שלמה אלעמי

Rav Shlomo Alami was a Portuguese ba’al mussar of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and a contemporary of the Rashbatz, Rav Shimon ben Tzemach Duran. He is known through a single work, the Iggeret Musar, which he cast as a letter addressed to one of his talmidim in 5175/1415.

He had seen with his own eyes the persecutions that broke over the kehillot of Catalonia, Castile and Aragon in 5151/1391, and in the Iggeret he weighs those decrees and the trials that came after them against the spiritual state of Spanish Jewry, holding up a mirror to the failings he found in every circle of the community. There were men, he wrote, who spent their strength on Talmudic difficulties and on chiddushim without number, drawing distinctions as fine as a spider’s thread, so that they darkened rather than gave light and lowered the honor of the Torah. Others dressed the Torah in Greek finery and labored to square it with philosophy. Worse were the light-headed, who on a smattering of Greek learning made sport of the mesorah and held the mitzvot cheap. His sharpest words were for the wealthy and for the proud parnassim of the kehillot, men grown rich in money-dealing who cast off whatever marked them as Yidden and whose wives and daughters went decked out like princesses — while those who taught Torah were left to eat the bread of poverty. Their Christian neighbors, he noted, at least vied with one another to uphold their own faith and to raise their young in it.

His “letter” was written in a very elegant Hebrew. Each of its sections opens with a pasuk that hints at what follows. An early printing appeared in Venice in 5472/1712 under the title Iggeret HaChochmah VehaEmunah, with the author’s name garbled to Shlomo ben Lachmi; Zunz later published an abridged German rendering of part of it, and the edition issued by Jellinek in Vienna in 5632/1872 became the standard one. Passages of the Iggeret are quoted in Or HaChayim of Rav Yosef Yaavetz.