משה יעקב רפאל

Rav Moshe Yaakov Raphall (1798–1868), known as Morris Jacob Raphall, was an Orthodox rav in England and afterward in America. He was born in Stockholm, where his father served as banker to the king of Sweden, and at the age of nine was brought to Copenhagen and schooled there among the Jews of the city. At fourteen he went to England to learn in yeshiva, and later studied languages in Germany, where he took a doctorate; he married Rachel Goldston in 1825.

He began lecturing on the poetry of Tanach in the 1830s, and in 1834 founded the Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature, England’s first Jewish journal, which ill health forced him to close two years later. He served as honorary secretary to Rav Shlomo Hirschell, chief rabbi of Great Britain, translated from the Rambam, from Rav Yosef Albo and from Herz Wessely, and together with Rev. D. A. de Sola published a translation of eighteen masechtot of Mishnah; his translation of the Chumash got no further than the first volume. When the blood libel broke out in Damascus in 1840 he traveled there to help investigate it and published a refutation in Hebrew, English, French and German. From 1841 he was rav of the Birmingham Synagogue and head of its school for eight years, working against the discrimination English Jews faced and helping to found the city’s Hebrew National School.

In 1849 he sailed for New York, where he was appointed rav and preacher of the Greene Street Synagogue, the kehillah of B’nai Jeshurun, serving there until 1866. He put a series of changes in place — an end to the selling of honors in shul, a men’s choir, a dress code for the chazzan and the rav — all of them within the bounds of Orthodox halachah. On 1 February 1860 he became the first Jew to deliver the opening prayer at a session of the United States Congress.

In the winter before the American Civil War, President Buchanan (in his final days as p US President) called a national fast day for 4 January 1861, and Raphall used the occasion to set out before his kehillah what the Torah says about servitude, in a drasha printed within days and sold soon after as a pamphlet, The Bible View of Slavery. He said plainly from the pulpit that he was no friend of slavery and was not placing his own feelings before them but the view of Scripture, and he drew a sharp line between the Torah’s laws, under which a slave is a person who holds rights, and the practice of the South, which he said reduced him to a thing. Other American rabbanim, among them David Einhorn and Michael Heilprin, disputed him in print. He was niftar in New York on 23 June 1868.