Moses Isserles

Moses Isserles was a Polish rabbinic scholar born in Krakow in 1530 who spent his entire career there, heading its yeshiva until his death in 1572. Because Joseph Karo's newly published Shulchan Aruch, completed in Ottoman Palestine, reflected mainly Sephardic legal custom, Isserles composed the Mapah, literally the tablecloth, a set of glosses laid over Karo's code that inserted the parallel Ashkenazi rulings and customs of European Jewry wherever the two traditions diverged; he had already worked through much of the same material in his earlier commentary, the Darkhei Moshe, on Jacob ben Asher's Arba'ah Turim and Karo's own Beit Yosef. The Mapah's integration into Karo's text was so complete that the term Shulchan Aruch has since referred to the combined work of both authors rather than to Karo's original code alone. Through this gloss, Isserles reestablished the Talmudic authorities and customs of Ashkenazi Jewry as a deciding factor in Jewish law rather than allowing Karo's Sephardic rulings to stand unchallenged, and the merged code became the universally accepted law code across both the Sephardic and Ashkenazi branches of Judaism.