Ben Ish Ḥai בֶּן אִישׁ חַי

The book's structure must be described exactly, because everything else follows from it. It is a two-year cycle of Sabbath sermons on the weekly portions—Shanah Rishonah, "first year," and Shanah Sheniyah, "second"—delivered in Baghdad and afterwards written up. Each unit opens with a kabbalistic exposition of a verse from the portion, turns that exposition into a halakhic theme, and closes with a numbered set of practical laws on that theme, following the order of the Shulḥan ʿArukh's Oraḥ Ḥayyim across the cycle. The title alludes to 2 Samuel 23:20—Benayahu ben Yehoyada ben ish ḥai—and from the same verse come the titles of two of his other books, Ben Yehoyada and Benayahu: the whole shelf is a signature.

The book's authority is posthumous and functional: precisely because it is laid out along the yearly cycle and written in accessible language, it displaced the Shulḥan ʿArukh from the everyday practice of Baghdadi and then of much Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewry. "The Ben Ish Ḥai says" became the operative citation.

Corrections. The Ben Ish Ḥai is not "the Sephardi Shulḥan ʿArukh": that is a category error. The book has no independent structure and no simanim system of its own; the laws are embedded in the portion and generated by its kabbalistic reading. Its code-like status is a reception phenomenon of the twentieth century, driven by calendrical convenience. And it was printed not in Baghdad but in Jerusalem, in 1898; the continuation ʿOd Yosef Ḥai is Jerusalem, 1910, posthumous. Baghdad had a Hebrew press of its own—Ezra Dangoor from 1904, and before him Solomon Behor Ḥuṣain's press—and it printed his Judaeo-Arabic books, for example Qānūn al-Nisāʾ (Baghdad, 1905); but the Hebrew halakhic corpus went to Jerusalem and Livorno. This is a fact about the economics of Hebrew printing, and it is worth a line.

With it belongs a rare story about a signature. He issued the responsa Torah li-Shmah under the name "Yeḥezkel Kaḥali." The gematria gives him away: יחזקאל = יוסף = 156, כחלי = חיים = 68. He then cites his own pseudonymous book ten times in the Ben Ish Ḥai without disclosure. A computational stylometric study by Moshe Koppel in 2004 confirmed single authorship and concluded that the stylistic divergences had been inserted deliberately, as a ruse.