Rabbi Isaac Ben Walid רבי יצחק בן ואליד
forty years rabbi of Tetouan, the legal authority of all northern Morocco
Tetouan is a city of the Spanish exiles: here came those driven out of Spain, and here they spoke Haketia, the Spanish dialect of Moroccan Jewry. Rabbi Isaac Ben Walid led this city for some forty years.
His answers are gathered in Va-Yomer Yitzchak, in two volumes; they were printed at Livorno, whither the Moroccan communities sent their books throughout that age. They are worth reading not for the halakhah alone: in the questions one sees what the city lived by—trade across the strait, dowries, inheritance, quarrels with neighbours, the standing of the community under the sultan.
In his time the first Alliance school in the world opened at Tetouan: with it began the French school for the eastern communities, and the argument whether this was a blessing or a misfortune ran another half century through the whole Maghreb. He did not live to see that argument.
His grave in Tetouan is a place of pilgrimage, and the day of his memory is kept there to this day.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Va-Yomer Yitzchak, Livorno — his responsa: halakhah and the daily life of mid-nineteenth-century Tetouan
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the forty years of the rabbinate, the first Alliance school at Tetouan
Basis: documents and evidence.