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Nehemiah Hayon

Nehemiah Hayon

1650 CE–1730 CE · Acharonim · Sarajevo

Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon (c. 1650–c. 1730) was a Sephardic kabbalist and itinerant preacher whose Sabbatian writings ignited one of the great religious controversies of the early eighteenth century. Born in Sarajevo and educated in Hebron, he wandered through the Ottoman lands, Italy, and central Europe, printing kabbalistic works that his opponents condemned as veiled Sabbatian theology.

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About the Controversy

After an education in Hebron and a brief rabbinate in Skopje, Hayon wandered for decades through Palestine, Egypt, and the Ottoman Balkans, developing a kabbalistic system that critics read as a thinly veiled Sabbatian theology of the Godhead. Between 1711 and 1713 he printed his works — among them Oz le-Elohim — in Venice, Prague, and Berlin.

In 1713 he reached Amsterdam, where the storm peaked. The Sephardic court under Hakham Solomon Ayllon examined his book and, on 7 August 1713, declared him innocent — even as the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, the Hakham Tzvi, had weeks earlier joined Rabbi Moshe Hagiz in excommunicating him as a dangerous heretic. The clash split Amsterdam and reverberated across Europe.

Condemned by rabbinic courts in many lands, Hayon spent his final years wandering under repeated bans (Hamburg-Altona excommunicated him in 1726) and died around 1730 in North Africa.

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Stop 1 of 51650–1668Born

SarajevoסרייבוBosnia

What they did here

Born into a Sephardic family in Sarajevo around 1650.

About Sarajevo

Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, became home to a Sephardic Jewish community after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, established under Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century. For centuries it was one of the principal Sephardic communities of the Balkans, with a Ladino-speaking culture; the famed medieval Sarajevo Haggadah, carried from Spain, is preserved there.

See other sages who lived in Sarajevo→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Nehemiah Hayon’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Nehemiah Hayon’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Jewish world

Works

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