Rabbi Moshe Alashkar רבי משה אלאשקר

He was born in 1466 in Spain, into a family that gave rabbis; he studied at Zamora under Rabbi Shmuel Valenci. At the expulsion of 1492 he was about twenty-six: the ship on which he left Spain sank, and he himself fell into the hands of pirates and managed to escape.

He reached Tunis together with Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, and there he was received with honour; he lived at Tunis some eighteen years, until the Spanish advance in North Africa set the community moving again. By way of Greece, where he led a yeshiva, he came to Egypt and became rabbi of Cairo. From there his answers went out—a hundred and twenty-one of them—and in them the hardest time of Jewish history can be seen: what to do about forced converts, about promises given under threat, about property left behind in flight.

At the end of his life he settled in Jerusalem. When Rabbi Yaakov Berab set out to renew semichah and the Ralbach objected, Alashkar at first inclined to Berab but then parted from them both. He also wrote against the Sefer HaEmunot of Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov, defending the Rambam's Guide for the Perplexed. The responsa and these notes were printed together at Sabbioneta in 1553. He died at Jerusalem in 1542.