The Life of Maran

Rabbi Yosef ben Ephraim Karo is known to generations of Jews simply as Maran — “our master” — or as HaMechaber, “the Author.” Born in the year of the Spanish exile’s shadow and buried in the hills of the Galilee, he gave the Jewish people its most widely followed code of law, while living, in private, one of the most remarkable mystical lives recorded in Jewish history.

A child of the expulsion (1488–1497)

Yosef Karo was born in 1488 in Toledo, in the Kingdom of Castile (some accounts place his birth in Portugal). He was four years old when the Alhambra Decree of 1492 drove the Jews out of Spain. His family crossed into Portugal, only to face forced conversion and expulsion there in 1497. They escaped, and after wandering — some accounts include a stay in Morocco — reached the Ottoman Empire, which had opened its gates to the exiles.

The trauma of that generation shaped his life’s work. Whole communities had been uprooted; every exiled congregation brought its own customs and its own rabbis’ rulings. Karo would spend fifty years gathering that scattered inheritance into one order.

Nikopol and Adrianople: the young scholar

The family settled in Nikopol, on the Danube in today’s Bulgaria. His first teacher was his father, Rabbi Ephraim, a respected Talmudist. After his father’s death he was raised by his uncle, Rabbi Yitzchak Karo, author of the Torah commentary Toldot Yitzchak. Around 1520–1522 he moved to Adrianople (Edirne), where he headed a yeshiva and, in about 1522, began the work of his life: a vast commentary on the Arba’ah Turim, the code of Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher. He would labour over it for twenty years.

He married the daughter of Rabbi Yitzchak Saba, and after her death the daughter of Rabbi Chaim Albalag — both scholars of note. Sorrow followed him: tradition records that his first wife and their children died in a plague.

Salonica, the Maggid and the call to the Land

In the early 1530s Karo was in Salonica, the great Sephardi centre of the Ottoman Balkans, among the circle of the kabbalist Rabbi Yosef Taitazak. There he formed a lifelong bond with a younger scholar and poet, Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi Alkabetz — the future author of Lecha Dodi.

It was in these years that Karo began to receive the Maggid, a heavenly teacher who spoke through his own mouth and identified itself with the Mishnah. On a Shavuot night that Alkabetz described in a letter to the Salonica companions — the letter later printed as the introduction to Maggid Meisharim — the friends heard the voice urge them, on two nights and again the following Shabbat, to go up to the Land of Israel. They bound themselves by a pact to do so, and Alkabetz begged the Salonica circle to follow. (Read The Voice on Shavuot Night.)

In these years Karo also met Shlomo Molcho, the charismatic former Marrano who was burned at the stake in 1532. The Maggid promised Karo that he too would die sanctifying God’s name — a promise, as the story The Promise of Fire tells, that was not fulfilled.

Tzfat: a city of sages (c. 1536)

Travelling by way of Istanbul and Egypt, Karo reached Tzfat in about 1536. The small Galilean town had become, within a generation of the expulsion, a magnet for exiles: a centre of wool-weaving and trade, and of Torah and kabbalah unlike anywhere else in the world.

There he joined the court of Rabbi Yaakov Beirav, who in 1538 attempted to renew semikhah — the ancient rabbinic ordination broken off for well over a thousand years — as a step towards restoring the Sanhedrin. Karo was among the first four sages Beirav ordained. The plan met fierce opposition from Rabbi Levi ibn Chaviv in Jerusalem, and Beirav left the Land. Karo later ordained his own disciple, Rabbi Moshe Alsheich, who in turn ordained Rabbi Chaim Vital; after that the chain fell silent. (See Ordination in Tzfat.)

The Rav of Tzfat and of the Jewish world

After Beirav’s death Karo was regarded as his successor and, together with Rabbi Moshe di Trani (the Mabit), headed the rabbinical court of Tzfat — by then the leading court of the whole Jewish world. Questions came to it from across the Diaspora: when members of the community of Carpentras in France felt wronged in a matter of taxes, a letter from Karo was enough to restore their rights. His name heads communal decrees, and the great scholars of Egypt, among them the Radbaz, came to visit him.

In his beit midrash he taught a great yeshiva. A Yemenite traveller, Zechariah al-Dhahiri, who came on a Shabbat around 1567, counted some two hundred students on the benches before him. (See Two Hundred on the Benches.)

He completed the Beit Yosef in 1542 and went on refining it for years; it was printed in Venice and Sabbioneta between 1550 and 1559. While a plague raged he lived for a time in the nearby village of Biriya, and there, in 1555, he finished the Shulchan Aruch, the concise code drawn from it, printed in Venice in 1565. In his last years he saw his commentary on Maimonides, the Kesef Mishneh, go to press.

Family and final years

In old age he married a third time, the daughter of a Jerusalem sage, and a son, Yehudah, was born to him. His older son, Shlomo, born in 1555 while the Shulchan Aruch was being finished, married — so tradition relates — the daughter of the Arizal, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, who came to Tzfat in 1570. (See The Lion and the Master.)

Rabbi Yosef Karo died in Tzfat on 13 Nisan 5335 — 24 March 1575 — at about eighty-seven. The news, it was said, brought mourning across the Jewish world; funeral orations and elegies for him survive. He was buried in the old cemetery of Tzfat, where his grave is visited to this day, above all on his yahrzeit, two days before Pesach.

Timeline

• 1488 Born in Toledo, Castile (some say Portugal).
• 1492 Expulsion from Spain; the family goes to Portugal.
• 1497 Forced conversions in Portugal; the family escapes to the Ottoman Empire and settles in Nikopol.
• c. 1520–1522 Moves to Adrianople; begins the Beit Yosef.
• early 1530s Salonica; friendship with Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz; the Shavuot night of the Maggid.
• c. 1536 Settles in Tzfat.
• 1538 Ordained by Rabbi Yaakov Beirav in the renewal of semikhah.
• 1542 Completes the Beit Yosef.
• 1550–1559 Beit Yosef printed in Venice and Sabbioneta.
• 1555 Completes the Shulchan Aruch in Biriya; his son Shlomo is born.
• 1565 Shulchan Aruch printed in Venice.
• c. 1567 Zechariah al-Dhahiri visits his yeshiva.
• 1570 The Arizal arrives in Tzfat; by tradition, the two families are joined in marriage.
• 1574–1576 Kesef Mishneh printed in Venice.
• 13 Nisan 5335 · 24 March 1575 Passes away in Tzfat.