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| Levush haOrah by R. Mordechai Jaffe first published in 1603 |
Introduction
This article—drawing extensively on the research of Professor Eric Lawee—examines the publication of rabbinic texts during the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods,[1] in the aftermath of the invention of the printing press around 1450. It focuses on the printing struggles of R. Mordechai Jaffe (c.1530–1612)—also known as the Levush, or Baal haLevushim—and especially on the personal reflections contained in the epilogue to his Levush haOra.
The first Hebrew books were printed in Rome around 1470. Rabbinic books (sefarim) were not always selfless, intellectual and spiritual contributions for the edification of the People of Israel. The reality of rabbinic publishing was far more complicated. Publishing was not just about scholarship, but also about authority, the tension between tradition and innovation, and the practical challenges of getting a manuscript into print. It was about survival in a crowded marketplace of ideas, where every published gloss and commentary bore the promise of Chashivut—legitimacy, influence, power and authority—for its author. But behind the finished published product sometimes lay a hidden world of rivalry, negotiation, polemics and politics.
Printed rabbinic texts began to circulate far more widely and faster than the earlier manuscripts, reaching audiences unimaginable in earlier centuries. Where once multiple manuscript traditions coexisted, each with its own variations, the advent of print required the selection of a single manuscript to serve as the authoritative version. This process of standardisation of texts often generated tensions, as cherished local manuscript traditions sometimes clashed with the newly established and ‘official’ printed editions. Thus, the printing press not only facilitated the unprecedented dissemination of rabbinic texts but also shifted “scholarly priorities” (Lawee 2025:103). The selection and elevation of certain works—whether guided by scholarly judgment or by the practical and sometimes random decisions of printers, both Jewish and non‑Jewish—profoundly shaped the trajectory of Jewish learning. In many cases, the texts that came to define future study curricula were not chosen for their intrinsic rabbinic authority, but rather because they were simply the first ones committed to print.
This backstory is not usually evident to the later average student of Judaism. R. Mordechai Jaffe’s work, Levush haOra, offers a rare personal and candid glimpse into the Medieval world of rabbinic publishing - the battle for authority and the race to be the first to get their manuscript into print.
The era of supercommentaries on Rashi
The Early Modern period was marked by the widespread popularity of supercommentaries (commentaries on commentaries) on Rashi (1040–1105). This development was no accident. The authority of Rashi’s commentary on the Torah established a solid foundation upon which later supercommentaries could assert legitimacy, authority, and the control of textual dissemination—a process deeply entangled with the rivalries and politics of rabbinic publication. This is ironically significant because the earliest printers’ selection of what became the ‘official’ Rashi text—in Reggio di Calabria, Italy, 1475—was drawn from at least nine, often conflicting manuscripts. The problem is that the earliest surviving manuscript of Rashi’s commentary was produced more than 130 years after his passing, and the first printed edition did not appear until over 350 years later [see Kotzk Blog: 213) AND WHAT DOES RASHI SAY?, see also Kotzk Blog: 193) DANIEL BOMBERG –THE STORY BEHIND THE TZURAS HADAF:].
The epilogue to R. Mordechai Jaffe’s Levush haOra preserves a rare personal record of his encounter with printing, reflecting his hopes and anxieties. Though a supercommentary on Rashi, it can equally be understood as an ‘egodocument,’ disclosing his lived experience within the formal world of rabbinic commentary and the race to be the first to publish.
Background
R. Mordechai Jaffe was born in Bohemia, a central European region that today forms part of the Czech Republic. His teachers included two of the foremost Polish rabbinic authorities of the era, R. Moshe Isserles (Ramah) and R. Shlomo Luria (Maharshal). In 1592, R. Mordechai Jaffe succeeded the Maharal as the head of the Beit Din of Prague and later became the Chief Rabbi of Posen.
R. Mordechai Jaffe’s teacher, R. Moshe Iserless (Ramah), was renowned for his glosses on the Shulchan Aruch, which integrated Ashkenazic customs into what became the most authoritative code of Jewish law. R. Shlomo Luria (Maharshal), by contrast, was a fierce defender of Talmudic integrity, often criticising excessive reliance on codification and urging a return to the original sources. Together, these two teachers represented different but complementary currents in sixteenth‑century Polish rabbinic thought—legal standardisation on the one hand (Ramah), and textual fidelity on the other (Maharshal). R. Mordechai Jaffe’s exposure to both shaped his own scholarship, situating him at the crossroads of tradition and innovation in the new age of print.
Levushim as competition to the Shulchan Aruch
and the role of print
What is significant about R. Mordecai Jaffe is that the first five of the ten sections of his magnum opus, Levush Malchut (collectively known as the Levushim), consciously mirrored and even sometimes rivalled the Shulchan Aruch of R. Yosef Karo together with the glosses of his former teacher, R. Moshe Isserles. Written in a clearer and more accessible Hebrew style, Jaffe’s work offered a more readable alternative to R. Yosef Karo’s terse formulations. For a time, the Levushim challenged the dominance of the Shulchan Aruch! But ultimately, the Levushim were eclipsed by it, probably in the interests of creating a unified code, but more likely because the Shulchan Aruch beat him to the printing press. R. Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch had been printed first, and:
“print has been identified as a decisive factor in the extraordinary success of the Shulhan Arukh” (Lawee 2025:107).
This reality left Jaffe’s contribution as a fascinating yet secondary voice in the story of the codification of Jewish law. As Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg similarly points out, the Shulchan Aruch:
“was created with print in mind, and circulated faster and further, thanks to print” (Morsel-Eisenberg 2012:309).
Significantly, Jaffe’s teacher, R. Moshe Isserles, was prepared to embrace the new printing technology. He was crucial in affecting the shift from script to print in the rabbinic world, despite the fact that some were holding on to the notion that manuscripts should prevail as the essential medium for Torah transmission. Jaffe, similarly, had an “almost obsessive urge to write and publish books” (Sládek 2019:53-54), and most of his works did eventually go to press (Lawee 2025:108).
The other sections of the Levushim include Jaffe’s supercommentary on Rashi, a commentary on the Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides, a work on astronomy and the Jewish calendar, and a supercommentary on the Kabbalistic Torah commentary by Menachem Recanati (d. 1290). These examples of his subjects of interest indicate his:
“distinctive synthesis of law, exegesis, philosophy, science, and mysticism that makes Jaffe such a compelling figure” (Lawee 2025:105).
The tenth section of the Levushim is his Levush haOra, with which we are here concerned. We now turn to the epilogue of Jaffe’s Levush haOra, which includes his extremely candid and personal expressions on his respected colleagues and their writings.
Levush haOra
Jaffe writes in his epilogue to Levush haOra that the work
was almost fifty years in the making. He was inspired to write this work when
he was just eighteen years old, on Shabbat haGadol, just after he got
married. He had many obligations, so the work progressed “little by little,”
and usually on Thursday nights and Fridays. Sometimes work was halted for “an
entire year.”
In 1578, Jaffe’s Levush haOra project
was almost canned when his colleague, the Maharal of Prague, beat him to the
press and published his Gur Aryeh, also a supercommentary on Rashi. He
seems to have felt that his work, then two and a half decades in the making,
had been supplanted by the Maharal. This may have brought back memories of a
similar frustration by R. Yosef Karo (Mechabber) and R. Moshe
Isserles (Ramah) and their joint Shulchan
Aruch, overtaking and replacing his own work:
“Jaffe greeted the publication of Gur
Aryeh with despair. In describing the event in his epilogue, he speaks of the
new supercommentary having ‘spread throughout the world,’ using the exact
phrase he had once used to describe the rapid dissemination of Shulhan Arukh”
(Lawee 2025:108).
Yet, Jaffe took hold of himself and
decided, at first, to engage dialectically and to argue with his competitors in
his own books:
“[H]e had more than once given up on prior plans, only to find a way to fill what he deemed significant lacunae [gaps] left by his forerunners” (Lawee 2025:106).
The woes of publication and the fear of losing the race to publish first were not unique to Jafe. R. Yosef Karo, himself, wrote about his fear of having R. Moshe Isserles publish his Shulchan Aruch (for Ashkenazim) before him [see: Kotzk Blog: 448) R. Yosef Karo’s unusual mystical entries in his diary]. So did Jaffe’s colleague, R. Shlomo Efraim Luntschitz— author of Keli Yakar (not technically a supercommentary on Rashi)—worry about having insufficient funding to publish on time.
R. Shlomo Efraim Luntschitz (Keli Yakar)
R. Shlomo Efraim Luntschitz was also concerned about “scandalous” rabbinic leadership that used pilpul (intentionally complex argumentation) and “plagiarism” to ‘confuse the people’ and thereby elevate their own rabbinic stature. This was something he noticed with “most [!] of the commentators” in “most places,” who had published books in his time:
לפי שראיתי שערוריה בדברי רוב המפרשים הנגשים לבאר התורה שכמעט אין חדש בפיהם וברוב מקומות שנמצא בו איזה פשט הקרוב לשמוע נמצא אותו פשט בכמה מפרשים, לא ידעתי אם כולם לדבר אחד נתכוונו או אם קצתם נתעטפו בטלית שאינו שלהם
“I saw a scandal in the words of most of the commentators who approach the explanation of the Torah, with almost nothing new in their mouths. In most places where some interpretation makes sense, we find the same repeated in several commentaries. I did not know if they all [coincidently] meant the same thing or if some of them were wrapped in a tallit that was not theirs [this last sentence appears to be sarcastic]” (Introduction to Keli Yakar).
Epistological authority
R. Shlomo Efraim Luntschitz recognised that without the sustained support of patrons and their perception of a work’s suitability, even writings of genuine scholarly merit could remain unpublished. In the competitive arena of early modern publishing, the principle was clear: whoever published first prevailed. The first text to reach print typically established the epistemological authority for future generations—that is, it came to be perceived and recognised as the authorised source of correct knowledge, irrespective of competing manuscripts or alternative traditions. Keli Yakar was published in Lublin in 1602, just a year before Jaffe’s Levush haOra was published.
R. Mordechai Jaffe’s financial insecurity and rabbinic rivalry
Jaffe, too, was acutely aware of rabbinic rivalry and the theo-politics of publishing. After the Maharal’s work, Gur Aryeh had been published, Jaffe was inspired once more to complete his own Levush haOra, because he believed he had something better to offer than the Maharal. Once again, this was not the first time he resolved to press on in the face of competition, because he had already done so concerning the R. Eliyahu Mizrachi (1455-1525, known as Re’em)—a Romaniote Jew of Greek descent—who had also preceded him with another Rashi supercommentary (and defended Rashi against criticisms). Mizrachi’s work was titled Sefer haMizrachi, which—like Gur Aryeh—had also gained traction and became a popular competing work. In all three previous cases where Jaffe faced competition from earlier publications (namely, the Shulchan Aruch, Gur Aryeh, and Sefer haMizrachi), he initially decided to “engage in an ongoing critical dialogue with…[each] new work” (Lawee 2025:106). He felt confident to challenge all three competitors because he believed he still had something to offer over and above the two Rashi supercommentaries, Gur Aryeh and Sefer haMizrachi, as well as the Shulchan Aruch. Although Jaffe had suffered two successive and major setbacks at the hands of rival Rashi supercommentators, he nevertheless pressed forward with his half‑century‑long project, the Levush haOra:
“Nearly five decades after he had begun, Jaffe faced a moment of self-reckoning, not to mention self-reproach. Why had he tarried? Would his work remain incomplete? Trembling at the thought, he found himself entertaining dark reveries, exclaiming twice in rapid succession: Heaven forefend! A literary course correction was desperately needed. He had to force himself to withdraw from extended, debilitating debates with his two rival expositors and to focus on presenting only what he saw as the truth” (Lawee 2025:106).
In other words, R. Mordechai Jaffe ultimately chose to cease his compulsive critical engagement with Maharal’s Gur Aryeh and Mizrachi’s Sefer ha-Mizrachi—and all other literary competition—and to focus exclusively on his own contributions to the field of Rashi exegesis. Jaffe openly writes about his dispute with Maharal:
“[A]t the outset, my first comment involved a dispute with the great sage, the Rav [Maharal of Prague, author of] Gur Aryeh” (R. Mordechai Jaffe, Epilogue to Levush haOra).
The pivotal moment
Throughout most of his career, Jaffe was deeply entangled in the rivalries of rabbinic publishing, where authority often hinged on who could circulate a text first. These contests shaped not only the reception of these works but also the broader authority of future scholarship. Yet, in his epilogue, he reflects on a decisive shift. He had eventually decided to concentrate solely on his own writing, inner discipline, and ignore the outside competition. He speaks of a retreat to quiet strength, withdrawing from the clamorous contests of his publishing rivals. He decides to halt the competitiveness, end the dialectics, and just focus on putting his own thoughts down and letting them rise or fall on their own merits:
“When I saw how long such an arduous undertaking was taking when conducted in this manner—over forty-five years!—I was struck with trembling. My heart questioned: What are you doing, tarrying in this composition of yours so many days and years? Lest, Heaven forefend, your luminance be extinguished midway through your composition, and you might not merit to complete the book Levush ha-Ora, leaving no lasting legacy…Heaven forefend. When these thoughts pierced my ears, I regretted what I had done up to that point and resolved to withdraw from dispute with the commentators, Re’em [Mizrahi] and the Rav [author of] Gur Aryeh…and only to write what I thought true and novel” (R. Mordechai Jaffe, Epilogue to Levush haOra).
His work reached completion and was eventually published in 1603, distinguished by the inclusion of a title page, a strikingly novel feature for Jewish books of that era. The earlier Hebrew printing of his competitors began directly with the text or a brief colophon. Now, the use of a decorative, standalone title page—which only became common in the early seventeenth century—marked Jaffe’s publication novel and distinctive and symbolically rewarded him for his patience and persistence.
Analysis
It was easier and cheaper to write a manuscript than to publish a
book. The race for first publication exposed the underbelly and fragility of
rabbinic authority, where funding and rivalry often overshadowed scholarship. The
world of Medieval and Early Modern rabbinic printing was never merely about ink
and paper. It represented a theo-political dynamic, somewhere between a holy
endeavour and a political struggle. It was a battleground where authority,
prestige, and survival were contested, revealing how precarious the
transmission of Torah could be when entangled with human ambition. And the
irony is stark: Torah authority—meant to rest on eternal truth—could in
practice hinge on something as contingent as who succeeded in publishing first.
Bibliography
Lawee, E., 2025, ‘The Long Road to Rashi
Supercommentary: R. Mordekhai Jaffe’s Epilogue to Levush ha-Ora’, Tradition,
vol. 57, no. 3, 103-115.
Morsel-Eisenberg, T., 2021, ‘Anxieties of
Transmission: Rabbinic Responsa and Early Modern “Print Culture”,’ Journal
of the History of Ideas, 83, 390.
Sládek, P., 2019, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Rabbi as a
Published Author: The Early Editions of Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe’s Levushim’, in Connecting
Histories: Jews and Their Others in the Early Modern Period, Edited by
David Ruderman and Francesca Bregoli, University of Pennsylvania Press.
[1]
The Medieval Period is the one thousand year period roughly from 500CE (fall of
Western Roman Empire in 476CE) to around 1500. The Early Modern Period is from
about 1500 to 1800.
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