Hachmei Provence

Hachmei Provence (Hebrew: חכמי פרובנס, romanized: sages of Provence) refers to the hekhamim, "sages" or "rabbis," of Provence, now Occitania in France, which was a great center for Rabbinical Jewish scholarship in the times of the Tosafists. The singular form is hakham, a Sephardic and Hachmei Provençal term for a rabbi.

In matters of halakha, as well as in their traditions and customs, the Provençal hekhamim occupy an intermediate position between the Sephardic Judaism of the neighboring Spanish scholars and the Old French (similar to the Nusach Ashkenaz) tradition represented by the Tosafists.

The term "Provence" in Jewish tradition is not limited to today's administrative region of Provence but to the entirety of Occitania. This includes Narbonne (which is sometimes informally, though incorrectly, transliterated as "Narvona" as a result of the back-and-forth transliteration between Rabbinical Hebrew and Old Occitan), Lunel (which is informally transliterated Lunil), and the city of Montpellier, 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) from the Mediterranean coast. It also included cities which at that time formed part of the Catalonia's political and cultural domain, such as Perpignan. In some ways, the Jewish traditions of Catalonia were closer to those of Provence than to those of the Kingdom of Castile and al-Andalus.

There was a distinctive Provençal liturgy used by the Jews of the Papal enclave of Comtat Venaissin, who remained following the expulsion of the Jews from the rest of France.^[1] This liturgy was intermediate in character between the Sephardi rites and the Nusach Ashkenaz, and was in some ways closer to the Italian rite than to either.

After the French Revolution, when France annexed Comtat Venaissin, the Provençal rite was replaced by the Portuguese Sephardic liturgy, which is used by the Jews of Carpentras today.