Month: April 2021

We recently got an email from reader JR Ayaso regarding our identification of the town אלקוליעא, which appears several times in Responsa Rivash, with Alcolea in Almeira Province, in Andalusia. He points out that there are several localities in Spain called “Alcolea” (prompting me to consider writing a song about all these Alcoleas, to the tune of Naomi Shemer’s “Al Kol Eleh”, but I digress), and suggests that Rivash is referring to Alcolea Del Rio, on the Guadalquivir River, in Seville Province. This prompted me to take a closer look.

Looking at our map of Responsa Rivash shows that Alcolea does, indeed, seem to be a geographical outlier. Since that map will be updated, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like now:

Alcolea is the relatively large green dot southeast of Granada. Almost all of the Rivash’s early responsa were written to Aragon and Navarre. In fact, the only major outliers, we thought, were Alcolea and the dot to the northwest of it, Pinar. It turned out that Pinar was a misidentification of פינה, which is actually Pina De Ebro, in Zaragoza Province, smack dab in the middle of Aragon. So it seems that Mr. Ayaso is correct; we got the wrong Alcolea.

What about Mr. Ayaso’s suggestion that it refers to Alcolea Del Rio? Well, it’s problematic for similar reasons; Seville is even further away from Rivash’s base in Aragon. But that is only two of the 13 Alcoleas on the Spanish Wikipedia disambiguation page. [Protip: When studying such things, look at the Wikipedia page of the local language. The English disambiguation page has only 9 Alcoleas.]

Meyer Kayserling, in his Jewish Encyclopedia entry for “Alcolea”, lists Responsa Rivash as a source on the community and writes that it is in Jaen Province. Jaen is also in Andalusia, and moreover, we found no Alcolea in that province. Perhaps he is referring to one of the other Alcoleas in Andalusia, but it would remain an outlier – possible, but only after discounting other possibilities.

The Jewish Virtual Library has an entry on Alcolea, which they identify, based on Encyclopedia Judaica, with Alcolea De Cinca – in Huesca Province, right in Rivash’s home territory. Furthermore, a while ago Prof. Simcha Emanuel shared with me a monograph by Dr. Zunz, titled “Uber die in den hebräisch-jüdischen Schriften vorkommenden hispanischen Ortnamen.” It is essentially a gazetteer of Iberian place names that appear in Hebrew works. Here’s Zunz’s entry for אלקוליעא:

Zunz points out that it is mentioned in Responsa Rivash and that it has the suffix דסינקה (De Cinca!) in a responsum of Rabbenu Nissim (Ran). Page 63 in the Rome Edition of Responsa Ran corresponds to responsum #30, written in 1349-50. Two other places are mentioned in this responsum about the acceptability of testimony to the betrothal of a woman named Bella. One, as Zunz notes, is אלבליט (or אלבליט דסינקאה), and the other, noted by Leon Feldman, is Lerida (לרידה; Lleida). We have identified אלבליט דסינקאה as Albalete De Cinca, a town that is literally across the River Cinca from Alcolea De Cinca. Lleida, the largest town in the region, is about 30 miles away. Ran’s responsum is thus addressed to the rabbinic leaders of the two small towns involved in the dispute and of the larger town nearby. You can see the dispute moving up the food chain from the village to the larger town to the acknowledged posek of the country.

Rivash was a primary disciple of Ran and, upon the latter’s death, became the leading halakhist of Aragon. It stands to reason that the responsa he wrote to Alcolea were indeed to Alcolea De Cinca, which was firmly in “his” territory, had a documented Jewish community, and had consulted with Rivash’s master when a dispute arose. This is not ironclad proof, but the evidence makes this conclusion the most likely by far.

Thank you, Mr. Ayaso, for asking this question and leading us down this fun little “rabbi hole”.