Kitzur Shulchan Aruch קיצור שולחן ערוך
The Shulchan Aruch in one book in plain Hebrew. All Eastern Europe learned from it—and therein lies its weak point too: in abridging, the author chose the stringent opinions.
Ungvár, 1864. The design is plain from the title: to shorten. Take the Shulchan Aruch with the later commentaries and fit it into one book in plain Hebrew, so that a man who has not been in a yeshiva can read it.
It worked. The Hebrew and Yiddish editions spread as almost no other Jewish book of modern times; children were taught from the Kitzur, adults checked themselves by it, and it lay in the house where no other code did at all.
But abridgement has its price. To fit into one book one must choose among opinions—and Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried chose the stringent and the Hungarian ones. Later decisors therefore often note that the Kitzur is not a smaller Shulchan Aruch but a code with a face of its own, and where it is stricter than the accepted practice, that is its choice and not the general law.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, Ungvár 1864 — the first edition, in the author's lifetime
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Ganzfried, Solomon ben Joseph" — the book's purpose and the stringency of the opinions chosen in it
Basis: documents and evidence.