Rabbi David Abraham Pipano’s Hagor Ha-Ephod: A Historical–Halakhic Source for Writing Given Names in Gittin of Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the Balkans ‏

Jewish onomastics is a diverse field of study, ever changing from generation to generation regarding the frequency and fashion in the choice of personal names and their social impact.

Today I will present another direction of research, namely the use of halakhic decisions by the rabbis of these communities which reflect the challenges brought about by the Moderna.

Illustrating this genre, I present Rabbi David Avraham Pipano’s important halakhic work, Hagor Ephod. Rabbi Pipano was born in Thessaloniki and died in Sofia, Bulgaria (1851-1924). He served as rabbi and cantor in Thessaloniki and later became the Chief Rabbi of Sofia. In his halakhic book Hagor Ha-Ephod (Sophia, 1925), which deals with Even Ha-ezer, i.e., family laws, we learn about his approach to halakhic jurisprudence as well as issues in writing names, especially in bills of divorce. His expertise and halakhic authority in these matters were recognized by rabbinic authorities throughout the Middle East and the Maghreb. They referred to him in their decisions in writing names in Gitin. These halakic novellae are an important source for understanding the challenges of modern society that effected these communities, such as coping with the influence of the secular world which expressed itself among other matters with the need to write foreign names in bills of divorce. This was especially relevant for spelling women’s non-Hebrew names and the same for foreign male names as well when spelled phonetically.

Rabbi Pipano made decisions on people with no patronymic, possibly because they were proselytes to be recorded as the son of Avraham> יצחק בן אברהם, and converts from Judaism to be written in Gitin only with their Hebrew names.

In this paper, I present Rabbi Pipano’s contribution to onomastic studies by investigating his halachic decisions with data demonstrating the rabbinic authorities reaction to the social changes facing the Jewish communities of the Balkan in the modern period.