The Shulchan Aruch

The Shulchan Aruch ("Set Table") is the most widely popular code of Jewish law in use today. It was written by Rabbi Joseph Karo in Birya, a small town on the outskirts of Safed in the Galilee region of the Land of Israel (c. 1560s). It was intended as the combination and summary of two earlier works, the Arbah Turim by Rabbi Jacob ben Asher and Rabbi Joseph Karo's own commentary upon it. The Shulchan Aruch itself was written as a concise guide to rulings and customs without needing to work through those two earlier compositions. Although Rabbi Joseph Karo wrote it in the Safed area, he previously received feedback from the rabbis of Jerusalem for his earlier writing, which influenced some of the resulting text.

Adoption Across Jewish Communities

The Shulchan Aruch has been reprinted in new editions many times since its original publication, with the first few of them fixing printing errors. Since the Shulchan Aruch's rulings were not in line with the practices of many communities, a few years after its author's death, a lengthy addition in smaller print was added to make it more acceptable to more communities, which is a major reason it became so widely popular. The lengthy addition is Pseudepigrapha, misattributed to Rabbi Moses Isserles of Kraków, a famed Rabbi who wrote his own commentary to the Arbah Turim. This misattribution is frequently maintained, despite the addition being published several years after Rabbi Moses Isserles' death and its contents contradicting the rulings of his commentary. Later editions added additional customs and notes in parentheses to both the original and smaller supplementary text, with those parentheses being removed in subsequent editions, leaving them indistinguishable from the original text. Those late additions are routinely misattributed to Rabbi Joseph Karo and Rabbi Moses Isserles.

Unlike the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides — a far larger, more comprehensive code that also rules on Temple service, national sovereignty, the laws of a Jewish government, and personal behavior more broadly — the Shulchan Aruch is deliberately narrower, focused on a subset of laws applicable to everyday religious and communal life in the Diaspora, without covering many topics in personal behavior, such as rules regarding speech. However, even communities that rely on the Shulchan Aruch for typical day-to-day rulings defer to the Mishneh Torah on all matters it uniquely and comprehensively covers, particularly regarding interpersonal behavior, the Temple, kingship, and national sovereignty.

Significance

More than 450 years after it was written, the Shulchan Aruch remains the most commonly cited Jewish legal code. It stands as one of the major works of Jewish literary production in the Land of Israel, produced in the same Galilee region that centuries earlier had given rise to the Mishna and the Palestinian Talmud — continuing an unbroken chain of Jewish legal scholarship rooted in the land.