Zivḥei Ẓedeq זִבְחֵי צֶדֶק
Rulings on slaughter and kashrut that became the working handbook of the Baghdadi merchant communities from Basra to Canton.
Halakhic rulings on Yoreh Deʿah—slaughter, terefot, kashrut—with appended responsa, in two parts, Baghdad. The year of printing needs a caveat: the two-volume Baghdad edition is dated 1914, while an earlier Baghdad printing is cited as 1899; the range should be printed. The later responsa appeared separately as Zivḥei Ẓedeq he-Ḥadashot.
The book's significance lies not in the novelty of its rulings but in where it worked. The nineteenth-century Baghdadi commercial diaspora—Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai—consisted of merchant communities with no rabbinate of their own. There was no one to decide whether a bird slaughtered in Canton was kosher; and Zivḥei Ẓedeq became the text by which it was decided. From Basra to Canton this was a single halakhic region, and it was held together by a book and by correspondence.
Hence one point about the author: Somekh's authority in his lifetime travelled by responsa, not by print. The book is posthumous on either possible year, and no lifetime publication should be attributed to him. That is, incidentally, a fairly exact picture of how halakhic authority in the East worked in the nineteenth century at all: by post.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Zivḥei Ẓedeq, Baghdad, 1899 or 1914 — two parts of rulings with responsa; the year of printing is disputed
Scholarship
- Z. Zohar on Baghdadi halakhah — how the rulings travelled through the commercial diaspora
Basis: documents and evidence.