Israel Moses Hazan
Israel Moses Hazan (1808 October 1862 in Beirut) was a Sephardic rabbi from Smyrna. Life. He was taken by his father Eliezer Hazan to Jerusalem (1811), where he was educated under his grandfather, Joseph ben Hayyim Hazan. In 1840 he became a member of a rabbinical college; in 1848 he was appointed "meshullach" (messenger). While at Rome he was elected chief rabbi. In 1852 he resigned this office for the rabbinate of Corfu, and in 1857 he was called to the rabbinate of Alexandria. In 1862 he went to Jaffa; but, being in ill health, he removed  to Beirut, where he died. He was buried in Sidon. In Rome and in Corfu he was held in high esteem, and the poet Ludwig August von Frankl, who saw him in Corfu (1856), speaks in glowing terms of his venerable personality. While a champion of Orthodoxy, he possessed sufficient independence of mind to protest against the superstitious practices customary among the Jews of Rome, who insisted on washing corpses with warm water, and who would not allow a clock in the yard of the synagogue. He wrote a letter condemning the reforms advocated in the Brunswick rabbinical conference (published  in the collection "Kin'at Tziyyon," Amsterdam, 1846). In his book "Iyye ha-Yam", a commentary on the Responsa of the Geonim, he provided an extensive analysis of the Geonic chain of tradition, arguing among other things that the 'Spanish' version of Iggeret Sherira Gaon (Sherira Gaon's epistle) was the original version, in line with the scholarly consensus of the time. Works. Other responsa, with homilies and a defence of the Kabbalah, remain in manuscript.