Rabbi Yaakov Berav רבי יעקב בירב

Rabbi Yaakov Berav was born in 1474 at Maqueda near Toledo and left with the expulsion of 1492, at eighteen. In Fez he was put at the head of the community almost at once — at eighteen years old. Then Egypt, Damascus, and finally Safed.

His plan was among the boldest in Jewish history. True semikhah — ordination running in a chain from Moses — had lapsed at the end of the talmudic age, and with it went courts able to judge by the full measure of the law: no judicial penalties, no authority to sanctify the new moon, no Sanhedrin. Berav rested on Maimonides (Laws of the Sanhedrin 4:11): if all the sages of the Land of Israel agree to appoint judges and ordain them, the ordination holds.

In 1538 the sages of Safed ordained Berav first, with the right to ordain others. He passed semikhah to four men, among them Rabbi Yosef Karo and the Mabit, Rabbi Moshe di Trani. He sent it also to the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, the Ralbach — who refused it.

The quarrel turned harsh, and not only learned. Maimonides ends that very passage with "the matter requires decision"; one does not found an institution on an undecided ruling, Ralbach answered. Besides, the sages of Jerusalem had not been consulted, so the condition "all the sages of the Land of Israel" was unmet. Berav in reply threw Ralbach's forced baptism in Portugal in his face — and the dispute became personal.

No Sanhedrin was convened. But it was not wholly for nothing: the chain of ordination ran on some four generations — Karo ordained Alshich, Alshich ordained Chaim Vital in 1590, and Yaakov Berav II ordained Elazar Azikri in 1596. Berav died in Safed in 1546.