Levush Malchuth [elucidations and novellea to the Shulchan Aruch]

JAFFE, MORDECHAI

Moses ben Bezalel Katz

Prague

1609-10

Title-pages with printer’s mark of Mordechai Cohen (Yaari, Hebrew Printers’ Marks, p. 24 , no. 37). On final page, printer’s mark “Mishpachath ha-Gershuni” (Yaari, Hebrew Printers’ Marks, p. 27, no. 43) .Two titles within woodcut historiated architectural arch

Vinograd, Prague 172, 173, 174,192

Complete uniform sets of this edition are scarce. Mordechai Jaffe (c.1535-1612), a native of Prague, studied in his youth in Poland under the greatest scholars of the day, R. Solomon Luria (Maharsha”l) and R. Moses Isserles (Ram”a). In subsequent years, he would sojourn in Italy and once again in Poland before finally returning to his native Prague in 1592, at which time he succeeded the famed R. Judah Löw (Mahara”l) as Av Beth Din. In most of Europe, the “Levush,” was studied as a supplement to Karo’s Shulchan Aruch and Isserles’ Mappah. It was useful because of its lengthier, broad-based explanations as opposed to the terse statements of Karo and Isserles. In Prague, however, it was studied as the most fundamental, authoritative text of the halacha and remains to this day one of the mainstays of the Halacha - especially the Aschkenazic tradition. “R. Jaffe’s commentaries on the classics of philosophy, astronomy and Kabbalah included alongside his Halakhic Code...are perhaps the finest and most balanced expression of a general cultural pattern of Polish Jewry in the 16th century...In the work of Jaffe, the rabbinic culture of Poland-Lithuania...achieves a certain breadth and integrity that even at this distance cannot fail to impress." See L. Kaplan, Rabbi Mordekhai Jaffe and the Evolution of Jewish Culture in Poland in the Sixteenth Century in: B. Cooperman (ed.) Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1983) pp. 266-82