ר׳ רפאל חיים יצחק קאריגל

ר׳ רפאל חיים יצחק קאריגל (1733–1777) was a Hebron-born rabbi, preacher and emissary whose journeys connected Ottoman Palestine with Mediterranean, Atlantic and early American Jewish communities. Ordained around age seventeen, he left Hebron in 1754 and spent extended periods in Constantinople, Curaçao, Hebron, London, Jamaica and the North American colonies. In London he taught in a bet midrash; in Curaçao and later Barbados he performed rabbinic functions. His best-documented episode came in Newport, Rhode Island, from March to July 1773. There he officiated at Yeshuat Israel, now Touro Synagogue, and formed an unusually close intellectual friendship with the Congregational minister Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale. They met repeatedly to study Hebrew, rabbinic exegesis, Kabbalah and the situation of the Holy Land, then continued corresponding in Hebrew. His Spanish Shavuot sermon, translated by Abraham Lopez and printed as The Salvation of Israel , was the first published Jewish sermon in British North America. Stiles commissioned Samuel King's authenticated portrait of him, now at Yale. After Newport he travelled to Suriname and Barbados, where he served as hakham and died in 1777; his trilingual gravestone survives at Nidhe Israel cemetery.