Chaim Joseph David Azulai - His Role As Shadar

His Role As Shadar

The Hida's role as shadar (sheliha derabanan), or emissary, and major Jewish traveler of his day is a little known or appreciated aspect of his life. He left Israel twice on five year long fundraising missions that took him as far west as Tunisia and as far north as Great Britain and Amsterdam. His mission: Raise money for the support and survival of the beleaguered Jewish community of Hebron. At that time, the Jewish community of Hebron, as well as other communities in Israel, suffered the brutal and constant privations of Arab and Turkish landlords and warlords who demanded exorbitant sums of money in the form of arbitrary and draconian taxes. Moreover, money and work in that part of the world were very hard to come by. Without the missions of people like the Hida, the very physical survival of these communities came into question.

Yet the task of raising the necessary funds was much more complicated than most people realize. The right candidate for the mission, ideally, combined the characteristics of statesmanship, physical strength and endurance, Torah knowledge and understanding and the ability to speak multiple languages. They had to have the right stature and bearing to impress the Jewish communities they visited, they often had to be able to arbitrate matters of Jewish law for the locals and, ideally, they were multi-lingual so that they could communicate with both Jew and Gentile along the way. Finally, they had to be willing to undertake the dangerous, time consuming mission that would take them away from their families for so long. At that time, travel was far more time consuming and much more dangerous than it is today, especially for Jews. One in ten emissaries sent abroad for these fund raising missions never made it back alive. Emissaries would often divorce their wives before leaving, so that if they died along the way and their deaths could not be verified, their wives would be able to legally remarry. If they returned safely from their journey, they would remarry their wives, who would sometimes wait as long as five years for their husbands to return from their mission.

Moreover, the Hida records numerous instances of miraculous survival and dangerous threats of his day, among them, close scrapes with the Russian Navy during its support of the Ali Bey uprising against the Turks, the danger of boarding and worse by the Knights of Malta, the possible anger of English government officials towards anyone entering the country from France or Spain, as well as those aforementioned countries' wrath against someone crossing back over from their hated enemy, England, and the daily danger of running into various anti-semitic locals and nobles throughout mainland Europe (especially Germany).

No discussion of the Hida's bravery and accomplishment during his fund raising missions is complete without mentioning his intact and published travel diaries, which places him in the ranks of Benjamin of Tudela in terms of providing a comprehensive first hand account of Jewish life and historical events throughout the Europe and Near East of his day.