Rav Refael Baruch Toledano הרב רפאל ברוך טולידאנו
Chief rabbi of Meknes; he brought the Moroccan community to the Land of Israel together with its law
He came of the Toledano family—one of those that brought the Spanish heritage to Morocco after the expulsion. He took the rabbinate of Meknes young and held it for forty years: the court, the schools, the care of the poor, the quarrel with the authorities.
His chief work is the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch HaMekutzar: a short code of law after the Moroccan custom, written so that an ordinary man could read it. When Moroccan Jewry moved and was dissolving into a new country, that code was what held the custom in place.
In 5724 he went up to the Land of Israel and settled in Jerusalem, where he died in 5731. The exact Hebrew date of his birth is not recorded; the year from Creation is derived from the common-era year.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Kitzur Shulchan Aruch HaMekutzar — his own code of law after the Moroccan custom
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, Meknes and the ascent to Jerusalem
Basis: documents and evidence.