Isaac Ibn Ya‘ish

A writer and bookseller in the Jewish community of Essaouira (Mogador), Morocco, Isaac Ibn Ya‘ish ha-Levi (Yishaq Ben Ya’îs[h] Halewi) identified as a maskil, an advocate of Jewish Enlightenment. Like other maskilim with whom he maintained contact across the Arab Jewish and East European Jewish world, he mixed a love of Hebrew and desire to revitalize Jewish culture and peoplehood in a more modern idiom; a critical attitude toward aspects of traditional Jewish society that he deemed irrational, foolish, or unjust; and enthusiasm for ideas of civic and scientific progress. Working locally in support of social, educational, and communal reforms in Essaouira’s Jewish community, he also wrote more than fifty reports about Jewish life, communal affairs, and Jewish culture and customs in Morocco for the Warsaw Hebrew newspaper Ha-Tsefirah and other Hebrew-language East European journals. Permeated by critical and reformist concerns, these reports are also essential sources for our understanding of Jewish life in late nineteenth-century Essaouira and other North African Jewish communities.