rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 315
dialectic derived from the Talmud to legal issues not addressed in the
talmudic text itself in order to extend the reach of the halakhah into
contemporary life. At the same time a number of rabbinic authorities
sought to codify this burgeoning legal literature into manageable form
for those not sufficiently steeped in the talmudic commentaries to find
their way without such guidance. In the eleventh century Yitzhak Alfasi
(known as the Rif), who compiled his Sefer haHalakhot in Fez and,
towards the end of his life, in Spain, presented a digest of the legal con-
clusions in the talmudic text with authoritative summaries of the
legislation of the geonim. In some cases, he put forward his own rules
for determining the law when the Talmud left an issue unclear. The
Arabic Sefer haMitzvot (‘Book of the Precepts’) of Hefets b. Yatsliah, a
contemporary of the Rif and one of the last scholars from Babylonia to
have a lasting influence on rabbis in the west, divided the command-
ments into thirty- six chapters arranged by theme, each with the positive
and negative commandments presented separately and citation of rel-
evant biblical and rabbinic proof texts.^5
Both codes were extensively used by Maimonides in his Mishneh
Torah (‘Repetition of the Torah’), which was written in Egypt in the
second part of the twelfth century. Maimonides aimed specifically to
overcome what he perceived as the decline in knowledge in his time by
laying out every aspect of Jewish law in a superbly clear Mishnaic Heb-
rew without muddying the text by adding either justification or sources
for the rulings laid down. This revolutionary work went far beyond the
compendium form of Hefets b. Yatsliah, since Maimonides was con-
cerned to produce not an aid to Talmudic learning – his work did not
refer to the writings of Rashi even once – but instructions for living in
the real world. The search for clarity and finality in codifying the law
undertaken by Maimonides and his younger contemporary Eleazar b.
Yehudah, who wrote a straightforward halakhic code in Worms for the
benefit of Jews in Germany and northern France, was in tension with
the originality and innovativeness of those rabbis who devoted them-
selves to hiddushim which constantly expanded the halakhah.
The codifiers did not hide their frustration at what they saw as the
obscurantism of their rabbinical colleagues who delighted in complicat-
ing the law under which Jews did their best to live in piety. Yaakov b.
Asher complained in the first half of the fourteenth century that ‘there is
no law that does not have difference of opinions.’ His own father, Asher
b. Yehiel, known as the Rosh, had produced an influential halakhic
compendium which covered all halakhic practice of the time both for