הרב עובדיה מברטנורא

Rav Ovadia of Bartenura (c. 5205/1445–c. 5275/1515), known for all generations as the Bartenura and in English sources as Obadiah of Bertinoro, wrote the commentary that has accompanied the Mishnah on the printed page ever since, and in his later years rebuilt the Jewish community of Yerushalayim. He was born in Italy to Rav Avraham Yarei — a name tied to the pasuk “and Ovadiahu feared Hashem greatly” — and the family carried the name of the town Bertinoro. In his youth he learned in the yeshiva of Rav Yosef Colon, the Maharik, in Bologna; the Maharik calls him “yedid nafshi” in one of his teshuvot. In the early 1480s he served as rav of Città di Castello, where he also stood among the honored Jewish bankers of the city.

On 1 Kislev 5247/1486 he set out on the journey of his life. A year and a half took him through Rome, Naples, and Salerno, then Palermo in Sicily — where he darshened every Shabbat for some three months and the kehilla pressed him to stay — and on to Alexandria and Cairo, where the nagid Rav Natan HaKohen Shulal received him with honor, set him over his house in Yerushalayim, and placed the leadership of its community in his hands. He entered Yerushalayim on 13 Nisan 5248/1488, days before Pesach, and found some seventy families, crushed by taxes and so poor they lacked even sifrei Torah; in his first days he himself dug a grave when the community had no one for the task. Living from the means he had left in Italy, he won a lightening of the taxes, supported the poor, darshened twice a month in lashon hakodesh, fixed shiurim for the tzibbur, restored the chevra kadisha and served in it himself, and rebuked rabbanim who took fees for weddings and gittin. When the exiles of Spain arrived after the gerush of 5252/1492 he became their leader as well, and founded a yeshiva in Yerushalayim, maintained by the kehillot of Egypt and Turkey through the nagid Rav Yitzchak Shulal; within a decade the city had care for its sick and societies of tzedaka and chesed, and even the Muslims brought him their disputes for judgment.

His perush on all six sidrei Mishnah was printed in Venice in 5308–5309/1548–1549 by his brother’s son. Built above all on Rashi on the gemara, with the Rambam beside him — and, in Zeraim and Taharot, on Rabbeinu Shimshon of Shantz and the Rosh — it brings the maskana of the gemara down into the Mishnah itself, and its clarity made it for the Mishnah what Rashi is for the gemara: nearly every printing since carries it, the Tosafot Yom Tov and Melechet Shlomo were written around it, and the great spread of Mishnah learning from the late 1500s grew with it. He also wrote Amar Naka, a supercommentary on Rashi on the Torah composed while still in Italy — the title was a later printer’s — piyutim that remain in manuscript, and the iggerot to his father and brother printed as Darchei Tzion, whose accounts of the kehillot of Greece, Egypt, and Eretz Yisrael are a treasure of history.

A burial cave at the foot of Har HaZeitim, on the eastern slope of the City of David in the chelka of the Sefardim, is held by tradition to be his resting place, and batei knesset and streets across Eretz Yisrael carry his name.