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Sefer Tikkun Soferim of Rabbi Itzhak Tzabah: Copied in Jerusalem in the Year 1635 by the Scribe Yehudah Mor'ali. Notes and Introduction by Ruth Lamdan. Tel Aviv: The Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research, Tel Aviv University, 2009.
In an elaborated and enlightening introduction, Ruth Lamdan presents a socio-economic aspect of the small, oppressed and yet resilient Jewish community of Jerusalem between the 16th and 17th centuries. Counting some 2000 members and pressed hard by financial setbacks and political repression from the Muslim authorities, the Jerusalem community was led by the Sephardic1 majority adopting in their midst North African, Byzantine, Greek and European Jews. Notwithstanding internal differences and external pressure, the community did not slip into the pitfall of lawlessness. It is not only their religious belief that should impress us but their adherence to their social and economic laws, passion for learning and preservation of tradition and antecedent writings while all the while showing flexibility in exposing the Jewish law to temporal, local and personal adaptations.
Sefer Tikkun Soferim of Rabbi Itzhak Tzabah is an invaluable compilation of documents relying on a long tradition of scribes, scholars, rabbis and judges like sefer shetarot of Rabbi Saadiah Gaon (10th century). The Tzabah's compilation counts one hundred handwritten documents from the 16th century. These cover both individual and communal affairs, regulating legal business and relations among individuals, or between the community and its members, along with a selection of family laws. The language employs legal jargon in Hebrew and Aramaic, similar to other compilations of the same official nature. Concomitantly, a shetar, a Hebrew document comports of a formulaic part purporting its general character and purpose on the one hand and a blank space destined for supplements and variations,...