Not the least remarkable thing about Rabbi Haddaya was his bachelorhood, which seemed particularly inexplicable in light of his fondness for arranging matches and raising doweries for brides. Sometimes he even traveled great distances for the sole purpose of presiding at some wedding. And yet he himself declined to take a wife, a refusal that he justified by claiming that a childhood injury had left him unable to have children.
When Rabbi Haddaya first came to Salonika in 1812, he stayed at the home of Yosef Mani, Avraham Mani’s father, and made a great impression on him and his family, especially by virtue of his observations about Napoleon, who was then in the midst of his Russian campaign. After spending several months in Salonika, the rabbi continued on to Constantinople, where he finally appeared to settle down. He ceased his wandering and opened a small school in the Haidar Pasha quarter along the Asiatic coast, and soon after Avraham Mani arrived to study there. Although the boy was not a particularly good student, Rabbi Haddaya appreciated his good qualities, among which was a great capacity for loyalty.
Young Avraham Mani sought the closeness of the old rabbi and grew so dependent on him that Rabbi Shabbetai sometimes referred to him in private as “that little pisgado” Nevertheless, he was sad to see the boy go when he had to return to Salonika after the failure of his father’s business. Indeed, the emotion that he felt on that occasion quite surprised him. Soon after, his old wanderlust returned. Once again he began to travel all over the Ottoman Empire, particularly to Mesopotamia and Persia, although he also journeyed southward to Jerusalem, where he stayed at the home of Refa’el Valero and became acquainted with Refa’el’s wife and his sister-in-law Flora, whose unmarried state was a cause of great wonderment to him.
Upon his return to Constantinople in the early 1830s, Rabbi Haddaya resumed his ties with ex-pupil Avraham Mani, who crossed the Bosporus from time to time to visit his former teacher. Rabbi Haddaya even tried to arrange a match between Avraham, whose wife died in 1832, and Flora Molkho, who had in the meantime moved from Jerusalem to Salonika after her sister’s death. When Flora Molkho showed no interest in such a marriage, the rabbi invited her to Constantinople in the hope of changing her mind, and when this proved impossible, he suggested several other possibilities, all of which she rejected too. Finally, in a surprising and perhaps even despairing step, he proposed to her himself and was astonished when she accepted. The betrothal took place secretly in order to avoid hurting his dear disciple Avraham Mani; similarly, not wanting tongues to wag over his marriage to a woman forty years his junior, Rabbi Haddaya wed Flora in a ceremony conducted by himself in a remote town in Mesopotamia, for which he was barely able to round up the ten Jews needed for the occasion.
Despite the age difference between them, the couple’s marriage worked out well. Rabbi Haddaya continued to travel widely, and his wife Flora was accustomed to being alone. When Avraham Mani sent him his son Yosef, the rabbi was pleased by the gesture of conciliation and took the boy in, even though he himself hardly taught anymore due to his frequent absences. Although Yosef proved to be a highly imaginative child who at times seemed out of touch with reality, he was able to charm whomever he met, and above all, the rabbi’s wife, whose childlessness had left her increasingly isolated. Thus, he grew up in the Haddaya household, the excitable child of two elderly “parents.”
Rabbi Haddaya did not play an active role in the betrothal of his wife’s niece Tamara Valero to Yosef Mani in Beirut. For a while, he even seemed opposed to it. However, after the newlyweds settled in Jerusalem and Avraham Mani disappeared there too, and especially, after hearing of Yosef Mani’s death from the rabbinical fund-raiser Gavriel ben-Yehoshua, Rabbi Haddaya grew so distraught that his health was affected. He decided to set out for Jerusalem to find out what had happened, and since travel by land was unsafe, he resolved to sail from Salonika on a ship manned largely by Jews. In the late spring of 1848, more than thirty years after last having set foot in Europe, he crossed the Bosporus westward.
Rabbi Haddaya was received in Salonika with great pomp and ceremony and seen off at his ship by Rabbis Gaon, Arditi, and Luverani. Yet his own excitement must have been even greater than theirs, because the robust though slender old man had hardly been at sea for a day when he suffered a stroke, a thrombosis in the left hemisphere of his brain that caused him to lose the power of speech and all control over the right side of his body. Although able to understand everything said to him, he could no longer answer, and when he tried writing, the letters came out backward in an illegible scrawl. Since it was impossible to sail on in such circumstances, the captain changed course for the port of Piraeus, from which the paralyzed man was brought to a Jewish inn in Athens. There he lay, often smiling, nodding, and making sounds like “tu tu tu.”
News of the revered rabbi’s illness spread quickly and Jews gathered from near and far to help Doña Flora minister to him. In no time an entire support system sprang up that was most ably directed by her. The Greek governor of Athens stationed a permanent guard by the entrance to the inn, and Rabbi Haddaya, who sat covered by a silk blanket in a special wheelchair brought from Salonika, seemed almost to be enjoying his new situation, which spared him the need at last to express his opinions and left him free to listen to the Jews who came to see him while smiling at them and occasionally nodding or shaking his head. Nevertheless, his wife, who discerned a slow but gradual deterioration in his condition, did everything she could to avoid exciting him.
Thus, when the “vanished” Avraham Mani turned up unexpectedly one winter day at the inn in a state of great agitation, Doña Flora granted him permission to see his old rabbi “for a brief while and only for a single conversation.”
Doña Flora’s half of the conversation is missing.
— In truth, Doña Flora, for a brief while only, for one short conversation. I am compelled to, for the love of God! Please do not deny me that. Am I not, after all, besides a member of the family, also the eldest of his pupils?
— Yes. I will cry no more.
— There will be no raising of my voice or upsetting him.
— I will be most gentle.
— With much anxious supplication. Who of us does not pray for God’s grace? “Though a sharpened sword lie athwart a man’s throat, he must not…” But does the rabbi know I am here? Has he retained his active intelligence? The Jews outside say, “Rabbi Shabbetai has left his own self; he now ascends from dream to dream.”