Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Israel

Almost every other page on this site follows one community outward from Iberia. This page is the only one that runs the other way. Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias are where all the strands of the Sephardi diaspora arrive — Castilians and Portuguese in the sixteenth century, Ottoman Sephardim from Salonica, Izmir and Constantinople, Maghrebi families from Fez and Tetouan, Amsterdam and London merchants coming to die, and finally, after 1948, the near-total transfer of the Sephardi and Mizrahi world into a single state.

Why is Israel different from every other page on this site?

Because it is a destination rather than a community of origin, and because for most of its history the population you are researching was supported from outside.

For most of the Ottoman period the Jewish communities of the four holy cities were not economically self-supporting. They lived substantially on halukka — organised charity remitted from the diaspora. That is a hard fact about their history, and it is a gift to the genealogist, because charity generates lists, and those lists are frequently the only surviving record naming individuals in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias before the nineteenth century.

The most important of them have never been published. They are described below.

Before starting, separate the strands. This page treats them in turn: the Western Sephardim and their money; the Eastern Sephardim of the Ottoman world; the Maghrebim and Megorashim; Sir Moses Montefiore, who sits between the old system and the new; and the mass immigration after 1948, which changes the research problem completely.

What were the four holy cities?

Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias — four small, poor, documented communities whose fortunes moved independently.

Jerusalem was always the largest and the goal, and always the hardest to live in. Sultans were generally welcoming; local governors much less so. Add economic underdevelopment and a punishing climate, and the result was a community that needed outside support to exist at all.

Hebron (Hevron / al-Khalil) was small, poor and disproportionately important. It was a centre of kabbalah and of Sabbatian sympathy, and it housed a yeshiva founded and endowed by an Amsterdam merchant (see below). The Jewish community there ended with the massacre of 1929.

Safed (Tzfat) is the extraordinary sixteenth-century story. Refugees from Iberia and their children turned a Galilean hill town into the intellectual centre of the Jewish world for roughly seventy years. It was later devastated by the plunder of 1834 and the Galilee earthquake of 1837, which killed thousands in Safed alone and effectively ended the town’s pre-modern community. If your Safed family disappears in the 1830s, those two events are the first thing to consider.

Tiberias was repeatedly refounded. The best-documented refoundation begins around 1740, when the Abulafia family of Izmir, encouraged by the local ruler Dhaher el-Omar, re-established a Jewish settlement there. That event is reported in the London and Amsterdam correspondence almost as it happens.

Why did Amsterdam and London send money to Jerusalem?

Out of religious obligation, and also to prove something about themselves.

The Amsterdam Portuguese community’s first documented gift to Eretz Israel is from 1616 — a donation of 92 guilders — and the giving continued, essentially unbroken, until the Second World War. Two obligations were established at the same moment and treated as duties of the whole community rather than of any one charity: Terra Santa (support for the Holy Land) and Cativos (the redemption of captives).

Ton Tielen, whose research this section draws on, makes an observation about motive that is worth repeating. These were people who had arrived in Amsterdam as former Catholics. Some knew Judaism well; many had to be taught it. The community felt the insecurity of its own position, and giving conspicuously to Jerusalem was one way of demonstrating to the Jewish world that it belonged to it.

Each of Amsterdam’s three original congregations appointed a gabbai for Terra Santa — Bezalel Coronel held the office for Beth Israel. When the three merged into Talmud Torah in 1639, the ascamot of the united community formally established the post: a treasurer who kept the records, received the money and was responsible for its despatch. London followed the same model. Its first ascamot required two separate boxes at the synagogue, one labelled for Terra Santa and one for Cativos.

A warning that has caught researchers out. Neither Amsterdam nor London created a separate Terra Santa charity with its own archive, precisely because the obligation belonged to the whole community and the Mahamad wanted tight control of it. People have gone to Amsterdam looking for the Terra Santa charity records and concluded there were none. The accounting is in the general community registers, and the letters and lists are copied into the minute books. That is where to look.

What are the listas, and why do they matter more than anything else?

They are annual schedules of named individuals in Eretz Israel and the exact sums they were to receive — and they are the single best source for early modern Jerusalem.

From 1639 Amsterdam operated a system that is, as far as we know, without parallel. Each year a lista was drawn up naming individuals and institutions in Eretz Israel, each with an allocated sum. It was earmarked money. The rabbis of Jerusalem had no discretion to redistribute it, apart from one lump sum reserved for the general poor.

The lists were drafted in Jerusalem by the rabbis there, sent to Amsterdam for approval, and returned with the money. No original list is known to survive. They exist because Amsterdam copied them into its minute books — roughly 140 lists covering 1639 to 1803, continuous to about 1712, a short gap, then continuing to 1791, with a final list in 1803.

Who is on them. Between about 50 names at the start and 150 by the end: the hakhamim of Jerusalem — as many as thirty in a single year; their widows; their orphaned children; and, until 1728, the ordinary poor. The names are Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic together — Pardo, Arobas, Rico, Benari, Maestro — and the majority are Sephardi. Separate smaller allocations went to Safed and Hebron, and money was earmarked for named yeshivot.

Why they beat every other source for this period. Because they are annual and consecutive, you can follow one person across decades. Ton Tielen’s description is exact: you watch a name appear low on the list, rise as the man’s standing rises, reach the ten or twelve patacas that marked a chief rabbi of Jerusalem — and then vanish, replaced by his widow, or his orphans. That transition dates his death. No other source will do this for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jerusalem.

Two honest limitations. The lists record the dependent population. The prosperous Jews of Jerusalem — perhaps half the community — are not on them. And after 1728 the ordinary poor drop off entirely: those already listed continued, but no new poor were added, and the lists narrow to rabbinical families and their descendants.

The genealogical use nobody makes of them. If you have a London or Amsterdam Sephardi who simply disappears from the records — no burial at Ouderkerk, no burial at the Velho or the Novo, no will proved — consider that he went to Jerusalem. There was a steady trickle of people, particularly late in life, who travelled to Eretz Israel to die and be buried there. Some of them are on these lists. This is exactly the kind of dead end the listas can resolve, and it is why we regard them as a priority.

Places of origin are only occasionally given, but where they are they include Hamburg, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Bayonne, London, Livorno, Corfu, the Balkans, North Africa — and, strikingly, Portugal and Spain direct, with Toledo, Madrid and Burgos named. People were still leaving Iberia in the seventeenth century and going straight to Jerusalem. Ton Tielen has matched one such man to an Inquisition processo. There is a doctorate in doing that systematically.

Status of this material. The lists are being transcribed by Ton Tielen and are not yet published; each year is in a different hand, and the language alternates between Spanish and Portuguese with the clerk. His lecture, “My Heart is in the East…”: Financial Support for Eretz Israel from the Farthest West, is available on our video pages and is the fullest account in existence.

How did the money actually travel?

In coin, by sea, under naval escort — and the route changed twice, which helps date documents.

Not by bill of exchange. The money went in coin, carried by named Dutch skippers who are identified in the listas themselves, in convoys of ten to twenty ships with a naval escort against Mediterranean corsairs, and then overland.

Until 1652 the money went direct. From 1652, and regularly between 1682 and 1712, it went by way of Livorno, where guilders were converted into patacas, the currency that was useful in the Ottoman east. From 1744 it went instead through Constantinople, because in 1728 the Officials of Constantinople (Pekidei Kushta) had been established as the clearing house through which all the world’s money for Eretz Israel was channelled.

As far as the surviving records show, the money always arrived. Once, when war prevented a sailing, Amsterdam sent double the following year.

Who were the shadarim?

Emissaries — sheluchei de-rabbanan — sent from the four cities to collect in person, and the second mechanism by which the diaspora supported the Land.

Sephardi emissaries went chiefly to Italy and Western Europe and, later, to the Americas. They brought first-hand news, which no letter could, and they were formidable fundraisers — one appeal in London raised £1,000, ten thousand guilders, in a single collection.

They were also resented. Amsterdam and London gave every year and objected to being asked again. Amsterdam wrote to Constantinople asking that no more emissaries be sent, citing “muy discretas razones” it declined to specify, and on occasion bought a period of exemption with a lump sum. In 1707 the emissary Moses Hagiz arrived in Amsterdam, was struck by the wealth of the Portuguese Jews, and argued they should give far more. Amsterdam considered that it gave enough — 800 to 1,500 guilders a year against a total community budget of 40,000 to 60,000, or about two per cent of its income.

There is a case on both sides. Earmarked money could not be diverted, and around 1760 it emerged that funds sent through Constantinople had gone into building a synagogue rather than to the poor. Against that, the Jerusalem rabbis had no discretion over their own relief.

What did London and the Caribbean contribute?

More than Amsterdam, from about 1708 — and part of it came from Barbados and Jamaica.

London’s first recorded gift is 1671, of three to five pounds, later ten. By 1708 it was giving £134, about 1,340 guilders, and had overtaken Amsterdam. The money went chiefly to Jerusalem, then Safed, then Hebron; Tiberias only later.

London’s first emissary from Hebron was Solomon Ayllon, who came with news of desperate poverty, raised the money — and was then engaged as Haham of London, which ended badly when his Sabbatian sympathies emerged. He left for Amsterdam in 1700 and was succeeded in London by David Nieto; his later feud with Moses Hagiz in Amsterdam is well documented.

Importantly for our other pages: London solicited money from Barbados and Jamaica and forwarded it, so part of that £1,000 collection was West Indian. Both islands later received emissaries of their own and set up their own Terra Santa funds. The last recorded solicitation through London was in 1733, for distress at Hebron. Similar funds existed at Livorno, Bordeaux and Curaçao, and probably in North America.

Abraham Israel Pereyra’s yeshiva at Hebron. One Amsterdam merchant deserves separate mention. Pereyra endowed a yeshiva at Hebron in his own name. Gershom Scholem identified it as a centre of mystical and Sabbatian activity; Pereyra was himself a believer, and in 1666 travelled to Italy intending to go on to Turkey to meet Shabbetai Zevi, turning back at Venice on news of the apostasy. The yeshiva is understood to have survived until the twentieth century.

What was the Dotar, and does it reach Eretz Israel?

A dowry society — and its correspondent network is the clearest proof that these scattered communities were one connected system.

The Santa Companhia de Dotar Órfãs e Donzelas Pobres, founded at Amsterdam in 1615, provided dowries by lottery to poor girls of the Nação. It is one of the finest genealogical sources in the Western Sephardi world, because an application had to establish the girl’s descent and standing, attested by correspondents — so the records name parents, places of birth and residence.

For this page the relevant point is the network. The Dotar maintained correspondents across the Sephardi world — Brazil, New York, Livorno, Venice, Hamburg, and Eretz Israel among them. The Amsterdam Dotar archive should be consulted alongside the listas by anyone working on Eretz Israel connections. (We hold Dotar material; the precise extent of Eretz Israel coverage in the applications is something we are still establishing.)

Who were the Eastern Sephardim in the Land?

The larger stream by far — Ottoman Sephardim who reached Palestine from across the empire, and who built sixteenth-century Safed.

Ottoman rule from 1516–17 opened Palestine to the Sephardi refugees who had settled across the empire after 1492. The result, within a generation, was Safed. Jacob Berab arrived in the 1520s and in 1538 attempted to revive the ancient semikha and with it a Sanhedrin — a serious bid to reconstitute Jewish legal authority in the Land. Joseph Caro, author of the Shulchan Aruch, settled at Safed in 1536 and died there in 1575. Shlomo Alkabetz, author of Lecha Dodi, and Moses Cordovero worked there. Isaac Luria, the Ari, arrived in 1570 and died in 1572, having in two years reshaped Jewish mysticism permanently.

This was an overwhelmingly Sephardi achievement, built by the children of the expulsion, and it is the single strongest answer to anyone who imagines the Sephardi story after 1492 as one of decline.

Thereafter the Ottoman Sephardi connection ran through Constantinople, Salonica and Izmir. The Constantinople pekidim from 1728 controlled the flow of diaspora money. The Abulafia family of Izmir refounded Tiberias around 1740. Shabbetai Zevi, born at Izmir in 1626, visited Jerusalem in the 1660s and declared himself messiah in 1665, converting to Islam in 1666 — an episode that convulsed every community on this website and left its deposit in Hebron and Safed.

Corfu, Rhodes, Bulgaria, Serbia and the Anatolian communities all sent settlers. Their records, where they exist, are Ottoman and Judeo-Spanish, not Western.

Who were the Maghrebim and Megorashim?

A third distinct stream — Iberian exiles who went first to Morocco, and whose descendants came on to Eretz Israel.

The Megorashim — the expelled — were the Iberian exiles who settled in Morocco and remained culturally separate from the indigenous Toshavim for centuries. Families from Fez, Tetouan, Meknes and elsewhere came on to Eretz Israel throughout the period. The best-known individual is Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, author of the Or ha-Chaim, who reached Jerusalem from Morocco in 1742 and founded a yeshiva there, dying the following year.

The community as an institution dates from the nineteenth century. The North African Jews of Jerusalem — the Ma’aravim — were counted within the Sephardi community and received a share of its halukka, and in 1860 Rabbi David Ben-Shimon led them in establishing a separate Maghrebi community with its own relief and institutions.

This split matters genealogically. From 1860, a Moroccan family in Jerusalem generates its own records, distinct from the Sephardi community’s. If you are searching only Sephardi community records after that date, you may be looking in the wrong series.

The Mughrabi Quarter beside the Western Wall took its name from this community. It was demolished in 1967.

Why does Sir Moses Montefiore matter so much?

Because he took five censuses — and because he belongs to both the old system and the new.

Montefiore was a Sephardi of the London congregation, formed entirely by its traditions, and he invented the methods that replaced them. He made seven journeys to the Holy Land between 1827 and 1875. On several of them he and Lady Montefiore conducted censuses of the Jewish population, and these are the most important nineteenth-century name source for the country. They cover 1839, 1849, 1855, 1866 and 1875, extend to Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Tiberias and beyond, and record households with names, ages, origins, occupations and often the family’s place of origin abroad. They are searchable through the Montefiore Endowment, and they are the point at which the community stops being a list of dependants and becomes a documented population.

He also changed what philanthropy was for. Rather than remitting relief, he invested — Mishkenot Sha’ananim in 1860, the first Jewish neighbourhood outside the walls of Jerusalem, the windmill beside it, land for agriculture, and support extended to Ashkenazim as well as Sephardim. And the arrival of newspapers meant the stories the emissaries had carried in person could now be printed, which is why the shadarim faded in the nineteenth century. Amsterdam’s own contribution, by contrast, was fixed at 600 guilders a year through the nineteenth century and was eroded by inflation into insignificance.

The historical argument worth making. Between them, the Western congregations kept a Jewish community alive in the four holy cities through three centuries in which it could not have supported itself. When the Ashkenazi immigration and then the Zionist movement arrived, they found a functioning community already there. That bridgehead is under-represented in the literature — histories of Ottoman Palestine tend to concentrate on its last decades — and it is a story to which this site’s own sources contribute directly.

Why does the research problem invert after 1948?

Because after 1948 Israel is not where the research happens. It is where the trail ends.

From 1948, and overwhelmingly between 1948 and 1970, the Sephardi and Mizrahi world moved to Israel: Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Turkey, Iran, Bulgaria, Greece and beyond. Over 70,000 Jews came from India alone in later decades. Egypt’s community, treated on our own Egypt page, went largely to Israel and France.

For a family in Israel after about 1950, the question is which country they came from, and the answer sends you to that country’s page and its records: the Egyptian rabbinate registers, the Moroccan ketubot, the Iraqi community records. Israeli sources will give you the arrival, the absorption camp and the modern family. They will rarely take you back beyond the emigration.

The corollary is important and often missed. Israeli archives hold enormous quantities of material about other countries — brought out by immigrants, collected by institutions, microfilmed by the CAHJP. For many communities whose home archives are closed, Jerusalem is the best place in the world to research them.

What records can you actually reach?

The diaspora sources (our own field)

The listas, 1639–1803, in the minute books of the Amsterdam Portuguese community — c.140 annual lists of named recipients in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Being transcribed; not yet published.
The Amsterdam copiadores — the community’s letter copybooks, from 1700, containing the covering letters that went with the money, and some replies from Jerusalem.
The London Mahamad minute books, in which letters were copied directly rather than into a separate copybook, and the general community accounts, where the Terra Santa expenditure is recorded.
The despachos — the Amsterdam departure records, in which emigrants to Eretz Israel appear, including a small early wave before 1639.
The Dotar archive, Amsterdam, with its worldwide correspondent network.
Parallel Terra Santa funds at Livorno, Bordeaux, Curaçao, Jamaica and Barbados.

Ottoman and local sources

Nüfus registers — Ottoman population registers for Palestine, 1883–1917, recording households by name.
Sharia court records (sijill) of Jerusalem — the Ottoman Islamic court dealt with Jewish litigants, property, inheritance and taxation constantly, and its registers survive in quantity. Amnon Cohen’s editions are the way in. This is a first-rate and under-used source.
Ottoman tax registers, with the caveat that they frequently give first names only.
Montefiore censuses, 1839–1875 — Montefiore Endowment.
Consular archives, especially the British consulate in Jerusalem from 1838, which extended protection to Jews and generated registers and correspondence; also French, Austrian, Prussian, Russian, Spanish and American consulates.
Christian missionary archives — the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews and others, which observed the Jewish communities in obsessive detail and are held in Britain.
Travellers’ accounts and guidebooks, which are more useful than they sound for naming individuals.

One administrative fact worth knowing, because it determines where records were generated: from 1872 Jerusalem was an independent Mutasarrifate reporting directly to Constantinople rather than through a provincial capital.

Cemeteries

The Mount of Olives, Jerusalem — the principal Sephardi burial ground, in continuous use for millennia. Severely damaged between 1948 and 1967, when many headstones were removed and used as building material; partially restored, and now indexed in a searchable database.
Safed’s old cemetery, with the graves of the Ari, Caro and Alkabetz, and the mass burials of the 1837 earthquake.
Tiberias, and the ancient Hebron cemetery.

Institutions in Israel

Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA) — databases including Ottoman and Mandate material, and the natural first stop.
Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Jerusalem — community archives from across the Sephardi and Mizrahi world, much of it on microfilm and unavailable anywhere else.
National Library of Israel — manuscripts, ketubot, the Historical Jewish Press, and Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic collections.
Israel State Archives and the Central Zionist Archives.
Montefiore Endowment, London — the censuses.
Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem — for the communities of the East.

Sephardic World lectures

Ton Tielen, “My Heart is in the East…”: Financial Support for Eretz Israel from the Farthest West — the fullest account in existence of the Amsterdam and London Terra Santa system and the listas, and the source for much of this page.

Our video pages carry further lectures on Amsterdam, London, Morocco and the Ottoman communities, all of which connect to this one.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The listas are the single largest unpublished body of names for early modern Jerusalem, and their transcription is the most valuable piece of work in progress that this site is connected to.
Nobody has matched the listas against the London and Amsterdam congregational records. People who vanish from Bevis Marks and Ouderkerk should be looked for in Jerusalem. This is tractable, and it has never been done.
The direct Iberia–Jerusalem migrants — people leaving Portugal and Spain in the seventeenth century and going straight to Eretz Israel — are barely studied. One has been matched to an Inquisition processo. There is a thesis in the rest.
The standard literature under-weights the West. Matthias Lehmann’s Emissaries from the Holy Land and Jacob Barnai’s work on the eighteenth century and the Constantinople officials are the essential books, and both, in Ton Tielen’s assessment, miss the scale of the Amsterdam and London contribution.
The Ottoman sharia court records are a superb and largely untouched source for named Jews in Jerusalem. They require Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
The whole period c.1550–1850 is thinly covered. Histories of Ottoman Palestine concentrate on its final decades; a thousand-page history of Jerusalem may give this period twenty pages.

Organisations and repositories

Israel Genealogy Research Association (IGRA); Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; National Library of Israel; Israel State Archives; Central Zionist Archives; Ben-Zvi Institute.

Amsterdam City Archives — the Portuguese Jewish community archive: the minute books containing the listas, the copiadores, the despachos and the Dotar records.

Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, London — Mahamad minute books and community accounts.

Montefiore Endowment, London — the censuses of 1839–1875.

Mount of Olives cemetery database, Jerusalem.

Help us find records

The Eretz Israel material is where our own collection can grow fastest. We are looking for:

Listas, or copies of them, from congregations other than Amsterdam — Livorno, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Curaçao, Jamaica and Barbados all operated Terra Santa funds, and their records may survive
Letters from Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed or Tiberias in any Western Sephardi archive — very few survive, and each one matters
Records of shadarim and of the collections they raised, anywhere in the diaspora
Identifications of individuals who left London, Amsterdam, Livorno or Iberia for Eretz Israel
Transcriptions or photographs from the Mount of Olives, Safed, Tiberias or Hebron

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Israeli Sephardi research divides sharply at about 1850. Before it, the sources are diaspora sources — the Amsterdam and London charity records, the Ottoman court registers, the Montefiore censuses — and the work is in Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Ottoman Turkish. After it, and especially after 1948, the real question is almost always which country a family came from, and the research belongs there. We are glad to say which of the two you are facing before you commit to anything. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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