(“Noda BeYehudah.”) Tzion LeNephesh Chayah - TZLa”Ch [novellae to Talmudic Tractate Pesachim].

LANDAU, YECHEZKEL

Joseph Emmanuel Diesbach

Prague

1783

FIRST EDITION. Title with signature of R. Ya’akov Ettlinger.

Vinograd, Prague 938.

R. Ya’akov Ettlinger (1798-1871) was one of the great rabbis in 19th century Germany who led the Orthodox defense against the growing Reform movement. It was Ettlinger who first formulated the well-known ‘Tinok Shenishba’ (captured child) analogy which would define the Orthodox approach towards the non-religious for the coming centuries (Binyan Tzion Chadashoth 2:23). His students, rabbis Samson Raphael Hirsch and Azriel Hildesheimer would continue to blaze unique German-Orthodox trails informed by Ettlinger’s teachings. That this is R. Ettlinger’s copy of R. Yechezkel Landau’s work is doubly significant. On the one hand, both rabbis dealt with the fallout from the respective Haskalah and Reform movements. At the same time, the work in question is not related to Halachic questions of the day, but contains timeless Talmudic novellae, fortified from the ideological tempest of the times. It was Talmud study such as this that both rabbis fought hard to preserve.