SHULHAN ARUKH (HALAKHIC CODE), RABBI JOSEPH CARO, VENICE: [ALVISE BRAGADINI AND] MEIR BAR JACOB PARENZO, 1564-1565

The first edition of the most authoritative code of Jewish law.

Shulhan arukh, the magnum opus of Jewish law compiled in the mid-sixteenth century by Rabbi Joseph Caro (1488-1575), remains the standard legal code of Jewish religious practice to this day. The work follows the order of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s Sefer arba‘ah turim (see lots 30, 112, 166) and is divided into the same four main sections:

Orah hayyim (The Path of Life; see Ps. 16:11) deals with worship and ritual observance in the home and synagogue, through the course of the weekday, Sabbath, and festival cycle;

Yoreh de‘ah (Giver of Instruction; see Isa. 28:9) treats assorted ritual prohibitions and rules, especially dietary laws and regulations concerning menstrual impurity;

Even ha-ezer (The Rock of the Helpmate; see I Sam. 5:1 and the rabbinic interpretation of Gen. 2:18) discusses marriage, divorce, and other issues in family law; and

Hoshen ha-mishpat (The Breastplate of Decision; see Ex. 28:15) explores the administration and adjudication of civil law.

The origins of the Shulhan Arukh lie in Caro’s earlier work, the Beit yosef, a detailed commentary on the Tur in which Caro carefully examined each of the laws recorded in the earlier code, adducing their sources in Talmudic and medieval rabbinic literature and comparing the interpretations and rulings of the leading medieval authorities. The Shulhan arukh summarizes the conclusions of the Beit yosef. In general, Caro based his decisions on three earlier pillars of Jewish codification: Rabbis Isaac Alfasi (1013-1103), Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), and Asher ben Jehiel (ca. 1250-1327), the father of the Tur’s compiler. In cases of disagreement among them, Caro states that he usually followed the majority position.

Although some rabbis initially opposed basing religious law on a summary code rather than going back to the original legal sources, the Shulhan arukh rapidly came to be accepted in almost all Jewish communities as the most authoritative statement of normative religious law. In recent generations, acceptance of the Shulhan arukh has come to be regarded as a defining feature of religious Orthodoxy and traditionalism. The book has been reprinted over a thousand times throughout the Jewish world and, according to venerable Jewish historian Israel M. Ta-Shma, can be counted as “one of the few books whose appearance stands as a decisive landmark in the intellectual and spiritual history of the Jewish people.”

Caro advises in his introduction that readers divide the entire four-volume work into thirty sections and study one portion per day, so that they could review the laws contained therein every month. One of the owners of the Orah hayyim and Yoreh de‘ah volumes in the present set obviously took Caro’s suggestion seriously, for on f. 35r of Orah hayyim he writes that “a person must split up [the book] so that he can read one section each day.” Indeed, marginal manuscript notations in these two volumes mark at regular intervals (approximately every sixteen and a half leaves) “day two,” “day three,” etc.

Provenance

Elijah ben […] (Yoreh de‘ah f. 131v)

Literature

A.M. Habermann, “Ha-madpisim benei r. ya‘akov parenzo be-venetsi’ah,” Areshet 1 (1959): 61-90, at pp. 75-76 (no. 14).

Marvin J. Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 2 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 554-555.

J. Rothschild and Israel M. Ta-Shma, Arba me’ot shanah shulhan arukh[,] [5]325-[5]725: ta‘arukhat yovel (Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, 1965).

Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, Sifrei yesod: sifrei ha-yesod shel ha-sifriyyah ha-yehudit ha-toranit (n.p.: Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, 2019), 55 (no. 157).

Vinograd, Venice 509

Isaac Yudlov and G.J. Ormann, Sefer ginzei yisra’el: sefarim, hoverot, va-alonim me-osef dr. yisra’el mehlman, asher be-beit ha-sefarim ha-le’ummi ve-ha-universita’i (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1984), 130 (no. 777).