Rabbi Ya’aqob Kholi (1689-1732) and the book that changed the Sephardic communities

Rabbi Ya’aqob Kholi (many people pronounce his name incorrectly: Culi, Koli, etc.) was born in Yerushalayim in 1689. His father, Ribbi Makhir Kholi, came from a family that had lived for generations on Crete, today the largest Greek island. Crete belonged for a long time to the Republic of Venice, until the Turks conquered it in 1645. In 1650, Ribbi Makhir emigrated to the land of Israel and settled in Yerushalayim. He married the daughter of the famous Rabbi Moshe ibn Habib, the Rishon leTsion, that is, the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardim in Erets Israel. Rabbi Moshe ibn Habib was a descendant of the famous Rabbi Ya’aqob ibn Habib, author of Ein Ya’aqob (see this).

Young Ya’aqob studied with his grandfather, who had an enormous influence on him. His grandfather wrote important works of Halakha, such as Get Pashut and Ezrat Nashim, but much of his work was still in manuscript.

CONSTANTINOPLE

In those years, the situation of the Jews in the land of Israel was disastrous, politically and financially. In 1714, at about 24, Ya’aqob Kholi traveled to Constantinople to publish his grandfather’s manuscripts. He planned to come back. He stayed.

He found a large community with great scholars, but with ordinary people who had lost touch with Torah study. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire had not yet recovered from the blow dealt to them by Shabbetai Tsebi, the false messiah, who a few decades earlier had swept up entire communities and ended up converting to Islam.

In Constantinople he met Rabbi Yehuda Rosanes, the Chief Rabbi of the city and the greatest rabbinic authority in the East in his time. Rabbi Kholi became one of his main students, and soon Rabbi Rosanes appointed him Dayan (rabbinical judge) of the Constantinople court.

In 1727 he published Shamot baArets, his grandfather’s commentaries on various passages of the Talmud. That same year Rabbi Rosanes died. After his death, his house was looted, and the manuscripts that were not destroyed were left scattered all over the house. Rabbi Kholi gathered them, put them in order and took on the task of publishing them, knowing it would take years and that he would have to postpone publishing his own books. In 1728 he published Parashat Derakhim, and in 1731 Rabbi Rosanes’ most famous work, Mishne laMelekh, a commentary on Maimonides’ Mishne Torah, enriched with many notes of his own. Mishne laMelekh is studied to this day in every yeshiva in the world.

THE ME’AM LO’EZ

Once his teachers’ work was done, everyone expected him to publish his own ideas on Talmud and Halakha. Instead, he turned to something different: a book for ordinary people.

The Me’am Lo’ez is a monumental anthology of Midrashim and Halakhot, organized by the weekly Parasha. Alongside the Talmudic material, Rabbi Kholi included autobiographical notes and anecdotes that take the reader into the old Sephardic communities of the Balkans. Reading it, you also sense that the Jews of his time lived under constant abuse and persecution, and the Me’am Lo’ez comforted them. Rabbi Kholi taught, for example, that Shabbat should be seen as an “island of peace”: twenty-four hours to disconnect from sadness and adversity and enjoy peace and family. To his readers, most of them living in very hard conditions, he recommended practicing Chesed with those who were worse off. He insisted that the best antidote to personal hardship is not self-pity, but opening one’s heart: helping the poor, widows and orphans, and visiting the sick.

What makes this book special is that it was not written for scholars but for ordinary Jews. Even, or especially, for Jews who did not understand Hebrew. In the introduction, Rabbi Kholi makes a promise: whoever reads the Me’am Lo’ez every day will be able to say in Heaven that he studied the whole Torah.

The book’s name comes from Psalm 114:1:

בְּצֵ֣את יִ֭שְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָ֑יִם בֵּ֥ית יַ֝עֲקֹ֗ב מֵעַ֥ם לֹעֵֽז

“When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Ya’aqob from a people of foreign tongue.” Me’am lo’ez, “from a people of foreign tongue,” alludes to the language the book was written in. And “Bet Ya’aqob” alludes, in passing, to the name of its author.

THE BOOK THAT MADE LADINO FAMOUS

The Me’am Lo’ez was written in Ladino, that is, old Spanish with some Hebrew words, written in Hebrew letters. Here is the first line of the introduction, so the reader can taste the flavor of this beautiful language:

דיקלארו דיל ארבע ועשרים אין לאדינו דאנדו אה אינטינדיר איל ריז’ו די לה וידה קי דיב’י ריז’ירסי לה פירסונה סיגון קומאנדו לה ליי סאנטה

“Declaro del arba ve’esrim en ladino, dando a entender el reg’o de la vida que debe reg’irse la persona según comando la ley santa.”

That is: an exposition of the twenty-four [books of the Tanakh] in Ladino, to explain the rule of life by which a person must be guided, as the Holy Law commands.

In the eighteenth century, Ladino was the everyday language of the Jews of Turkey, Greece and many communities in the East. The Me’am Lo’ez was an educational revolution. Any man or woman who could read Hebrew letters could now study Torah, something unthinkable until then.

THOSE WHO CONTINUED HIS WORK

Rabbi Kholi published the first volume in 1730, in Constantinople. But his work remained unfinished. He died on the 19th of Ab, 5492 (1732), at only 43. He managed to complete only the book of Bereshit and two thirds of Shemot. He also left a work of Halakha, Simanim leOraita, which was never printed.

But his book was so popular and so needed that his students would not let his death be the end of it. Just as Rabbi Kholi had devoted himself to publishing his teachers’ books, his students and followers, using his notes, went on to write “the twenty-four books” the Me’am Lo’ez set out to cover, in the same style as the original:

1. Rabbi Yitschaq Magriso completed Shemot and wrote the commentaries on Vayiqra and Bamidbar.

2. Debarim was written by Rabbi Yitschaq Bekhor Agruiti.

3. The book of Yehoshua, by Rabbi Rachamim Menachem Mitrani.

4. The book of Esther, by Rabbi Refael Chiya Pontremoli.

5. In the twentieth century, Rabbi Shemuel Yerushalmi translated the Me’am Lo’ez into Hebrew and wrote the missing books of Nebiim and Ketubim.

6. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, who passed away in New York in 1983, translated it into English as The Torah Anthology, and so the Me’am Lo’ez also reached the Ashkenazi world.

MY FAMILY AND THE ME’AM LO’EZ

The Me’am Lo’ez has a special place in my heart. First, because on my mother’s side we are descendants of Rabbi Kholi. “Kholi” was also the surname of my maternal grandmother, Sofia Aurora Kholi, from Damascus, Syria, z”l.

Second, my wife’s grandfather, Ribbi Shemuel Chocron z”l, of Melilla, acquired his great Torah knowledge “exclusively” from the Me’am Lo’ez. Ribbi Shemuel lived in the time of Franco’s revolution, and in 1937, still very young, he was forced to retire from his work. His parents owned the complete set of the Smyrna edition of the Me’am Lo’ez in Ladino, more than ten very large volumes, and Ribbi Shemuel devoted the rest of his life to studying it every day, eight hours or more. He came to know it by heart. I had the merit of knowing him, and of watching my wife Coty, or one of her seven sisters, read the Me’am Lo’ez to him when, because of his age, he could no longer read on his own. I saw with my own eyes how he corrected a mistake or finished the next sentence from memory. Ribbi Shemuel, and I suppose there were many, many like him, became a “direct” student of Ribbi Ya’aqob Kholi. My love and admiration for the Me’am Lo’ez grew enormously when I saw the impact this book had on my wife’s grandfather. Beyond the Torah knowledge he acquired, the teachings of the Me’am Lo’ez shaped his character and made Ribbi Shemuel a model of decency, integrity, nobility, boundless kindness, love of Torah and fear of God.