The Chida — Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai החיד"א — רבי חיים יוסף דוד אזולאי
an emissary of the Land of Israel who travelled all Europe — and the first true Hebrew bibliographer
Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai was born in Jerusalem in 1724 and died at Livorno in 1806; in 1960 his remains were brought to Jerusalem. Among his teachers was Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, author of the Or HaChaim.
His life was spent on the roads of the shadar, the emissary who collects for the communities of the Land of Israel: 1753–58 Italy, Germany, Holland, France, England; 1764 Constantinople, on the way to which he was detained in Cairo; 1772–78 Europe again, at the end of which he settled at Livorno.
On the road he kept a diary, Ma'agal Tov: communities, people, libraries, money, illness, the miseries of shipboard, and the endless hunt for manuscripts. It is one of very few first-person accounts left by an eighteenth-century Sephardi rabbi; the full text was published from the autograph only in 1921–34.
His chief book grew out of those same roads. Shem HaGedolim is the first Hebrew bio-bibliography of the modern kind: a part on authors (Livorno, 1774) and a part on books (1786). And it is built not on retelling other men's lists but on what he **handled himself**: the manuscripts and printed books of European collections. Some thirteen hundred new bibliographical references beyond all that had been known. Zunz and Steinschneider later worked from it — that is, the foundation of scholarly Hebrew bibliography was laid by a traditional emissary from Jerusalem.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Shem HaGedolim, Livorno 1774 and 1786 — a bio-bibliography built on books he handled himself
Documents of the period
- Ma'agal Tov — the emissary's diary, 1753-78; published from the autograph 1921-34
Basis: documents and evidence.