Or ha-Chaim—Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar אוֹר הַחַיִּים — רַבִּי חַיִּים אִבְּן עַטָּר

Born in 1696 in Salé, on the Moroccan coast. Named for his grandfather, Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar the elder, and raised and taught by him. Around 1705, when he was nine, the family fled persecution to Meknes.

In 1724 his first father-in-law died and his position collapsed. His first wife, Fatzunyah, was a kinswoman; there were no children. His second, Esther Bibas, bore five daughters. He kept a yeshiva at Salé; in 1733, during the famine, he moved to Fes.

In 1739 he left Morocco for the Land of Israel—and was detained at Livorno by the Jewish community itself, which endowed a yeshiva for him and held him some two years. On 15 Av 5501 (1741) he finished the manuscript of Or ha-Chaim and sent it to Venice. In 1741–42 he sailed east with two wives and thirty students and landed at Acre. In 1742 Or ha-Chaim was printed at Venice—in his lifetime—and in the same year Peri Toʾar appeared at Amsterdam. By mid-1742 he had reached Jerusalem and founded the yeshiva Knesset Yisrael; among his students was Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai, the Chida. He died on 15 Tammuz 5503, 7 July 1743, in Jerusalem, on a Sabbath, aged forty-seven, and is buried on the Mount of Olives.

The order of his books is usually garbled and is worth learning: Ḥefetz ha-Shem (Amsterdam, 1732) precedes Or ha-Chaim by a decade; Or ha-Chaim and Peri Toʾar both appeared in 1742, but in different cities—Venice and Amsterdam; Rishon le-Tziyyon is posthumous, Constantinople, 1750. The frequent claim that Or ha-Chaim was his first published work is wrong.

Two corrections about the man. He was born at Salé, not Meknes—the family moved to Meknes when he was about nine; both cities claim him, and Moroccan popular literature usually reverses the order. And he was not "chief rabbi of Morocco" or of Salé: no such office existed; he ran yeshivot—at Salé, then at Livorno and Jerusalem—and his authority was personal.

There remains the best-known tradition, and it must be named as tradition. That the Baal Shem Tov set out to meet him, and on the news of his death cried "the light of the West has gone out," and that had they met the redemption would have come—there is no documentation of any contact between them. Every known attestation is Hasidic, of the nineteenth century, generations after both men. It is a beautiful and historically important story—important as evidence of how Hasidism annexed the Or ha-Chaim—and it should be presented as exactly that.