Kerem Chemer כרם חמר
A compendium of Moroccan Jewry: responsa on questions of law, and in the second part the takkanot and community agreements of Fez, written down and gathered together. Through it one sees how a community lived from within, rather than how it was described from outside.
Rabbi Avraham Ankawa, rabbi of Salé and later of Livorno, gathered in this book what would otherwise have scattered into private notebooks.
The first part is his own responsa on questions of law. The second holds the takkanot and agreements of the communities of Fez, beginning with the enactments of the exiles from Spain: on marriage and dowry, on taxation, on how the community ransoms captives and keeps its poor.
Why it is valuable. A community's enactments are not theory but its constitution: through them one sees how much money it had, whom it protected and what it argued about. For the history of Moroccan Jewry the Kerem Chemer is one of the chief sources of that kind.
Printed in Livorno; the volume with the Fez enactments in 1869.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Kerem Chemer, Livorno — the make-up of the book: responsa and the Fez enactments
Scholarship
- Reference works on the Jewry of the Maghreb — the value of the book as a source
Basis: documents and evidence.