Pachad Yitzchak: the first halakhic encyclopedia
A physician and rabbi of Ferrara compiles a code arranged by the alphabet: take a concept and you get everything said of it from the Talmud to the compiler's contemporaries. In his lifetime a volume and a half of six appear; the work is finished a hundred and twenty-four years later.
Rabbi Isaac Lampronti practised medicine in Ferrara and headed its yeshiva—in the Italian community of the eighteenth century this was ordinary, not exceptional: his own teacher Rabbi Isaac Cantarini of Padua was physician and preacher at once. His second teacher, Rabbi Judah Briel, taught him halakha at Mantua.
Pachad Yitzchak is arranged by the alphabet. Under each concept is gathered all that has been said of it: the Mishnah, both Talmuds, the Rishonim, the Acharonim, the responsa of contemporaries—with references where they belong. The book deliberately decides nothing: it gives the places and leaves the reader to work it out. Nothing like it had existed before.
The book's fate matched its design. The first volume appeared in 5510, a partial second in 5513; no more was printed in the compiler's lifetime—a volume and a half of six. The rest came out posthumously, decades apart, and only the society Mekitze Nirdamim brought it to an end in 5624–5634. A hundred and twenty-four years from the first volume to the last—for a work that was planned from the start to outlast one life.
How we know
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Pachad Yitzchak — the code itself: alphabetical arrangement and references without ruling
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
Rabbi Isaac Lampronti · Pahad Yitzhak · Judah Briel · Isaac Hayyim Cantarini · Ferrara · Mantua · Halakha · Acharonim · Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini—Sdei Chemed