Joseph Karo

Joseph Karo was a Sephardic rabbinic scholar born in Toledo, Spain, in 1488, whose family was expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree when he was four years old; after decades moving through Portugal, Morocco, Nikopolis, Adrianople and Salonica, he settled around 1535 in Safed, in Ottoman controlled Palestine, where he built a yeshiva of more than two hundred students and remained until his death in 1575. His first major work, the Beit Yosef, was an exhaustive commentary tracing the sources and reasoning behind every ruling in Jacob ben Asher's Arba'ah Turim across the legal literature accumulated since the Talmud. Karo then distilled that commentary into the Shulchan Aruch, completed in 1555 and published in four parts beginning in 1565, a concise code that followed the Turim's own fourfold structure and stated Jewish law's practical rulings without the surrounding argument, drawing chiefly on the earlier authorities Isaac Alfasi, Maimonides and Asher ben Jehiel as its three governing voices. Karo earned the honorific titles HaMechaber, the author, and Maran, our master, and the Shulchan Aruch became recognized as the last of the great codifications of Jewish law, remaining the standard reference for Sephardic religious practice into the present.