Guest post by Dr. Noam Sienna, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Toronto.

Examining inscriptions in Sephardi script for the Footprints workshop at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, held in June 2025, revealed two volumes of Sefer ha-levush (Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Friedberg F0013 v.3-4) with a provenance connecting them to an important Moroccan Jewish family. The books, comprising the volumes Even ha-‘ezer and Hoshen mishpat of Mordekhai Jaffe’s halakhic compendium Sefer ha-levush, were printed in Venice in 1619 by Giovanni Cajon (whose name appears on the Hebrew portion of the title page), working at the press of Pietro and Lorenzo Bragadini.

Figure 1: Inscriptions in Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto,
Friedberg F0013 v.3

The first handwritten inscription is an unfortunately-trimmed note recording that the books were acquired “as my portion … from the inheritance of R. Yosef … [for the sum of] 40 uqiyyot, 3 thamans [an eighth of an uqiyya], and four flus [a twelfth of a thaman].” Unfortunately the names of both the giver and the receiver have been cut away by an overzealous binder. But another note lower down on the page gives another owner’s name, Pinhas Toledano, and in the other volume, he recorded a lengthier inscription, with the same purchase sum, so it is likely that he was also the purchaser in the original inscription:

“A purchase of mine, to fulfill my desire, in the year May You REBUILD [5457 AM= 1697 CE] the walls of Jerusalem, for the sum of 40 uqiyyot, 3 thamans, and four flus, in the coinage of the sultan Mulay Isma‘il. I, the meek, Pinhas Toledano, son of Daniel of blessed memory.”

Finally, another inscription on the first volume confirms that the books stayed at least one more generation in the family:
“This [book] was my inheritance from my father of blessed memory — I, the meek servant of God, Meir Toledano.”

Figure 2: Inscription in Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Friedberg F0013 v.4

So who were these Toledanos? Toledano is one of the most significant names of the Sephardi diaspora — originating, as might be suspected, in the Spanish city of Toledo — and there are many branches of Toledanos spread across North Africa and the Ottoman Balkans. But luckily, these ones can be identified with precision, thanks to the reference to uqiyyot and Sultan Mulay Isma‘il which pinpoint the location of these footprints as having been written in 17th-century Morocco.

And indeed, among the Moroccan Toledanos, the bibliographer Yosef Bennaim records the following genealogy (in Malkhe rabanan, 1931):

1. Daniel b. Yosef Toledano II [ca. 1600-1688]: he was the friend and advisor of Ya‘aqov Sasportas [NES: and his father-in-law, since Sasportas was married to his daughter Rahel Toledano], and he came to his aid in the fight against the Sabbatean heresy. He was also one of the advisors to the king Mulay Isma‘il in Meknes.

2. [His son,] Pinhas b. Daniel Toledano. One of the sages of Meknes, who lived in the 17th century, and died in the year 1701. I saw a legal document in which [his cousin] Habib Toledano appointed Daniel Bahlul as guardian over the children of this Pinhas, and thus his sons, named Meir and Daniel, were still minors at this time; this document was dated Adar I 5461 [Feb-Mar 1701].

Bennaim also notes that Daniel’s grandfather (also named Daniel, ca. 1570-1640 CE) and his son Yosef “were among the [descendants of] exiles from Castile who settled in Fes, where Daniel was the head of a yeshiva… and [Yosef and his family] moved to live in Meknes in 1665 CE.”

Figure 3: Mulay Isma‘il, illustrated by Nicolas de Larmessin, Les augustes représentations de tous les rois (Paris, 1690).

This was a pivotal moment in Moroccan history. The 1660s saw the disintegration of the Sa‘adi dynasty after decades of chaos, and the rise of the ‘Alawis (who still rule Morocco today), beginning with Sultan Mulay Rashid (r. 1664–1672), followed by his half-brother Mulay Isma‘il (r. 1672–1727). The connection of the Toledano family to the court of Sultan Mulay Isma‘il is well-documented in European and Moroccan sources, showing that Daniel b. Yosef Toledano began as an advisor to Mulay Isma‘il in the 1660s, while he was a viceroy in Meknes. Following Mulay Isma‘il’s coronation in 1672, Daniel Toledano and several of his sons served not only as the sultan’s ministers, but also as negotiators (along with other Moroccan Jews, including members of the Maymaran and Benattar families) between the Moroccan government and the European nations of Spain, England, and the Netherlands (Hirschberg 1974).

For over a century, Moroccan sultans had relied on Jewish merchants to serve as translators, diplomats, and intermediaries with Christian Europe; these agents were known as tujjar al-sultan, “the merchants of the sultan,” and their work became especially important over the course of the seventeenth century (Schroeter 2002). The
first commercial treaty between a North African and a Christian European nation had been signed (between Morocco and the Netherlands) in 1608 through an embassy led by the Moroccan Jewish diplomat Samuel Pallache (ca. 1550-1616), and soon the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian governments had all engaged numerous Jewish merchants as mediators and representatives to Christian nations (Garcia-Arenal &
Wiegers 2007). These agents are sometimes equated with the figure of the “Court Jew” in Europe, who fulfilled similar functions, but they had very different relationships to diplomatic power. As Erica Heinsen-Roach writes, comparing Dutch and North African attitudes to their Jewish colleagues (2019):

[Could] Jewish mediators be considered public ministers? … [One Dutch consul] spoke for all and expressed it most clearly: “Jews cannot send delegates because they no longer have a state.” As second-class citizens they could not represent European governments either. France, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire never appointed Jewish diplomats. They relied on so-called court Jews, men who rarely resided at court but who supplied rulers with loans and arms and acted as unofficial mediators between states—that is, they functioned outside official diplomatic channels. In contrast, Muslim rulers in the Mediterranean appointed Jewish merchants as agents for the same reason that European states relied on them in their capacity as court Jews.

Figure 4: “Aplauso Harmonico al Illustrissimo Señor Don Ioseph Toledano,” in
de Barrios, Triumpho del govierno popular (Amsterdam, 1684)

Heinsen-Roach also observes that ransoming captives was an essential task of diplomatic agents on both sides (and one of the main sources of friction between European consuls and Maghribi representatives). In fact, we have quite a few accounts of the activity of members of Pinhas Toledano’s family from the time he was acquiring and inscribing his copies of the Levush! Between 1683-1685, two of Pinhas’ brothers, Yosef and Hayyim Toledano, along with their brother-in-law Ya‘aqov Sasportas, negotiated an important peace treaty between the Netherlands and Morocco (Hirschberg 1974). Yosef Toledano’s role in this treaty was celebrated in a commemorative poem by one of the foremost Sephardi Jewish poets of Amsterdam, Daniel Miguel Levi de Barrios.

Daniel Toledano’s children continued in the service of Mulay Isma‘il for several more decades. Hayyim Toledano is documented in the Mercure Gallant as visiting Amsterdam on another diplomatic mission in 1691 (Attal 1983), while in the summer of 1698, the Gazette de Paris reported that an unnamed son of Daniel Toledano was again in the Hague on behalf of Mulay Isma‘il with two important goals, namely, negotiating for weapons and ransoming captives:

The Hague, 12 June 1698
An Envoy of the King of Morocco, named Toledano — the son of the previous Envoy of this Prince — has recently arrived in this country. He made notice of his arrival to the States General, and then presented to them a  Memorandum, by which he demanded on behalf of his Master that they provide him with cannons, guns, lead, and ammunition, conforming to the last Treaty which he had made with them, and [notified them] that he would pay the cost of all those of [the Sultan’s] subjects who were enslaved in the States.

Perhaps the most fascinating source comes from two decades later: another Toledano (or perhaps the same one?) was sent by Mulay Isma‘il to Spain in 1717, but refused entry by a representative of the Spanish Inquisition, at which point the Sultan penned a  polite but firm letter to Philip V, King of Spain (as translated by Matar, 2009):

From the Sublime Commander in God Almighty, Isma‘il… to Philip the Fifth, the tyrant of Castile:

Know that before this hour, and a few days ago, we sent to the city of Cadiz a Jew of the Jews who serve us and perform for us some of our worldly duties. His name is Simon [sic] Toledano, and he was accompanied by six servants, also Jews. [We desired] that the aforementioned Jew should be permitted to travel for a specific number of days to finish the blessed duties we had assigned him. We thought that matter easy, uncomplicated, and unproblematic. But then it appeared to us from what [the governor] did that he could not grant that permission, and that if he could, he would have. The reason was that diwan [office] of yours, called the Inquisition…

As for the claim of the Inquisition that the company of the Jews will corrupt the belief of the common people — if that had been true, we would not have permitted them among us. For when a man chooses a religion for himself, nothing can corrupt it… Do you not know that in our blessed kingdom we have Christians and friars in churches and places where they perform their infidelity, as is their custom, in front of idols and crucifixes and everything else needed inside their churches—all of which is decried in our religion? But we have permitted them to worship because of the good will that your ancestors had shown. Therefore, we expect you to reciprocate and permit that dhimmi [i.e. Toledano] to enter the city of Cadiz, and stay there for two or three months until he completes the errands we have assigned him. Written on the 20th of Muharram, the beginning of the year 1129 [AH = 12 January 1717 CE].

Which Toledanos are these? According to Toledano family histories, Daniel b. Yosef Toledano had nine children, of which at least three are documented as Moroccan diplomatic agents in the years between 1680-1720: Moses (Moshe), Haym (Hayyim), and Joseph (Yosef). Nabil Matar wrote that Daniel Toledano was accompanied by his son Moses in 1698, and again in 1717, and considers the naming of the 1717 representative as “Simon” as a “scribal error.” Meanwhile, Fatima Rhorchi identifies the representative of 1717 as Joseph Toledano, who was also documented as being in the Hague in 1699.

In any case, the Toledano brother who owned our books, Pinhas, clearly died in 1701 (so he could not have been sent on the 1717 mission to Spain), and he himself is not recorded in any source as a merchant or agent of the sultan. But it is fascinating to note that his acquisition of these books is happening around the same time that his father and brothers were in Europe on repeated diplomatic missions. Was it through them that these books made their way from Italy to Morocco? In any case, Pinhas’ explicit mention in his inscription of “the coinage of the sultan Mulay Isma‘il” is a reminder of his family’s close ties to the sultan, and a rare illustration of the overlapping spheres of secular political influence and rabbinic Jewish authority in early modern Morocco —something also personified by Pinhas’ father Daniel, who, as Emily Gottreich points out, “saw to the consolidation of Moroccan Judaism by asserting his own authority [in opposing the Sabbatean movement], and linking it to Alawi authority [in his role as the sultan’s advisor]” (Gottreich 2013).

(As an aside: in this respect, it is astonishing to see that Daniel Bahlul was appointed as the legal guardian over Pinhas’ children, since Pinhas’ father was a vociferous anti-Sabbatean, while Daniel Bahlul was one of the most prominent of Moroccan Sabbateans in the 1660s and 1670s: Moyal 1984. But it seems that by 1701, the tensions had calmed enough for the Bahluls and Toledanos to integrate their families. As Gottreich writes, Moroccan rabbis were able “to control and ultimately assimilate the [Sabbatean] movement into normative Judaism without ever actually destroying it.”)

And how did his books — at least these two of them — get to Toronto? After Pinhas’ death (perhaps prematurely?) in 1701, they were inherited by his son Meir, whose script appears much cruder and tentatively written than his father’s elegant inscription; was he still a child at the time? Further details of Meir’s life are unknown. A Daniel b. Pinhas Toledano is mentioned in a legal document from Fes, dated 1709; this is probably the same as Meir’s brother of the same name, so perhaps they both moved from Meknes back to Fes. All we can say is that by a century or so later, the books had migrated from Morocco to Algeria, where they were acquired by the scholar Sa‘adya ‘Amur (ca. 1800-1888), the head of the rabbinic court of Algiers, who signed his name next to Toledano’s. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century, they were acquired by the noted Jewish book collector Albert Dov Friedberg, who donated them to the Fisher Library in 1996. Here, they will remain, not only as books on the shelf but as windows into the world of a Jewish family of “merchants of the sultan” in early modern Morocco.

Works Cited

  • Attal, Robert. “Un ambassadeur juif du Maroc dans la synagogue d’Amsterdam en 1691.” Revue des études juives 142:3-4 (1983).
  • Bennaim, Yosef. Malkhe rabanan. Jerusalem, 1931.
  • Garcia-Arenal, Mercedes, and Gerald Wiegers. A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
  • Gottreich, Emily Benichou. “Of Messiahs and Sultans: Shabbatai Zevi and Early Modernity in Morocco.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 12.2 (2013).
  • Heinsen-Roach, Erica. Consuls and Captives : Dutch-North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean. University of Rochester Press, 2019.
  • Hirschberg, Haim Zeev. A History of the Jews in North Africa. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
  • Matar, Nabil. Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
  • Moyal, Elie. Ha-tenu‘a ha-shabtait be-maroqo: toldoteha u-meqoroteha. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984.
  • Rhorchi, Fatima. “Court Jews and their Role as Dhimmis and Influential Agents of Moroccan Sultans.” In Significant Others: Aspects of Deviance and Difference in Premodern Court Cultures (eds. Zita Rohr and Jonathan Spangler), Routledge, 2021.
  • Schroeter, Daniel. The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. Stanford University Press, 2002.
  • Toledano, Yaakov Tal. Ilan ha-yuhasin shel daniel toledano. Jerusalem, 1999.
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