Professor Meir Benayahu's collection of documents includes a contractual agreement between some Jewish merchants in Aleppo and a hakham by the name of Yeshaya Attia. In it, Attia undertakes to go to the city of Manchester in England to serve as the spiritual leader of a colony of Aleppine merchants there. The document is very important because it enables us to fix, with a high degree of probability, the date of the founding of the Aleppine community in Manchester, the first of many communities of Jews from Aleppo in the West. The document also sheds light on the reasons why Jews emigrated from Aleppo to Manchester and the way in which they organized into a community in their new home. This article traces the background of Jewish emigration from Aleppo to Manchester and the model that the mother community of Aleppine Jewry adopted in dealing with communities made up of emigrants from Aleppo.
