Joseph Sambari

Joseph Sambari lived his entire life in Cairo, a member of the Musta‘arabi (Arabic-speaking) Jewish community. In the 1670s, Sambari worked as a clerk in the service of Raphael Yosef, chief financier of the Ottoman governor of Egypt at the time, who was his patron as well. His historical work, Divre Yosef (The Words of Joseph), was completed on January 23, 1673. According to the author’s testimony, it was the second part of a (lost) chronicle that began with the creation of the world; the surviving part describes events from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries.