SEFER HA-YASHAR (ETHICAL TREATISE), ATTRIBUTED TO RABBI JACOB TAM, [CONSTANTINOPLE, CA. 1515-1520]

The first edition of one of the most popular ethical books of the Middle Ages.

The present work, divided into eighteen short she‘arim (chapters), is an anonymous, thirteenth-fourteenth-century philosophical-ethical treatise concerned with the relationship between man and God and the requirement that man imitate God and thus fulfill the purpose of creation. The author writes in his introduction that he studied Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Hovot ha-levavot (see lot 228) but found its treatment of certain principles too profound for the average reader and therefore composed the present work in simple language. Sefer ha-yashar has been variously attributed to Rabbis Jacob Tam (ca. 1100-1171), Zerahiah ha-Levi Gerondi (twelfth century), Zerahiah ha-Yevani, and Jonah Gerondi (ca. 1200-1263), though none of these ascriptions has withstood modern scholarly critique. The association with Tam is apparently due to that great Tosafist’s authorship of a separate, halakhic work by the same name. Sefer ha-yashar would go on to be reprinted dozens of times down to the present day.