Letters from Jerusalem: what was there before the expulsion

Little is known of the Land of Israel in the fifteenth century, and almost all that is known comes from outside. Here it is otherwise: a man came, stayed, and wrote home.

Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro, a banker from northern Italy, set out at the end of 1486. He was sixteen months on the road: Rome, Naples, Palermo, Sicily, and from there by sea via Alexandria. Along the way he described the communities he saw—and that alone is of value: within a few years the expulsion would empty Sicily, and no other such witness to it exists.

He reached Jerusalem just before Passover 1488. The community there was ruined: about seventy families, and those destitute; the authorities' exactions had squeezed out the rest; houses stood empty. He set about raising it up and did so: he taught, preached in Hebrew, understood alike by all parts of the community, administered the money from Italy, and buried the dead with his own hands. He became deputy to the nagid, about 1491 rabbi of Hebron, and by 1495 had returned to Jerusalem.

Three letters survive: to his father, to his brother, and apparently to a friend.

Four years after his arrival Spain expelled its Jews, and the whole Mediterranean changed: the exiles came to the Land of Israel, and thirty years later Safed rose. Obadiah's letters are a photograph of what was there before that. And the same man finished here the commentary on the Mishnah now printed in every edition of it: while he was raising a ruined community, he was explaining the Mishnah to whoever opened it for the first time.