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Two Digests Outlast the Arguments They Compressed

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Two Digests Outlast the Arguments They Compressed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Asher ben Jehiel's major work, commonly called simply the Rosh after his own acronym, digests the legal conclusions of the Talmud tractate by tractate in a plain, decision oriented style, a documented departure from works that preserved the extended argument behind a ruling rather than stripping it away. That style is recorded as a deliberate choice aimed at giving practicing judges a usable ruling directly, rather than a record of the debate a judge would then have to work through independently before reaching the same conclusion.

He further condensed those conclusions into a second, shorter work, Kitzur Piskei HaRosh, a documented second stage of compression beyond the Rosh itself, and both works are printed alongside the Talmud in standard editions still used today. That two separate works, one digesting the Talmud and one further condensing the digest itself, both remain in standard use centuries later is documented as unusual persistence for legal writing produced for practical, everyday judicial use rather than for scholarly argument.

That one rabbi produced both a tractate by tractate digest of Talmudic law and a further condensed extraction of his own digest, and saw both remain in standard printed use centuries afterward, marks the Rosh and the Kitzur Piskei HaRosh as a documented case where writing aimed squarely at a working judge's practical need outlasted far more elaborate legal literature aimed at scholarly debate.

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Article On

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)
Sources
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007View the Source
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