Haim Farhi (1750-1818)

Haim "El Muallim" Farhi Several Farhi families were the subject of numerous books, thesis, dissertations and news articles. Some of these are mentioned and referenced in this site. Haim "El Muallim" Farhi was one of the most written about, member of the family. He was a politician and philanthropist. From 1789 to his murder in 1818, he was the Financial Vizier and de-facto ruler of Acca (Acco, now Israel) and its province. Haim's brothers who lived in Damascus, later raised an army and laid a siege to Acco for 6 months against Abdullah Pasha who had ordered his murder and summary execution by issuing a Fatwa. An Acca square has been named after him. He owned the 14th century Farhi Bible, now in the possession of the Sassoon family. Click here for a detailed biography of Haim (in French) and for an engraving showing Haim at the court of El Jezzar. Another similar document written in English is called The Remarkable History of Pharchi.

Thanks to the research of Mathilde Tagger of Jerusalem, we have found a Farhi family who lived in 1465 in Zaragoza, Spain. They were involved in a legal dispute of their inheritance. Two other Farhi ( Salomon, Moshe) were documented as living in Avila Spain in 148o and 1492 respectively.

This is the first documented proof that some Farhi descendants of the two brothers of Ishtori HaFarhi lived in Spain. Ishtori was given "Farhi" as his family name around 1306 , he left Spain for Egypt and Eretz Israel. We assume that his brothers used the same family name as well.

January 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It is appropriate to mention that about 167 persons listed in the Fleurs de l'Orient died in Concentration camps during WW II. A total of 67 Farhi (including spouses) also perished during the Holocaust.

Here are the grim statistics of the Farhi who died based on their country of Deportation.

Austria: 6, 5 Yugoslavian born & 1 Egyptian born
Bulgaria, 2 from Bulgarian occupied territories.
France: 33 including 6 Bulgarian born; 10 Turkish born & 17 French born
Greece: 2 from Saloniki
Italy: 1 from Trieste
Romania : 4
Yugoslavia & Croatia : 19

New Farhi ( 251 persons) data was found at the 24th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, it consist mainlyof the work of 1) Mathilde Tagger ( Records of Shoah victims from various countries, World War I , Bulgarian veterans & deads, 2) Joseph Covo (The Jewish Cemetery of Shumen Bulgaria (1873-1966), from 653 jews buried there , 69 were Farhi, the largest number for that community), 3) the Illegal Immigration into Israel, 4) The list of Shoah victims from Yad Vashem , 4) the 1920 & 30 US census and 5) US Social Security death records.

A new database : Farhi (Others) was created for those 251 Farhi who were not already recorded in the Fleurs. Women may be listed under their married name. That database can only be browsed under the New Advanced Search.

The Farhi calligraphy and coat of arms (see above left) was done in 1999 by a Persian artist living in Istanbul. I asked him to render the Arabic and Hebrew letters in a Ottoman design with flowers. A visit to a local Jewish cemetary was necessary for him to copy the Hebrew letters. Please feel free to use them as a family crest. To save a copy of the jpeg file, click 0n farhi.jpg and save the file to your hard disk.