The third bearer of Jewish thought, Abraham Ankawa (1812–1890), stands at the geographical crossroads between Morocco and Algeria, between Salé and Oran.
Born in Salé in 1812, son of Mordekhaï Ankawa (1779–1840), himself a dayan in Salé. Abraham was at once a Talmudic scholar, a shohet (ritual slaughterer), and a dayan (rabbinic judge). His geographical itinerary attests to the extent of the Sephardic rabbinic network in the 19th century: he travelled to Livorno in 1838 and 1858, supervising there the printing of his works at the publisher Benamozegh, the most prestigious Hebrew publishing house in the Mediterranean.
The first major work published by Abraham Ankawa during his second sojourn in Livorno, Zevaḥim Shelemim ve-Khesef Aḥer condenses the author's halakhic thought on the laws of sheḥita (ritual slaughter) and confirms his role as a bearer between the Sephardic schools of the Maghreb. The volume, of 226 pages, presents the typographical layout characteristic of the Livorno editions: at the center, the text of the Hilkhot Sheḥita of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah; around it, Ankawa's own commentary, divided into Kesef Aḥer (discussion of the Maimonidean positions) and Zevaḥim Shelemim proper (a synthesis of the novellae of the Rishonim and Aḥaronim); at the bottom of the page, the editio princeps of the Maggid Mishné of the Algerian rabbi Yehouda Alkalaz (~1540), drawn for the first time from a manuscript of which Ankawa had become the custodian. Appended are a Seder ha-Get — a practical manual for drafting bills of divorce, arranged in alphabetical order to serve rabbinic courts — and a Seder ha-Ḥalitsa, on the rite of levirate. The work provoked a polemic with several Algerian rabbis, led by R. Moshé Sebaoun of Oran. Ankawa replied two years later in Tohorat ha-Kessef (Livorno, 1860). This controversy, studied by Jessica Marglin, illustrates the halakhic tensions born of the encounter between the Moroccan traditions imported by Ankawa and the indigenous Algerian rabbinate confronted with the French colonial reforms. Zevaḥim Shelemim is moreover a precious secondary source for the genealogy of the Alnaqua lineage: in his preface, Abraham Ankawa reports the tradition according to which the Rab of Tlemcen is said to have had a third son named Salomon, and even a fourth named Yehuda — information that no other known primary source confirms to this day, but which deserves to be added to the file of hypotheses on the immediate descent of the Rab.
During a three-year sojourn in Tlemcen, he founded a Talmudic academy that prolonged the tradition of the Rab Éphraïm, established four centuries earlier. His masterwork, the Keren Hemer ('An admirable vineyard'), published in Livorno in two volumes (1869 and 1871), is a collection of legal decisions taken by Castilian judges who came to Morocco after the expulsion of 1492 — a compilation without equivalent in Sephardic rabbinic literature.
Convinced that adaptation to the laws of the host country was necessary, Abraham Ankawa relied on the Talmudic principle 'dina de-malkhuta dina' ('the law of the country in which a Jew resides is binding upon him'), a principle derived from the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 54b) and codified by Maimonides and the Shulhan Arukh. This position, resolutely modernist for its time, led him into controversies with the more conservative rabbis, who held that rabbinic law must prevail in all circumstances. He resigned from his post as chief rabbi of Mascara (Algeria) in 1878 at the close of these controversies. Jessica Marglin's article (Jewish Social Studies, 2014) brilliantly analyzes his trajectory as that of a man living between two empires (Morocco and colonial France) and two legal systems, attempting to harmonize them for the benefit of his community.