Jacob ben Asher

Jacob ben Asher was a rabbinic scholar born around 1270 in Cologne, in the Holy Roman Empire, the son of the legal authority Asher ben Jehiel; he followed his father into exile from Germany and settled eventually in Toledo, in the Christian kingdom of Castile, where he died around 1340. His major work, the Arba'ah Turim, or Four Columns, organized the whole of Jewish law then in practical use into four separate divisions, each covering a distinct area of daily religious, family, civil or criminal life, a structural innovation later commentators likened to the four columns of jewels set into the biblical high priest's breastplate. The Arba'ah Turim's four part organization proved so effective that Joseph Karo adopted the same structure wholesale for his own sixteenth century code, the Shulchan Aruch, which absorbed and eventually eclipsed Jacob ben Asher's own text as the standard reference while preserving its fourfold framework. Beyond the Turim, Jacob ben Asher also wrote a widely read commentary on the Pentateuch and an abridgment of his father's own Talmudic compendium, continuing the family's legal scholarship into a second generation.