Img. ID: 577571

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

This is a Siddur according to the Kabbalah by the Rashash. This particular copy of such a siddur is characterized by the use of mostly large square script. It was owned and used by Yitzhak Bonan, a famed Kabbalist and Rabbinical scholar from Tunisia. He was Rabbi of the Grana Community in Tunis and lived from ca. 1763 - 1814. The text is for Rosh Hashanah as well as a listing of the Kadosh Ha-Chodesh, with Rosh Chodesh. His son David saw to the publishing of several books by his father Yitzhak.

Sar Shalom Sharabi (Hebrew: שר שלום מזרחי דידיע שרעבי), 1720–1777, was a Yemenite-Israeli Jewish Rabbi, Halachist, Chazzan and Kabbalist. In later life, he became the Rosh Yeshiva of Bet El Yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem. His daughter married Rabbi Hayyim Abraham Gagin of Jerusalem, making him the great-great-grandfather of Shem Tob Gaguine, the "Keter Shem Tob."

Sar Shalom Sharabi was born in Jewish Sharab, Yemen. He moved to Palestine, then under Ottoman rule, in fulfillment of a vow. On his way, he stayed in India, Baghdad, and Damascus. He was one of the earlier commentators on the works of the Ari, a major source of Kabbalah. His Siddur was known as the "Siddur Ha-Kavvanot," and is the main siddur used today by Kabbalists for prayer, meditation, and Yeshiva study. It is a Siddur with extensive Kabbalistic meditations by way of commentary.

This manuscript contains part of the weekday prayers in a nineteenth-century Oriental hand. It was copied by R. Yedidya Raphael Aulafia and is part of a series of four volumes. At a later point, the siddur was owned by the wealthy R. Issac Bonan (d. 1887), one of the Tunis scholars from the Rashash community who immigrated to Jerusalem and served as a scribe in the Beit Din. He was the son of R. David Bonan, the author of Dee Hashav (Livorno, 1857), and the grandson of R. Isaac Bonan, the first of that name, the author of Ohalei Yitzhak (Livorno, 1821). In 1887, the owner Isaac Bonan printed his father's book Moed David in Jerusalem. He also assisted in the printing of Shemen Sasson, Part 4 (Jerusalem, 1889, by R. Sasson Bechar Moses Persiado.

102 pp