Next year will mark the 450th anniversary of the death of Joseph Karo (1488–1575), author of the code of Jewish law known as the Shulhan Arukh (literally, “The Set Table”). Prior to its publication, there were several important works that tried to systematize the unwieldly corpus of talmudic jurisprudence, and there have been many more since. But this book carefully synthesizes its predecessors, and every one of its successors is on some level a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh, conferring upon it a uniquely authoritative status. Menachem Wecker writes:
Karo, whose name is variously spelled in English, was born in Spain. Four years after his birth year, Spain expelled its Jewish population, and Karo’s family fled to Turkey. Some 34 years later, he moved to Israel, settling in Safed, the city associated with Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah.
Like other major Sephardi rabbis, Karo had his feet planted firmly in both Jewish ritual law—halakhah—and Kabbalah.
Karo’s work has been cited in multiple amicus curiae briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court. Edward Fram, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev . . . told JNS that Karo’s work remains timely “due to his scholarship, which is not to be underestimated, but no less significantly, because his work became a springboard for further discussion of the law, much of it in the margins of the printed text.”
More about: Halakhah, Judaism, Shulhan Arukh