Abraham Rosanes

A scholar and merchant, Abraham Rosanes was a chronicler and leader in the Ottoman Jewish community. Hailing from Rusçuk (now Ruse, Bulgaria), he was part of a prominent Sephardic family. In 1867 he traveled to Palestine, recording his experiences. His travelogue and letters home were translated from their original Solitreo—a form of Ladino—to Hebrew and published under Rosanes’s acronym Abir (or HeAbir). Returning to Rusçuk, he founded a secular Jewish school in 1869. He engaged in a nonacademic but valuable ethnographic study of the Ottoman Jewry. His commitment to Jewish education and history were taken up by his son, Solomon, with whom Rosanes sought refuge in Istanbul during the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878).