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." 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 fundraising 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). 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—elsewhere documented in the Cairo Genizah for the tenth and eleventh centuries and from the fifteenth century in North African responsa—from Ashkenaz. 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. 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 Ottomans 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. 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. 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.

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 vakif, 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. 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.

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. 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.

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 Jerusalem 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. 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 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: 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; 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);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.)

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 sub-ethnic 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. At one point, the Jerusalem community turned to Hevrat Erets Yisra'el in Istanbul and requested the appointment of two individuals as kapi kahya ("lobbyist") to represent the interests of the Jews of the holy city to the imperial government. Elsewhere, the community of Fez, in Morocco, adopted a community regulation in 1603 that stipulated regular collections to support the holy city of Jerusalem. 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. 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."

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 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.