Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Perhaps the most powerful rabbi in history, Yosef dramatically reshaped Israeli politics and religion.

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Ovadia Yosef was a Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel and the longtime spiritual leader of the haredi Orthodox Shas party. Perhaps the most powerful rabbi in history, Yosef’s leadership of Shas over nearly three decades dramatically reshaped Israeli politics, society and religion. He was also an immense scholar and creative interpreter of Jewish law who also had a common touch, expressed by his lifelong affinity for teaching day-laborers and tradesmen.

Born in Baghdad in 1920, he arrived in Jerusalem with his family when he was four years old and quickly distinguished himself by his remarkable memory, powers of concentration, religious fervor and original cast of mind. When his father, a poor grocer, requested he suspend his studies to work in the family store, Yosef’s teachers volunteered to take his place so his studies could continue uninterrupted. By his late teens, he had already begun to shape a distinctive profile, combining mastery of Talmud, its commentaries and the vast responsa literature, with a gift for teaching everyday people along with scholars.

His first rabbinic post was as a judge serving the Jewish community of Cairo. On returning to Israel, he served on the rabbinical court of Petah Tikva and, from 1968 to 1973, as chief Sephardic rabbi of Tel Aviv. In 1973, he was elected Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel.

Over time, he developed a striking judicial philosophy marked by two characteristics. The first was a humane responsiveness to the times and a tolerant attitude towards less-religious Jews. Yosef ruled that Ethiopian Jews and soldiers converted through the Israeli military rabbinate should be considered fully Jewish. He allowed deaf-mutes who could follow the prayers to be counted as part of a prayer quorum. And he enacted standards of kashrut that served to make the cost of kosher food less prohibitive. These stances and others were not uncontroversial in deeply Orthodox circles and marked him as the rare leader of unflinching traditionalism and great erudition who was nevertheless independent enough to soften the harder edges of Jewish law in a rapidly changing society.

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The second characteristic was his championing of the Sephardic legal tradition and its crowning achievement: the 16th-century code of Jewish law known as the Shulchan Arukh. Yosef came of age at a time when the masses of Mizrahi Jews coming to Israel were regularly treated as second-class citizens, a consequence of both the generally dire material circumstances of the new state and the condescension of the Ashkenazi elites who dominated Israel’s leadership in its early decades. This was also true of Israel’s haredi Orthodox community, whose Ashkenazi rabbis and politicians saw their Sephardic counterparts as lesser scholars and authorities. Yosef helped Mizrahi Jews regain much of the religious and cultural self-confidence they had lost as they immigrated to a young state where they regularly experienced discrimination.

Yosef’s long-simmering resentment at the Ashkenazi elite would explode in his clashes with Shlomo Goren, the Religious Zionist scholar along whom he served both in Tel Aviv and in the national chief rabbinate. Goren, who founded the IDF’s military chaplaincy, was an outsized figure too, whose learning and judicial innovativeness was matched by his imperious and combative personality. Yosef’s tensions with Goren played a major role in ending his tenure as chief rabbi in 1983, leaving him with a deep anger that mirrored the anger many Sephardic Jews felt toward the Ashkenazi establishment.

The year after his tenure as Sephardic chief rabbi ended, Yosef became the patron of the Shas Party, formed two years earlier by Ashkenazi haredim as a vehicle for garnering Sephardic support. Under Yosef’s leadership the party became an independent force to be reckoned with.

Shas was an anomaly in Israel’s crowded political landscape: a haredi Orthodox party whose supporters were mostly not haredi. Its success reflected the non-ideological traditionalism that had long characterized Sephardic Jews. In Europe, widespread secularization and the emergence of Reform Judaism had sparked a fierce backlash, giving rise to an ultra-Orthodoxy that saw itself as a separatist movement. Among the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, the process of modernization was less conflictual so the lines between Orthodox and other Jews were not as hard and fast. Shas was thus able to appeal to voters who were not punctiliously observant, even though Yosef himself adopted the Ashkenazi model of ideologically committed ultra-Orthodoxy.

Shas won six seats in the Israeli Knesset in 1988, which grew to ten in 1996. In 1999, the party won 17 seats and 13 percent of the popular vote. Yosef’s home in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood became a mandatory pilgrimage site for politicians seeking his endorsement and blessing.

Yosef deftly steered Shas toward a middle course between the theological anti-Zionism of the Ashkenazi haredi parties and the theologically inspired nationalism of Religious Zionism. Shas’ approach might be called un-Zionist — taking the state of Israel as neither the work of the devil nor God’s vehicle of redemption. This gave Shas great flexibility, not least on matters of peace and war. Yosef gave precedence to the Jewish legal principle of pikuach nefesh, which privileges the saving of human life over nearly every other religious consideration and enabled him to bless the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that included the return of the Sinai Peninsula, a step many Orthodox Israeli rabbis considered a violation of Jewish law. He subsequently ordered Shas not to oppose the Oslo Accords, which was similarly based on the land-for-peace formula. While Yosef was in principle supportive of negotiations aimed at achieving a peace agreement with the Palestinians, he became increasingly pessimistic about them.

The scope and perils of Shas’ achievements came to a head in 1999, the year of its strongest electoral showing ever, when Aryeh Deri, the mastermind behind the party’s ascent, became the first of several Shas politicians to be jailed for corruption. Other darkening tones began to take hold as well. Though in his pre-political years Yosef had strenuously objected to the popular study of Kabbalah, he eventually approved the mass distribution of pro-Shas kabbalistic amulets in political campaigning. His articulations of Sephardic grievance increasingly turned to a strident populism and, not infrequently, demagoguery.

His funeral in 2013, attended by several hundred thousand people, was the largest in Israel’s history. In the years since, Deri has reemerged as Shas’ unchallenged leader and a pivotal figure in Israeli politics. One after another of Yosef’s sons has succeeded him as chief rabbi. And the surge of self-confidence that Yosef sparked has helped propel Sephardic culture to a more prominent place in Israeli society.

In death as in life, Yosef scrambles familiar categories. His numerous, monumental works of Jewish law, his lifelong attachment to common people, his political approach mixing stridency and reconciliation, his jurisprudence combining leniency and rigor — these are just some of the varied elements that will fuel long debates about how he is best understood and remembered.