3 - The Saga of Raphael Kassin: From Ḥakham Bashi in Baghdad to Reform Rabbi in Aleppo
Summary
When a communal leader lords it over the public, The Holy One—blessed be He—weeps on him every day.
BT Ḥagigah 8bThe Background and Youth of Raphael Kassin
According to family tradition, the first Kassins to come to Aleppo arrived in the wake of the expulsion from Spain. They and their descendants lived in the city continuously from that point on. Over the generations, many members of the family became prominent Torah scholars, some of them even serving as rabbinic judges in the community. The greatest of these was Rabbi Yehudah Kassin who, towards the end of the eighteenth century, opposed the attempt by the chief rabbi of Aleppo, Rabbi Raphael Solomon Laniado, to impose upon those European Jews who had settled in Aleppo—the ‘Francos’—the edicts and regulations of the established local community. Yehudah Kassin’s grandson, Raphael Kassin, was the only son of his father, Elijah Kassin, who also served as head of the rabbinic court in Aleppo. Rabbi Elijah Kassin was a wealthy man, who spoiled his son and gave him everything he needed so that the young man could devote himself entirely to study, without having to earn his own living. As Raphael Kassin himself testifies:
I was the young and only son of my father and lived in an ‘[ivory] tower’ while I was growing up … He provided me with my daily bread to my full satisfaction, as well as raiment; altogether, he spared me naught—bed, table, chair, and lamp—to magnify and glorify Torah. And his proper intention was that I sit and increase in wisdom, and he graciously told me: I shall provide whatever you lack, even if there is the slightest doubt of what is needed for [studying] Torah … and I, in humility, nodded my agreement … all those years [i.e. when his father was alive] I sat calm and contented in my house in my palace, sitting in wisdom, and I inclined my ears to my teachers and was diligent in my studies, and did not stir from within the tent.
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- Intrigue and RevolutionChief Rabbis in Aleppo, Baghdad, and Damascus 1774–1914, pp. 55 - 78Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015