Levush Malchuth [elucidations and novellea to the Shulchan Aruch]

JAFFE, MORDECHAI.

Moses ben Bezalel Katz

Prague

1623- 24

Two parts (of four) in one volume. Two titles each within historiated architectural borders and bearing crowned priestly hands flanked by two winged cherubs (Yaari, Printer’s Marks no. 53)

Vinograd, Prague 307 & 315

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. As a whole, “the Levush Malchuth is thus not only a code of law which sums up the Halachic scholarship of the day, but rather an entire summa of rabbinic Judaism both halachic and non-halachic.” See L. Kaplan, Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1983) p. 274.