On October 7, some eight hundred thousand people, about 10 percent of Israel’s population and roughly 13 percent of its Jews, attended the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in Jerusalem. Ninety-three at his death, he was the single most powerful rabbi in history and for decades the kingmaker of Israeli politics. His extraordinary, complicated life reshaped not only traditional Judaism and Israeli politics and society but also scrambled familiar categories—of religious and secular, tradition and change, Israeli-ness and Zionism—in ways both petty and profound.
Born in Baghdad in 1920 to an undistinguished family, he immigrated to Jerusalem at age four and from childhood on displayed rare powers of memory and study, as well as a striking mix of religious fervor and intellectual independence. Rising through the ranks of the religious hierarchy, Rav Ovadia, as he was known, served as rabbinical judge in Cairo, Petah Tikva, and Jerusalem; as chief rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa; and, beginning in 1973, as the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel.
