ר' אברהם סבע

Rav Avraham Saba (5200/1440–9 Tishrei 5269/1508) was a rav, mekubal and darshan of the generation of the Spanish expulsion, whose life carries the whole tragedy of that generation. A talmid of Rav Yitzchak de Leon in Castile, he fled in the expulsion of 5252/1492 with his kehillah to Portugal — where the decrees of 5257 fell upon him with full force: his two sons were seized and baptized by force, and when the king decreed death for any Jew found with a Hebrew sefer, he buried his manuscripts and his tefillin beneath an olive tree outside Lisbon. Caught attempting to recover them, he was imprisoned for half a year and expelled.

He reached Fez in Morocco broken in body, and there did what only the greatest have done: he wrote his lost seforim anew from memory. The fruit of that labor is the Tzror HaMor, his commentary on the Torah in peshat and in the derech of the Zohar — a work learned to this day, in which the pain of the expulsion breaks through the parshiyot — and Eshkol HaKofer on Megillat Esther and Megillat Rut. His Tzror HaChaim on Pirkei Avot and the tefillot was partly recovered in manuscript in recent generations; his halachic Tzror HaKesef remained buried in Lisbon and is lost.

The Chida brings the mesorah of his end: sailing toward Italy, he fell deathly ill in a great storm, and the captain begged him to daven for the ship. He stipulated that if he died, his body be brought to the kehillah of Verona for burial — then davened, and the storm stilled. Two days later he returned his soul, and the captain kept his word: he rests in Verona, Italy. His granddaughter, the daughter of his son Rav Yitzchak, married Rav Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch.