Sept.2000 – 59-58 –Jewishgen-Caro-OUT

To JEWISH CARO-KARO S WORLDWIDE !
I am descended maternally from the Jewish Caro Family and am continuing the Caro/Karo family research started by the late Paul Jacobi LLB in his 1988 two-volume typescript on this subject. It is the first non-Rabbinical source, based on listed official documents, personal interviews and varied bibliographical sources.

Rabbi JOSEPH CARO (Toledo,Spain 1488 - 1575, Safed,Israel) was the compiler of the Code of Jewish Law, (Shulchan Aruch ­ Laid Table) followed by Orthodox Jews to this day.
Contrary to popular belief, there were numerous rabbis over the centuries with the same name, since the Spanish Inquisition. They too had families, but the ambition to belong to "the" Toledo-born Joseph Caro family, about whose close Sefardic family there are many "yawning genealogical gaps"(P. Jacobi) also gave rise to many fallacies and baseless wishful thinking of descent.

Unlike the non-Jewish Caros, the name originates from the Hebrew word kara or e.g. baÂ’al kore - professional Torah reader and leader of prayers. Over the centuries, spelling of the name in Latin were distorted either by border police, immigration officials' illegible handwriting or sheer necessity to: e.g. KARRO - KARU - KROH - QUARO - KARR. Mutual misunderstandings among escaping, persecuted Jews and the new host countries' dialects are common reasons, but do not automatically indicate Jewish ancestry today.

The Yad VaShem Holocaust Authority (Jerusalem) has lists of C/Karo victims. World War II scattered the surviving Jewish C/Karos of Europe, Poland, Russia, the Baltics, the Balkans and North Africa, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Many are still looking for close and distant relatives.
The younger generations have grown up not knowing and not asking. The past and the pain that went with it, was superceded by new and immediate problems of re-establishing a new existence.
For the last 18 years, I have been trying to record all Jewish C/Karos or descendants world-wide, (through letters or personal interviews) with all the family details they know and can vouch for ­ which I check against historic, bibliographic and geographic sources.
Sometimes, inquiries about C/Karos who lived in accurately-quoted and spelled geographic locations can indicate the presence of others who have not survived or have disappeared. Obviously I draw no trees, make no diagrams nor linkages unless given to me by the family. I have my own ideas about possible connections, but don't venture beyond that.
My research does not include any other spelling form of the name other than :Caro/Karo.

If you can quote the approximate year, the earliest geographic place name (village-shtetl-town,district and country) your Jewish C/Karo ancestor came from, I may be able to give you other family members' names who also lived there, and which have been previously discovered and recorded.

It's FREE - AND THERE'S NO GUARANTEE

Chava Agmon.
Caro Family Research
havahug@barak-online.net