that it speedily became the universal hand-book of Jewish life in many of its phases.  It was not accepted in all its parts, and its blemishes were clearly perceived.  The author, Joseph Karo, was too tender to the past, and admitted some things which had a historical justification, but which Karo himself would have been the first to reject as principles of conduct for his own or later times.  On the whole, the book was a worthy summary of the fundamental Jewish view, that religion is co-extensive with life, and that everything worth doing at all ought to be done in accordance with a general principle of obedience to the divine will.  The defects of such a view are the defects of its qualities.

The Shulchan Aruch was the outcome of centuries of scholarship.  It was original, yet it was completely based on previous works.  In particular the “Four Rows” (Arbaea Turim) of Jacob Asheri (1283-1340) was one of the main sources of Karo’s work.  The “Four Rows,” again, owed everything to Jacob’s father, Asher, the son of Yechiel, who migrated from Germany to Toledo at the very beginning of the fourteenth century.  But besides the systematic codes of his predecessors, Karo was able to draw on a vast mass of literature on the Talmud and on Jewish Law, accumulated in the course of centuries.

There was, in the first place, a large collection of “Novelties” (Chiddushim), or Notes on the Talmud, by various authorities.  More significant, however, were the “Responses” (Teshuboth), which resembled those of the Gaonim referred to in an earlier chapter.  The Rabbinical Correspondence, in the form of Responses to Questions sent from far and near, covered the whole field of secular and religious knowledge.  The style of these “Responses” was at first simple, terse, and full of actuality.  The most famous representatives of this form of literature after the Gaonim were both of the thirteenth century, Solomon, the son of Adereth, in Spain, and Meir of Rothenburg in Germany.  Solomon, the son of Adereth, of Barcelona, was a man whose moral earnestness, mild yet firm disposition, profound erudition, and tolerant character, won for him a supreme place in Jewish life for half a century.  Meir of Rothenburg was a poet and martyr as well as a profound scholar.  He passed many years in prison rather than yield to the rapacious demands of the local government for a ransom, which Meir’s friends would willingly have paid.  As a specimen of Meir’s poetry, the following verses are taken from a dirge composed by him in 1285, when copies of the Pentateuch were publicly committed to the flames.  The “Law” is addressed in the second person: 

    Dismay hath seized upon my soul; how then
      Can food be sweet to me? 
    When, O thou Law!  I have beheld base men
      Destroying thee?

    Ah! sweet ’twould be unto mine eyes alway
      Waters of tears to pour,
    To sob and drench thy sacred robes, till they
      Could hold no more.