משה קפשאלי

Rav Moshe ben Eliyahu Capsali (5180/1420–c. 5255/1495) was the first Chacham Bashi, the chief rabbi of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire. He was born in Candia on Crete, then held by Venice, to Rav Eliyahu, and as a young man he left the island to learn in the yeshivot of Germany. By about 1450 he is found as rav in Constantinople, and he rose to prominence in the reign of Sultan Mehmed II, who set him over the Jews of the empire. The sultan gave him a place in the divan beside the grand mufti and set him above the patriarch of the Christians — a regard which, it was told, dated from the day Mehmed came in plain clothes to watch him give judgment and satisfied himself that the rav could not be bought and showed no man favor.

His authority was as much civil as rabbinic: he oversaw the taxes of the Jewish community, appointed the rabbanim of the districts of the empire, and sat as a civil judge. He acted with a heavy hand against those young men of the kehillah who kept company with the janissaries and copied their manner of living, and in the street riots that came with the change of rule in 1481 some of them, embittered by the punishments he had laid on them, tried to take his life; he escaped by flight. His standing with Bayazid II, the son and successor of Mehmed, was no less good, and the readiness with which the exiles of Spain and Portugal were received across the empire owed much to him — not least in seeing the burden of taxes divided fairly between poor families and wealthy ones, and in settling the halachic questions that came with their resettlement.

Not every community in the empire accepted him as its final authority in Torah. His rulings carried weight in Istanbul and its surroundings and across the Balkans, chiefly among the Sephardic kehillot, while the large Romaniote community of Salonika did not look to him. A sharp difference arose between him and Rav Eliyahu Mizrachi, the Re’em, who numbered Karaites among his talmidim; yet when the Maharik ruled that Rav Moshe was not to be obeyed as the supreme authority, the Re’em, on the counsel of his rebbe Rav Yehuda Mintz, held his peace, while Rav Eliyahu HaLevi and Rav Yaakov ben Moshe Margaliot both came out on Rav Moshe’s side. He was niftar in Istanbul in about 5255/1495, and the Re’em was appointed in his place.