In the 15th century the Jews lived there (Zamora) in two districts. The population in the aljama was small and numbered only a few hundred. Nevertheless, it was larger than the surrounding communities and is mentioned among the major ones in the tax-collection for the war against Granada.
Lacking in quantity,
this vibrant Jewish community more than made up for it in quality. It became
famous as one of the foremost centers of Talmud study in fifteenth-century
Castile. There the great Rabbi Isaac Qanpanton headed his yeshiva, which was to become the source of a unique analytic method
of Talmudic study. That method was spread by his disciples thorough Castile and
on to the East after the expulsion. After Qanpanton’s death (1463), Zamora
shared its fame with other centers notably Toledo and Guadalajara. Rabbi Samuel
Valensi, one of Qanpanton’s foremost disciples, was his master’s successor in
Zamora and produced such scholars as Rabbi Moses Al’ashqar and rabbi Jacob Ibn
Habib.
We know also that the great philosophical preacher, Rabbi Isaac Arama, lived there before accepting a position elsewhere. Arama’s praise for Zamora is unequivocal. When he tells about his intellectual life there he describes its location and his feelings toward it in phrases such as “Fair in situation, the uttermost parts of the North”, appropriated from the Psalmist, who used these expressions to describe Jerusalem – “the joy of the whole earth…” (Psalms 48,3).
We know also that the great philosophical preacher, Rabbi Isaac Arama, lived there before accepting a position elsewhere. Arama’s praise for Zamora is unequivocal. When he tells about his intellectual life there he describes its location and his feelings toward it in phrases such as “Fair in situation, the uttermost parts of the North”, appropriated from the Psalmist, who used these expressions to describe Jerusalem – “the joy of the whole earth…” (Psalms 48,3).
Zamora also produced
one of the earliest Hebrew printing-houses (1484). Generally, this was a sign
of the cultural centrality of a community, as evident from the fact that the
other printing-houses were established in Toledo and Guadalajara, in those
years the other major Talmudic centers in Spain. This holds also for Lisbon,
which was the major center of Portuguese Jewry, and for printing-houses in
Italy and Turkey in the 16th century. It was in such a Torah center
that (Abraham) Saba lived. It was also there that he wrote the first part of
this commentary Zeror ha-Mor on most
or all of the Genesis.
Abraham Gross, Iberian Jewry from Twilight to Dawn. The World of Rabbi Abraham Saba. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1995, 6-7.
Abraham Gross, Iberian Jewry from Twilight to Dawn. The World of Rabbi Abraham Saba. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1995, 6-7.
