יצחק חילו

Rabbi Yitzchak bar Yosef Chelo, Isaac Chelo, יצחק חילו, was a rishon of the fourteenth century, a Sephardic Jew who traveled to Eretz Yisrael. What is known of him with certainty is that in 5093 (1333) he was in Jerusalem, and from there he sent a letter to his father and to acquaintances who had stayed behind in Aragon. Part of that letter is preserved in the sefer Yesod Olam of Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yosef HaYisraeli, a talmid of the Rosh. Where he lived before his journey is not clear: the French text discussed below places him in “Laresa of the kingdom of Aragon,” most likely Lerida.

His name is best known from a travel account called Shvilei DiYerushalayim, “the paths of Jerusalem,” presented as a letter written in 1333 to his father and relatives in Spain, describing Jerusalem, the Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, and the sites along seven roads leading out from the city. Eliakim Carmoly published a French translation of it in 1847. Israel Zev Horowitz printed a Hebrew translation in 1919 in the anthology Yerushalayim, edited by Avraham Moshe Luncz, and Yehudah David Eisenstein printed another in his Otzar Masaot in 1926, working from Carmoly’s text; an English translation by Elkan Adler appeared in 1930.

Whether the account is genuine has been in dispute since it appeared. Carmoly said he had translated it from a Hebrew manuscript, but no such manuscript was ever found among his books, and the work contains anachronisms, contradictions and kabbalistic quotations; many hold that Carmoly forged it. Chelo himself, though, is not in doubt; his letter of 1333 stands on its own. A street in the Shikun Dan neighborhood of Tel Aviv is named for him.

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