Wednesday, January 25, 2017

An Early Example of a Nossach Achid

This is an early example (one of many) of kibbutz galuyot, where a community of Jews, from so many diverse backgrounds, actually got together and agreed on something (now if that aint something, I don't know what is...). Also, it would be interesting to dig a bit more into the figure of R. Moshe Hagolah, he plays a role in Khazarian and Karaite history as well. From here 


Kaffa was the center of Crimean Jewish life; Jews lived there long before it came under Ottoman control. In the 1420s, the town had both Rabbinite and Karaite communities, each with its own synagogue. Onomastic evidence suggests that Kaffan Jewry came to include immigrants from Italy (Lombrozo, Piastro), the Mediterranean Sephardic diaspora (Konort, Tabon), Turkey (Izmirli, Stamboli), and Georgia (Gurji). The arrivals were overwhelmingly Rabbinites
According to data of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, Kaffa was at that time one of the Crimean towns where Jews were involved in slave trade. Conversely, they often served as intermediaries in ransoming people held captive by the Tatars, and ransomed East European Jewish captives. Some of those who were ransomed settled among their redeemers. This explains the appearance among Krymchaks of such names as Bershadskii, Varshavskii, and Lekhno (originating from the land of Lakhs, i.e., Poles). Many other members of the Krymchak community were also, according to family tradition, of East European Ashkenazic extraction, though their surnames are Crimean Tatar. The proportion of Krymchaks of Ashkenazic extraction at the beginning of the twentieth century is disputed but most likely did not exceed 25 percent.
One of the ransomed East European Ashkenazic Jews was the Talmudic scholar Mosheh ben Ya‘akov of Kiev, known as Mosheh ha-Goleh (the Exile; 1449–ca. 1520). He spent the last years of his life in Kaffa, where he proposed to its Rabbinite community a new liturgical rite that came to be known as nusaḥ Kafa. This system represented a compromise between the Romaniot rite of the old settlers and those of the latecomers, mainly the Ashkenazi rite. The format was accepted first by Kaffan Rabbinites and shortly later by all Rabbinite Jews of Crimea. The ritual homogenization of Crimean Rabbinite Jewry thus occurred during the sixteenth century.

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