition by, 260; distribution of funds by, 217, 220; Istanbul Officials’ relations with, 217–25; Lehren and, 215–25; in nineteenth century, 252; public mouthpiece of, 241; public scrutiny of, 238–39; transfer of funds by, 224–25; and Western European philanthropy, 217–23 Pereira, Jacob, 120, 133 Pereira de Leon, Gabriel, 82 Pereyra, Jacob, 54 Periphery, center’s relations with, 69, 80, 113–15, 152 Perushim, 196–98, 213, 216, 217 Phanariotes, 33 Philanthropic network, 15–69; Amsterdam Officials and, 215–25; centers of, 1, 12–13, 36–37, 43–44; communication in, 40–42; construction and maintenance of, 122; control over distribution of, 310n29; establishment of, 12–13, 16–17; ethnic relations within, 169–214; expansion of, 224; ideological foundations of, 121–23, 167–68, 221–22, 225, 242, 251–52; Istanbul as center of, 12–13, 18; Jewish identity formed with aid of, 2–3, 6–7, 211–13; manipulation of, 88–90; networks overlapping with, 37, 61–62, 64–69; nineteenth-century, 5, 215–60; non-Jews’ roles in, 64–67; organiza-

tional character of, 10–11; overview of, 1–2; and pan-Judaism, 2–5, 7, 241–42, 258; precursors of, 15–16, 18–22; trust within, 48–53, 76–81. See also Emissaries; Fund-raising; Mission; Pekidei Kushta (Istanbul Officials); Pekidim ve-Amarkalim (Amsterdam Officials) Philanthropy: control over distribution of, 173–207, 217–18; crises as trigger for, 19, 39, 239–40; early Jewish practices of, 15–16; endowments as form of, 17–18, 53–60; modern, 259–60; nature of, 14; Ottoman practices of, 17–18; rationales for, 166–67; relationships created by, 54, 57–58, 166–67; resistance to, 166; traditional Jewish practices of, 18–19; and transfer of funds, 60–64, 66–68, 224–25. See also Donors; Fund-raising; Missions Pidyon shevuyim. See Redemption of captives Pilgrims, taxes paid by, 24 Pinhas, Joseph, 60–61 Pinkasim (record books), 79–80 Pirates, 20, 104, 106 Poetry, written in honor of emissaries, 114 Poland, 285n72 Polisas. See Bills of exchange Pollacco, Israel, 83 Poll tax, 23–24, 46, 201 Ponentini (Western Sephardim), 118, 178– 79, 298n134 Poor relief: Amsterdam’s attitude toward, 166; costs of, 41; endowments for, 55, 160–61; ethnic solidarity as factor in, 180; historical examples of, 15; for the Land of Israel, 157–65; Muslim, 17; philanthropy distinguished from, 14; preferential, 20, 159–62, 176–77, 182–84, 199, 211, 212; taxes as source of, 280n12 Portuguese language, 10, 81, 123 Portuguese Sephardic communities, 19, 37, 119–20 Portuguese Sephardim: conflicts over rabbinic tradition among, 123, 131; ethnic solidarity of, 179–80; in France, 137–41; Hagiz’s criticism of, 125–27, 131–33, 165–67, 179; philanthropic contributions of, 133; in Tunis, 115–17. See also Western Sephardim Positive-historical school of Judaism, 238, 272

337

338

Index Posner, Netanel, 148 Prague, 37, 39 Prins, Abraham, 216 Printing, Hebrew, 36, 38, 72, 112. See also Books and manuscripts Pronunciations, 142 Public sphere, 232–42, 270–71 Qorah, Yehiya, 142 Rabbinic scholarship: Azulai and, 109, 111– 13; endowment of, 32, 38, 58; Maghrebi Jews and, 209–10; in Tunis, 111–13 Rabbinic tradition: criticisms and skepticism concerning, 128–30, 136–39, 149–50; defense of, 109, 120–21, 123, 125–28, 130–33, 142–52, 216–17, 221; on missions in nineteenth century, 243–51; modern orthodoxy emerging in defense of, 143–45, 150–52; rationalism vs., 129–30, 148–52 Rabbis: criticisms of, 128–30; financial oversight by, 47; Istanbul Officials’ relations with, 46–48, 51–52, 287n113 Rabina (rabbi), 156 Race, 268–70 Raphael, Jacob, 136 Rapoport, Jacob David Yekutiel ha-Kohen, 216 Rashi, 124–25, 137 Rationalism, rabbinic tradition vs., 129–30, 148–52 Redemption of captives, 19–20, 28, 79, 163, 178–79 Reform, 130, 143–44, 150–52, 216–17, 238 Renegados (conversos returning to Catholicism), 140 Repentance, return to Israel (teshuvah), 254–56 Resurrection, 164 Ricchi, Immanuel Hai, 106, 298n126 Right of settlement (hezkat ha-yishuv), 199, 202 Ritual slaughter, 135 Rokeah, Solomon, 35 Romanelli, Samuel, 118 Rothschild family, 256, 272 Rovigo, Abraham, 36, 133 Rozen, Minna, 8 Rubens, Solomon Barukh, 216 Rubi, Isaac ben, 216 Rubio, Mordecai, 73, 97, 100

Ruderman, David, 5, 143 Russia, 258 Saban, Yomtov, 132 Sabbateanism, 109, 121, 123, 126, 143, 264 Sabbath, keeping of, 105, 134–35 Sacks, Moshe, 223, 253 Safed: crises in, 95–96; endowment involving, 57; funds distributed to, 2, 193; halakhic oversight practiced by, 137–38; intercity rivalries involving, 192; Istanbul Officials and, 30–31; Jewish population in, 192; notable immigrants in, 16; solicitation of funds for, 97–98 Salem, Samuel, 41 Salem, Solomon, 132 Salonika: as center of philanthropic network, 36–37; endowment involving, 56–57; philanthropic activities in, 92, 182–84 Samanon, Joseph, 50–51, 288n119 Sand, Shlomo, 278n9 Sapir, Jacob, 9 Sapir, Jacob, Even Sapir, 261–72, 325n8 Saporta, Barukh, 145 Sassoon, Abdallah David, 295n71 Sassoon, David, 265 Savary, Jacques, 68–69 Schechter, Ronald, 139 Schroeter, Daniel, 175 Schwartz, Joseph, 223 Secularization, 123, 126, 134–35 Sefrou, 29–30 Segal, Matityahu, 98 Seihendler, Abraham, 267 Sephardim: Ashkenazi missions to, 201–2; Ashkenazim vs., 169–207; claims to authority in Jerusalem by, 198–200, 202–3, 205–6, 210; divisions among, 207–11, 213; Eastern vs. Western, 108, 118, 298n134; ethnic solidarity of, 169–207; Maghrebi Jews as, 175, 207–11, 315n108; philanthropic role of, 6. See also Portuguese Sephardim; Western Sephardim Sha’ananim, Mishkenot, 196 Sha‘arei Tsiyon, 91 Shadarim. See Emissaries Shalem, Salomon, 100 Shapira, Nathan, 132, 142, 147, 178, 244; Tuv ha-Arets, 122–23, 147

Index Shapira, Solomon Zalman, 219–20 Shefar‘am, 210 Shelihut. See Missions; Philanthropic network Shemuel, Meyuhas Bekhor, 52 Shim‘on, David ben, 209 Shtadlanim (intercessors with the government), 12, 18, 259 Shulhan ‘Arukh (code of law), 159–62 Sifrei (collection of midrashim), 160, 162 Simhon, Moshe Ben, 226 Sirkes, Yoel, 161, 162, 176 Slaughter, ritual, 135 Slouschz, Nahum, 113 Smith, Anthony, 212 Société des Tramways de Constantinople, 259 Sofer, Moshe, 143, 152 Sornaga, Haim Abraham, 97 Spanish language. See Ladino Spinoza, Baruch, 126 Stiles, Ezra, 145–46, 148 Sublime Porte, 24, 27, 259 Süleyman, Sultan, 17 Suzi, Moshe, 227 Suzin, Solomon Moshe, 215–25 Swetschinsky, Daniel, 131 Sztompka, Piotr, 292n17 Table manners, 117–18, 300n171 Takanah (tax), 21, 30 Talmud, 55, 111–13, 162–63, 244, 245, 250, 255, 299n151. See also Babylonian Talmud Talmud Torah synagogue, Jerusalem, 43, 45 Tanuji, Joshua ha-Kohen, 112, 113, 116, 117, 299n144 Tanuji, Moshe, 116 Taragan, Joseph, 77 Taurel, Joseph, 80 Tavares, Isaac Nunes, 139 Taxes: exemptions from, 92, 201, 206, 295n64; in Jerusalem, 23–26, 198; on non-Muslims, 23–24; philanthropic contributions for payment of, 198; on pilgrims, 24; rabbis’ responsibility for, 46–47; as source of Jewish philanthropy, 21, 28–29, 94–95; as source of Ottoman philanthropy, 17. See also Gabella (indirect taxes) Tax farming, 69 Tayeb (rabbi), 117

Teshuvah (repentance, return to Israel), 254–56 Tetuan, 39 Tevele, David, 148 Tiberias: funds distributed to, 2, 192–93; intercity rivalries involving, 192; Istanbul Officials and, 30–31; reestablishment of Jewish community in, 30, 31, 192 Tiempo (newspaper), 236–37 Tire, endowment involving, 57 Toledano, Barukh, 110 Toledano, Judah, 80 Torah: defense of, 136–37; emissaries’ study of, 71; Maghrebi study of, 209–10; philanthropic contributions for study of, 18, 25, 42, 43, 53–58, 158, 178; resistance to, 128, 202; study of, 104, 156, 229, 241, 246, 246–47, 249–50, 252; Tunisian study of, 112. See also Oral Torah Trading networks, 6–7, 66, 76, 265 Transfer of funds, 60–64, 66–68, 224–25 Translations, of the Bible, 124–25, 164 Travel: cost of, 41; dangers and difficulties of, 104–8; of emissaries, 102–8, 146; time spent in, 40 Tripoli, 230 Trivellato, Francesca, 66, 76 Trust: in administration of philanthropic contributions, 48–53; in business and commerce, 76, 292n18; defined, 292n17; in emissaries, 11–12, 74–81, 234, 238; in funds transfer operations, 60–64; in Istanbul Officials, 58–59; in Muslims, 65–66; public sphere as venue for, 238 Tsahalon, Yomtov, 178 Tsemah, Abraham, 237 Tsur, Jacob ibn, 110 Tsur, Yaron, 112 Tunis: attitudes toward emissaries in, 112–15; Azulai in, 110–18; communities of Jews in, 115–17; customs in, 117–18; rabbinic scholarship in, 111–13 Turjeman, Jacob, 207, 208 Turjeman, Moshe, 207 Turkey, missions to, 35 Uffenheim, Lazzaro (Lazarus), 10, 58–59 Umar, Zahir al-, 31, 192 Unity, of the Jewish people, 177, 179–85, 190, 194–95, 199, 257. See also Pan-Judaism

339

340

Index Uziel, Shelomo, 64 Vega, Raphael, 120 Velasco, Isaac de, 50, 52, 65, 288n119 Venice: as center of philanthropic network, 37; philanthropic activities in, 1, 19–22, 179; as port city, 36 Ventura, Haim, 193 Verdugo, Jacob, 114 Verdugo, Rafael, 156 Vernacular Jews, 124, 127, 159 Vienna, 37 Vilna, Yeruham, 188 Vivas, Judah, 254–58 Volterra, Aaron, 172 Volterra, Isaac, 21–22 Waqf (endowment), 17, 59 Wartalani, al-, 112 Wazan, Moshe, 117 Weinfeld, Moshe, 155 Wertheim, Samson, 27 Wertheimer, Wolf, 39 Wessely, Naphtali Herz, Divrei Shalom veEmet, 148 Western Europe, abolishment and persistence of missions in, 218–23, 225–32 Western Sephardim: beliefs and practices of, 133–41; criticisms of, 135–37, 165–67; Eastern vs., 108, 118, 298n134; economic advantages of, 165–66. See also Portuguese Sephardim

White Jews of Cochin, 268–70 Wolf, Johann Christoph, 147 Women: dining customs of, 117, 118; ritual immersion of, 137–38 Ya‘akov, Haim, 58, 107–8 Ya‘ari, Abraham, Sheluhei Erets Yisra’el, 7–9, 13, 16, 106, 113, 130, 264, 293n52 Yehuda, Yehezkel, 265 Yellin, Joshua, 206 Yemenite Jews, 264 Yeruham, Judah, 186–88, 192 Yeshivat Damesek Eli‘ezer, 33 Yeshivot: endowment of, 33, 38, 53–54; salaries in, 74 Yitshaki, Abraham, 133 Yohai, Shimon bar, 109 Zacuto, Moshe, 97 Zarifi, Georges, 259 Zeevi, Isaac, 97 Zerafa, Haim David Solomon, 202–3 Zeror, Abraham, 97 Zimra, David ibn, 55 Zionism, 213, 243, 250, 254–58, 273 Zionist historiography, 5, 7, 26–27, 113, 212 Zographos, Christaki, 259 Zohar, 109 Zohar, Zvi, 323n123 Zonana, David, 32, 33 Zvi, Abraham Israel, 82 Zvi, Shabbatai, 109