Background
Born and raised in Hungary, where his family had sought refuge during the Cossack atrocities of 1648-1654, he grew up in a mixed Ashkenazi-Sephardi community that enjoyed the benefits of Turkish rule.
Born and raised in Hungary, where his family had sought refuge during the Cossack atrocities of 1648-1654, he grew up in a mixed Ashkenazi-Sephardi community that enjoyed the benefits of Turkish rule.
Encouraged to familiarize himself with Sephardi practice, he continued his studies farther afield, mainly in Salonika (1676— 1679).
Fate dealt him a cruel blow, when his wife and child were killed during the Hapsburg siege of Buda in 1686. He then fled to Sarajevo, where the Sephardim appointed him their hakham (rabbi), a title that he proudly retained with the adopted surname of Ashkenazi.
The Danish-ruled city of Altona, in northwest Germany, was his home from 1688 until 1709. There he remarried and consolidated his reputation as an eminent scholar in Jewish law, questions being submitted to him from many parts of Europe. One dealt with the Turkish false messiah, Shabbetai Tzevi, and his secret adherents; another insinuated that David Nieto, the Sephardi chief rabbi of London, had preached in favor of Spinozism - a charge that Hakham Tzevi investigated and dismissed (1705).
Hakham Tzevi succeeded his father-in-law as rabbi of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbeck Triple Community in 1707, but fell sick and resigned two years later when a controversy broke out over one of his more unusual decisions.
In 1710 he was elected chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi Jews in Amsterdam and was welcomed by the local Sephardi magnates and lay leaders. His volume of rabbinic decisions published there in 1712, also drew many compliments from the Sephardi rabbinate, headed by Solomon Ayllon.
The following year, however, communal harmony was shattered by the arrival of Nehemiah Hayon, a smooth-tongued follower of Shabbetai Tzevi who had just published a heretical kabbalistic work in Berlin. Hayon asked the Sephardi leaders to permit the sale and distribution of his “learned” book in Amsterdam, but they made this conditional on a rabbinic endorsement. Having reason to suspect their own chief rabbi’s orthodoxy, these lay leaders decided to consult Hakham Tzevi as well as Solomon Ayllon. Without waiting for his Sephardi colleague’s decision in the matter, Hakham Tzevi proceeded to condemn the book as a Shabbatean tract and to excommunicate its author. This high-handed step enraged Ayllon, who made his quarrel with Hakham Tzevi the pretext for a general campaign of incitement against the “Ashkenazi upstarts.”
Rather than continue to endure the violent hostility of his opponents, Hakham Tzevi left Amsterdam in 1714 and accepted the Ashkenazic rabbinate of Lemberg in Poland, where he died a few months after assuming office, worn out and embittered by his experiences.
