Bekache, Shalom
BEKACHE, SHALOM
BEKACHE, SHALOM (1848–1927), printer and publisher. He was born in Bombay of Baghdadi origin. After studying in Safed, he became a rabbi in Acre and then migrated to Algeria, where he was rabbi of the Ben-Thoa Synagogue, the oldest in Algiers, for 40 years. He contributed to the Hebrew periodicals Ha-Maggid, Ha-Meliẓ, and Ha-Ẓefirah. In 1885 he published in Leghorn in Judeo-Arabic Mevasser Tov, a historical, geographical, and literary miscellany, which was followed by a monthly bulletin, Or ha-Levanah, dedicated essentially to the history and geography of Ereẓ Israel; five issues were published. In about 1888 he established a small printing press in Algiers, which produced some 20 books in Judeo-Arabic, edited and translated by himself. These works, which deal with the history of the Jews of Babylonia and the kingdom of the Khazars in fictional form, were adapted to the intellectual standard of the Algerian Jews of that time and were useful in widening their historical knowledge. In 1891–93 Bekache published a weekly newspaper in Judeo-Arabic, Beit Yisrael. Niẓẓaḥon ha-Or al ha-Ḥoshekh ("Triumph of the Light over the Darkness," 1896) is a philosophical thesis in Hebrew presented in the form of a controversy between the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
bibliography:
zhb, 2 (1897), 37–38; 7 (1903), 153–4.
[Robert Attal]