[ethics, according to the creed of the medieval Chasidei Aschkenaz]. Anonymous

ORCHOTH TZADIKIM

Mordechai ben Gershom Katz

Prague

1581

FIRST HEBREW EDITION. Title within historiated woodcut architectural arch form border piece. Printer’s device on verso of final leaf. (Yaari’s Printer’s Marks no. 40)

Vinograd, Prague 41; not in Adams

The identity of the author of this work, the earliest of the many ethical books produced during the Fifteenth-century has remained a mystery. He most likely hailed from Southern Germany as the book reflects the sober methods of the German moralists. He appears to be a man of broad knowledge and mind, whose morality is free of mystical elements and the rigorous ascetic spirit with which so many of the morality books of the time were permeated. The aim of the work is entirely a practical one; to instruct man how to train the forces of his soul in such a way that his actions tend toward the good and to inculcate the fear of God. The work is divided into twenty-eight chapters, twenty-five of which deal with virtues and vices and three which deal with penitence and the fear of God. There is some debate among the bibliographers as to whether this work, sometimes known as Sepher Hamidoth, was originally written in Hebrew or Judeo-German. Conventional scholarship has concluded that the Judeo-German “Zitn-Buch” (Sepher Hamdoth) was in fact a translation of a Hebrew text prepared by an anonymous admirer of the “lady doctor of the liberal art of medicine” - Madam Murada, who apparently knew of the Sepher Hamidoth but could not read it due to unfamiliarity with the Hebrew language. For a greater insight into the origin of this work and its link with the Zitn-Buch - the oldest morality book to appear in Judeo-German, see I. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature (1975) Vol. VII, p. 148-53