Isaac Alfasi, known by the acronym the Rif, was a rabbinic scholar born in 1013 near Qalat Bani Hammad in present day Algeria who spent most of his career in Fez, Morocco, before moving late in life to Lucena in Muslim Spain, where he died in 1103. His major work, the Sefer Ha-halachot, distilled the Babylonian Talmud's vast legal discussions down to their practical legal conclusions, omitting non-legal material and unresolved debate so a reader could find a clear, final ruling on a given point of Jewish law. Because of this systematic digest, Alfasi's work superseded the earlier codes produced by the Geonic authorities of Babylonia and became known as the Talmud Katan, the little Talmud, opening focused legal study to a wider audience than the full Talmud allowed. The Sefer Ha-halachot went on to underpin the later codes of both Jacob ben Asher's Arba'ah Turim and Joseph Karo's Shulchan Aruch, and Karo himself later counted Alfasi as one of the three principal authorities whose rulings the Shulchan Aruch would follow.
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