sign in sign up
<<
Home , The Hague

THE HAGUE, , , JERUSALEM: DAVID DE PINTO AND THE JESIBA MAGEN DAVID, 1750–1767

Gérard Nahon

On September 21, 1750 (20 Elul 5510) in The Hague, before the notary public Johannes Sythoff, David de Joseph de Pinto, by a Portuguese codicil to his last will, founded a yeshiva in Jerusalem that would bear the name Magen David.1 Seventeen years later, on 30 July 1767, Shem Tov b. Jacob Gabay and Ephraim b. Judah Navon, Jerusalem rabbis sojourning in Istanbul, completed the necessary arrangements and the yeshiva was opened. Thus Magen David joined the other yeshivot that operated in the Holy according to the model of the famous yeshiva, Beth Ya‘akov, founded in 1691 by Jacob Pereyra from Amster- dam. The present article is only a prelude to a larger work containing Hebrew and Portuguese documents that I promised several years ago to my colleague and friend Professor Meir Benayahu, who put at my disposal unpublished documents kept in his personal collection. These documents complement those I have found in the records of the Jewish Portuguese Nation in Amsterdam.2 This material provides us with the opportunity for following, over a long period, and across the geogra- phy of the western Portuguese diaspora and its links with the Ottoman Empire, the genesis of a yeshiva characteristic of eighteenth-century Jerusalem.3 The Jerusalem community, according to Jacob Barnai’s view,

1 GAA PA 334, no. 801 no. 12; the document is a copy drawn up by the notary in 1761. Concerning the will itself, I am indebted to my friend, Mr. Edgar Samuel, who sent me, as a precious gift, David de Pinto’s will, legalized in in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Prerogative Court on 14 May 1761, upon the request of his widow, Clara de Pinto. For bibliography on the Portuguese Jews in The Hague, see J. Mich- man, H. Beem, D. Michman, Pinkas Hakehillot. Encylopædia of Jewish Communities, The [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem 1985), pp. 390–91, pp. 258–59. 2 Cf. W. C. Pieterse, Inventaris de Archieven der Portugees-Israëlitische Gemeente te Amster- dam 1614–1870 (Amsterdam 1964). I thank deeply my friend Drs. W. C. Pieterse, former director of the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, who provided me with documents and microfi lms and helped me in all manners. 3 Much has been written on the Jerusalem yeshivot; see M. Benayahu, “Towards a History of the Study Houses in Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century” [in Hebrew], 252 gérard nahon was an emanation of the diaspora, on which it depended entirely.4 The diffi cult birth of Magen David provides us with a tool for understanding how commu nal power was wielded at the head of the community, and the links it fostered with the Mahamad, the governing Council of the Amsterdam Portuguese community on one hand, and the Va‘ad Pekidim for the Holy Land at Istanbul on the other. With Magen David we are wit nesses to a complex process, from personal devotion to an in ter-com- munal joint venture that involved The Hague, London, Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. Five distinguished rabbis of Jerusalem played an unplanned but decisive role in this process: Jacob Ashkenazi de Corona (c. 1698–1768), Ephraim b. Arieh-Judah Navon (d. 1784), Shem Tov b. Jacob Gabay, Raphael-Semah Bensimon (d. 1780), and Yom-Tov b. Israel-Jacob Algazi (1727–1802).5

The Yeshiva as Refl ected in the Codicil of David de Pinto

On September 21, 1750 in The Hague, where he lived, David de Joseph de Pinto, forty-six years old with an annual income (in 1743) of 28,000 guilders6 (people would say “Rich as Pinto”), met with the notary Johannes Sythoff and added a codicil to his previous will, thereby

HUCA 21 (1948), pp. 1–28. For a general picture of the eighteenth century, see my “Yeshivot hiérosolymites au XVIIIe siècle,” in Les juifs au regard de l’histoire. Mélanges en l’honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz, ed. G. Dahan (Paris 1985), pp. 301–26, reprinted in my book, Métropoles et périphéries sefarades d’Occident. Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jérusalem (Paris 1993), pp. 419–46; and idem, “Jérusalem au XVIIIe siècle: Rabbinat et Yeshiva,” in Permanences et mutations dans la société israélienne, Actes du Colloque international du Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes juives et hébraïques, ed. C. Iancu (Montpellier 1996), pp. 26–42. 4 See J. Barnai, “The Leadership of the Jewish Community of Jerusalem in the Mid-eighteenth Century” [in Hebrew], Shalem 1 (1974), pp. 271–316; idem, The Jews of Eretz-Israel in the Eighteenth Century under the Patronage of the Constantinople Committee Offi cials of Eretz-Israel [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem 1982); idem, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Offi cials for Palestine, trans. N. Goldblum (Tuscaloosa, Ala. 1992). 5 On these rabbis, see A.-L. Frumkin, History of the Rabbis of Jerusalem (1490–1870) [in Hebrew], vol. 3, ed. E. Rivlin ( Jerusalem 1929), pp. 70 (de Corona), 129 (Navon), 36 (Gabay), 123 (Bensimon), 108–11 (Algazi) and vol. 4, v. index. Of the last, there is a mention in the records of the Moslem Religious Court (February 5, 1795), see A. Cohen, E. Simon-Pikali, and O. Salama, Jews in the Moslem Religious Court: Society, Economy and Communal Organization in the XVIII Century. Documents from Ottoman Jerusalem [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem 1996), p. 32. 6 H. Bloom, The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Williamsport 1937), p. 212 n. 30; on the Jews in The Hague, cf. M. Henriquez