DRBR 1: Azulai raises funds

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Drawer 4, item DR4-R57.

This is a form letter, signed by Hayyim Yosef David Azulai.

Azulai is also known as the Hida, the acronym of his name. He’s a famous rabbi and scholar. But he also spent a lot of time fundraising, asking people for money for specific good causes, and tis here is a pre-printed form letter which he used to that end. You can see the place at the top where he’s written in the name of the person he’s hitting up, in fancy calligraphy.

Wikipedia:

His mission: Raise money for the support and survival of the beleaguered Jewish community of Hebron. At that time, the Jewish community of Hebron, as well as other communities in Israel, suffered the brutal and constant privations of Arab and Turkish landlords and warlords who demanded exorbitant sums of money in the form of arbitrary and draconian taxes…Without the missions of people like the Hida, the very physical survival of these communities came into question.

…The right candidate for the mission, ideally, combined the characteristics of statesmanship, physical strength and endurance, Torah knowledge and understanding and the ability to speak multiple languages. They had to have the right stature and bearing to impress the Jewish communities they visited, they often had to be able to arbitrate matters of Jewish law for the locals and, ideally, they were multi-lingual so that they could communicate with both Jew and Gentile along the way.

If you plug through some of the text, you see אין חדש תחת השמש, there is nothing new under the sun; flowery language for teasing open wallets, pleas for money for starving children and naked women in the streets, calling down blessings upon those who donate. (If anyone wants to type some of it up and translate for the benefit of all, feel free.)

He’s also raising money for redeeming captives. There was something of an industry in capturing Jews and hitting their communities up for ransom. I suppose אין חדש תחת השמש again, but these days it’s more for prisoner exchange than money. Ketubot of the period sometimes had stipulations that if the bride was captured, the husband’s estate was required to redeem her.

There are loads of these form letters in the Rare Book Room. The Hida was a busy guy.

I like this particularly because I know the Hida mostly as an halakhist. That is, from my perspective, the Hida’s existence has been boiled down to a few rules and regulations. But really, he was an enormously busy chap, doing all kinds of things that I’m familiar with rabbis today doing. I find this broadened perspective oddly reassuring.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.