Smak—Rabbi Yitzchak of Corbeil רבי יצחק מקורביל
"the small book of commandments"—for everyone, not for scholars
Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yosef of Corbeil (d. 1280), son-in-law of Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, wrote the Sefer Mitzvot Katan—"the small book of commandments": a statement of all the commandments binding in exile, short, divided into seven parts for the days of the week.
The design was not scholarly but communal. The book was sent round to communities with an instruction to copy it and read a part a day, so as to go through it all in a week; for this it was nicknamed Amudei Golah—"the Pillars of the Exile". Thus for the first time a code of the commandments was made not for the study house but for the ordinary man—long before the printing press.
The Ashkenazi communities held to the Smak for centuries; the glosses of Rabbi Peretz are printed in its margins, and in that form it entered medieval practice.
The sources give no exact years of life; the window of activity is set by generation, following Aharon Hyman and the lists of Seder haDorot.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Sefer Mitzvot Katan (Amudei Golah) — the commandments divided by the days of the week
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Shem ha-Gedolim of Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai — the compendium of the authors of sefarim: who wrote a book and what is known of him
Basis: documents and evidence.