Kerem Ḥemer — Avraham Ankava

❧ الوصف

✦ English

Kerem Ḥemer (כרם חמר) is the magnum opus of Rabbi Abraham ben Mordecai Ankawa (b. Salé 1810), dayyan in Salé and founder of a talmudic academy in Tlemcen — one of the leading halakhic authorities of nineteenth-century Hispano-Maghrebi Jewry. Printed in Livorno in two parts (1869 and 1871), it gathers responsa (she'elot u-teshuvot) by Ankawa and by Moroccan rabbis previously extant only in manuscript, arranged by the sections of the Shulḥan ʿArukh. Its second part contains the Sefer ha-Takkanot — the ordinances (takkanot) of the Sages of Castile and Toledo, the statutes of the 1492 exiles as observed in Fez and Morocco, with Ankawa's commentary — together with a section on the drafting of legal deeds (Et Sofer, formulae of shetarot). Kerem Ḥemer is thus a major source for the takkanot of the Castilian megorashim and for the private law (marriage, ketubbah, inheritance) of Moroccan Jewry.