Three Biographies by Two Maskilim: Abraham Menahem Mendel Mohr of Lemberg and Isaac Bekhor Amarachi of Salonika

Isaac Bekhor Amarachi is a relevant Sephardic author of moralistic works in Ladino and a prolific translator who, in the mid-nineteenth century, published in Salonika his entire literary opus. His writings combine relevant topics within the Jewish tradition with secular knowledge (universal wisdom, historiography, geography, natural sciences, scientific discoveries, etc.) in his quest to educate his readers in the vernacular and to make them more enlightened. Among his translations to Ladino there are three biographical works, written in Hebrew by Abraham Menaḥem Mendel Mohr (1815–1868): Keter Shem Tov [‘The Crown of the Good Name’] (Lemberg, 1847), Moses Montefiore’s biography (Salonika, 1850); Tiferet Yisrael [‘The Hope of Israel’] (Lemberg, 1843), a history of the Rothschild family (Salonika, 1850); and Ḥut ha-Meshulash [‘The Threefold Cord’] (Lemberg, 1853), a biography of Napoleon III (Salonika, 1857). The aim of this paper is to examine these biographies in Ladino and shed light on how the Hebrew literary works written by Abraham Menaḥem Mendel Mohr, a maskil from Habsburg Lemberg, inspired and shaped the Ladino literary legacy of Isaac Bekhor Amarachi, a Sephardic Rabbi from Ottoman Salonika.