Sefer Tikkun Soferim of Rabbi Itzhak Tzabah (review)

Leafing through this collection of centuries-old documents, introduced and annotated by Ruth Lamdan, I was struck by its relevance to matters that I am involved in, be it the translation of sixteenth-century responsa or learning the “daily page” of Talmud (which, as I began reading the book, brought me to the final chapter of Baba batra, dealing with laws of deeds and documents). In fact, whether your interest lies in Jewish history, halakhah or Jewish jurisprudence, you are bound to find something of interest in Sefer Tikkun Soferim of Rabbi Itzhak Tzabah.

The volume presents a collection of over a hundred legal and communal deeds and documents compiled by the scribe R. Itzhak Tzabah, who also served the Jerusalem community as rabbi, judge and head of a yeshiva in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As was the practice of many scribes, he copied examples of documents that would be useful when needed. His was the largest, most complete such collection to have survived. None of the earlier collections, manuscript or printed, contains such an extensive collection of documents on such a varied range of subjects, adapted to varying circumstances: marriage contracts (ketubot—for first-time brides, widows or divorcees, levirate marriage, etc.), bills of divorce (gittin—delivered directly or by messenger, conditional, for a minor-age wife, etc.), writs of slave manumission, deeds for the sale, rent or gift of property, loan agreements, the text for a pruzbul, certificates of rabbinic ordination, and many more.

The manuscript on which this volume is based is a copy of R. Tzabah’s Tikkun soferim copied by the scribe Yehudah Morali in 1635. From the notes and comments that were added to this collection each time it was copied and transmitted by other scribes, we learn about the cultural network of Sephardi Jews in the period following the expulsion from Spain. The collection reflects customs of Jewish communities in Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir, Cairo and Jerusalem during the second half of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, and also how information and texts were transferred among the communities. The collection also sheds light on the preservation of customs by communities, even when they were relocated, though cross-cultural influences are detected.

Lamdan’s introduction, an expansion of an article first published in Tarbiz, 74 (2005), provides historical background and a detailed genealogy of the manuscript and related collections, as well as a summary of important points about Jewish legal documents, with detailed and helpful references to the important literature on this subject. An extensive bibliography is included.

It is the documents that concern women and family life that are of particular interest to Lamdan, who came upon the Tikkun soferim while doing research for her doctorate, which later produced her book A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Brill, 2000). For this reason, her general introduction concludes with a discussion of several documents relating to women’s personal status, For example, Lamdan informs us that the marital conditions set out in the Jerusalem ketubah are particularly flexible in comparison to others (and in total contrast to the standard Orthodox ketubot currently in use), making it of interest to anyone who struggles to comprehend the rigidity of today’s Orthodox rabbinic courts. This last portion of the introduction provides an example of how researchers with other interests—such as sixteenth-century practices relating to business loans, partnerships or inheritance—might utilize this collection. Nevertheless, relating as it does only to those few of the many documents that are specific to the author’s own research interest, this discussion seemed out of place in the volume. It should rightly have been published in a separate context, as would any other researcher’s articles relating to a specific field.

In her discussion of documents relating to personal status, Lamdan notes that R. Itzhak Tzabah’s collection, unlike several others of its kind, does not include...