Mordechai ha-Kohen

Mordechai ben Yehuda ha-Kohen was born into a traditional religious family; his grandfather, Marco (Mordechai) Sangonetti, left Genoa around 1812 for Tripoli, Libya. Orphaned in 1861, ha-Kohen and his mother and two sisters were left in difficult circumstances, compelling Mordechai to seek a career as an elementary teacher of Hebrew and Judaism. In 1883, he married and started a family, which prompted him to search for supplementary work as a peddler and clockmaker. A father of thirteen, ha-Kohen later worked as a rabbinic judge and clerk, which enabled him to take care of his family’s needs and also write. His most important work is Higid Mordechai (Mordechai Narrated), a uniquely rich ethnographic, rabbinic, and historical study of Jewish life in Tripoli and Libya’s northwestern Tripolitania/Jebel Nefusa region. The compositional history of Higid Mordechai is obscure; ha-Kohen showed a version of it in 1906 to the Jewish “Orientalist” Nachum Slouschz and continued to enlarge it thereafter, but never published it. What we have instead is the version edited by Slouschz and published much later in Israel; this amended version seems to include ethnographic observations derived from Slouschz’s tour of Jebel Nefusa in 1906, during which ha-Kohen acted as his guide.