JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1504 The Safed-Jerusalem Shemittah Controversy of 1504: A Community Divided

In 1504, twelve years after the Spanish Expulsion, a halachic controversy over calculating the Sabbatical year erupted between Safed’s newly established Spanish exile community and Jerusalem’s rabbinical court. This earliest surviving letter from Spanish exiles in the Land of Israel reveals a sophisticated immigrant rabbinic elite challenging Jerusalem’s authority on agricultural law.

The shemittah cycle, a biblically mandated seventh year when Jewish farmers must let their fields lie fallow, required precise calendrical calculation to determine which year carried these obligations. For communities scattered by persecution, reestablishing this cycle in the Holy Land represented both halachic necessity and symbolic continuity with their destroyed Spanish communities.

A letter from Safed to Jerusalem, preserved in the responsa collection Zera Anashim and now held in Jerusalem’s National Library, stands as the earliest documentary evidence of Spanish exiles organized communal life in the Land of Israel. Its signatories read like a who’s-who of Iberian Torah scholarship: seventeen rabbis, most among the greatest sages of Spain, led by figures such as R. Moshe ben Shem Tov alFrangi, who had headed a great yeshiva in Spain and was himself a student of the renowned R. Yitzhak Canpanton (1360–1463).

At the head of Safed’s community stood R. Peretz Columbo, already documented as the head and notable of the city by 1496 and leader of a functioning yeshiva. The letter addresses him with extravagant honor, testimony to his stature among the exiles. Yet R. Peretz maintained himself partly through a grocery shop to earn his livelihood.

The rhetorical architecture of the letter reveals as much as its halachic content. Opening with elaborate poetic flourishes, the Safed rabbis simultaneously defer to Jerusalem’s traditional authority while asserting their own legitimacy. In addition, they express palpable anxiety with the factionalism in Jerusalem over this very issue.

If Jerusalem, seat of ancient authority, site of the destroyed Temple, could not maintain unity on fundamental agricultural halachah, what hope remained for scattered exiles attempting to rebuild communal life? The Safed rabbis position themselves as mediators, invoking both the Talmudic tradition of multiple valid opinions and their own claim to expertise.

The substance of the dispute involved reconciling different traditions about shemitta calculation that had developed across the Jewish diaspora. The letter cites testimony from R. Avraham Foguilla, who could not sign due to a prior oath but authorized others to transcribe his position: that the year 1504 (5264 in the Hebrew calendar) was indeed the Sabbatical year “in accordance with the custom until now of all the districts of the land and according to what has been clarified from the words of the Rambam.”

This invocation of the Rambam as ultimate authority reflects broader medieval Jewish legal methodology, but also the Spanish exiles’ particular veneration for their greatest native sage. In citing “the Rambam, of blessed memory, in the laws of Shemittah, chapter ten, in his final words relying on the Geonim,” the Safed rabbis grounded their position in a chain of transmission stretching back through North African and Babylonian authorities to Talmudic sages, a claim to unbroken tradition despite the catastrophic rupture of expulsion.

The controversy illuminates critical realities of early post-Expulsion settlement. Contrary to long-held assumptions that substantial Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel awaited Ottoman conquest of 1517, this letter proves that immediately after the expulsion, not only Conversos went up, but also great Torah scholars, establishing Safed as a rabbinic center contemporaneous with, perhaps even before, Jerusalem’s renewed Spanish community. The seventeen Safed signatories, supplemented by authentication from additional scribes and witnesses, demonstrate a large and deliberate aliya, not the result of the Turkish conquest.

 For Spanish Jews traumatized by expulsion, resettling the Holy Land carried profound theological significance, a partial redemption foreshadowing ultimate restoration. Reestablishing proper shemittah observance therefore marked a return not merely to ancestral soil but to complete Torah practice impossible in exile. Disagreement over its calculation touched raw nerves precisely because so much rode on getting it right.

Jerusalem’s response, unfortunately, does not survive in the documentary record. But the letter’s careful diplomacy suggests awareness of institutional friction. Jerusalem harbored its own Spanish exile community, survivors of pre-Expulsion migrations and post-1492 arrivals, some of whom had fled from there because of problems with the Jewish elders in Jerusalem. Communal governance disputes, perhaps exacerbated by refugee influx straining limited resources, created an unstable environment.

The 1504 letter thus captures a pivotal moment: Spanish Jewry’s greatest surviving scholars, displaced from Europe, reasserting rabbinic authority in the Land of Israel while navigating delicate inter-communal politics. Within decades, Safed would eclipse Jerusalem as the primary center of Jewish scholarship.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)