380 A History of Judaism
basis of his work because it gave the opinions of most previous decisors,
unlike the classic code of Maimonides. An added advantage of the
Arba’ah Turim, in comparison to Maimonides’ code, was its omission
of laws which were no longer applicable, such as laws about sacrifices,
and its inclusion of the views of French and German rabbis who had
been ignored by Maimonides – although Karo was at pains to avoid any
suggestion that he was intending to overrule Maimonides, whose work
in fact he frequently used with full acknowledgement. Karo’s commen-
tary, entitled Beth Yosef (‘House of Joseph’), took twenty years to
complete and constitutes an encyclopaedic guide to the development of
halakhah from the Talmud to Karo’s time, indicating the majority opin-
ion of leading rabbis of previous generations whenever it can be
discerned. Karo cited opinions culled from a huge range of rabbinic
scholarship, claiming to have consulted no fewer than thirty- two other
works. He originally intended to use his own judgement in deciding
between authorities, but eventually he decided that this was beyond his
abilities, and that instead he would follow whenever possible the views
of at least two of the greatest authorities widely accepted in his day –
Maimonides, Alfasi and Asher b. Yehiel.
The Beth Yosef was not published until 1555, and such a monumen-
tal work would be perused only by the exceptionally learned. Its impact
on the Jewish world came thus primarily through the authority it gave
to the digest of his great work which Karo prepared for ‘young stu-
dents’. The Shulhan Arukh, written specifically ‘in a succinct manner
and with clarity of language’, was intended, like Maimonides’ code, to
enable scholars to give clear decisions and for students to learn halakhah
from a young age. The book had all the advantage of Maimonides’ code
while avoiding the criticism which had plagued Maimonides that he
failed to mention dissenting views and the authorities on which his own
decisions were based, since users of the Shulhan Arukh could find all
this information laid out with exemplary precision in the Beth Yosef.
Just as Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into the vernacular used
the mass circulation of books which had become possible through print-
ing for the religious empowerment of Christian laymen, so Karo offered
to Jews untrained in rabbinic law a straightforward route to the correct
interpretation of the Torah as fashioned through the discussions of rab-
binic sages over more than 1,500 years since the time of Hillel and
Shammai while the Temple still stood. The Shulhan Arukh was an
immediate bestseller from the printing of the first edition in Venice in
1564– 5. The sixth edition, published in Venice in 1574, was designed