Solomon Ayllon

Who was Solomon Ayllon?

Solomon Ayllon was haham of the Sephardic congregations in London and Amsterdam, and a follower of Shabbethai Ẓebi. His name is derived from the town of Ayllon, in what is now the province of Segovia.

Ayllon was neither a general scholar nor a Talmudist of standing. But his history is closely interwoven with that of Shabbethaism in both the East and the West.

Ayllon's youth was passed in Salonica, which was probably his birthplace, although some persons assert that Safed was the place, because many Shabbethaians claimed to be of Palestinian birth. He associated with the Shabbethaian circles of Joseph Philosoph, Solomon Florentin, and other leading spirits of antinomian and communistic tendencies. There he is said to have married as his divinely appointed spouse a woman from whom another man had separated without the formality of a divorce, only to experience that she soon left him for a third spouse, whose "affinity" seemed holier to this strange sect than the bonds of lawful matrimony.

A few years later he visited Europe as a meshullaḥ from the Palestinian congregations to collect funds for the poor of Palestine, leaving his wife and children domiciled in Safed, and having apparently publicly broken with Shabbethaism. From Livorno, where he was in 1688, he repaired to Amsterdam and thence to London, where, after a few months' stay, he was appointed haham on June 6, 1689.