אליה אריסטיד אסטרוק

Rav Élie-Aristide Astruc (5592/1831–5665/1905), served as Grand Rabbi of Belgium and was among the leading French rabbanim of his century. He was born in Bordeaux on 12 December 1831 into a family that had lived in that city since the Middle Ages. After his early learning in Bordeaux he became the first Sephardi student accepted to the rabbinical school of Metz, completed his training in Paris in 1857, and was given semichah there by the chief rabbi of Paris. That August he married Myriam Esther Egle; they had a daughter, Myriam, and two sons, Lucien and Gabriel David.

In June 1866 Belgium named him its chief rabbi, an office he carried for thirteen years while keeping his French citizenship. During the Franco-Prussian War he served in the ambulance corps together with General Emile Mellinet, who in 1871 commissioned Edgar Degas to paint the two of them in a double portrait. King Leopold II made him a knight of the Order of Leopold in June 1879, the year he resigned the Belgian rabbinate; he returned to Bordeaux the following year, and in 1887 he was elected chief rabbi of Bayonne.

He wrote steadily in French on Jewish belief and on the standing of the Jews in the countries of Europe. His works include The Jews and Louis Veuillot (Paris, 1859), a French rendering of the liturgical poems of the Portuguese Jews (1865), a short history of the Jews and their beliefs (1869), a collection of his derashot (1879), and a study of the historical origins and causes of antisemitism (1884). He was niftar in Brussels on 23 February 1905 and buried at the Jewish cemetery of Uccle.

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