Pe'er Ha-Dor

Pe'er Ha-Dor

Pe’er Ha-Dor (“glory of the generation”) contains the responsa of Maimonides, the great 12th Jewish scholar and philosopher. Responsa are answers to specific questions of Jewish law. Maimonides left over 250 such answers, but they were never published. Moreover, like most of Maimonides' writings, they were written in Arabic, and as such were incomprehensible to virtually all the learned Jews of Europe.

In the 17th century, the scholar Jacob Sasportas from the Sephardic community in Algeria, came to possess a manuscript of these responsa. He brought it to Amsterdam, where he hoped to have it translated into Hebrew and published, but this was not accomplished until the following century, when a man from Jerusalem, Mordechai Tamah, was found to perform the work of translation. It was published by Yohan Yanson in 1765.

The title reflects the community’s pride in the publication, and its significance is confirmed by the endorsements it received from the chief rabbis of Amsterdam, the Hague, and Rotterdam, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi.

Pfeffer, Jeremy I. 'From One End of the Earth to the Other': The London Bet Din, 1805-1855, and the Jewish Convicts Transported to Australia. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008. 173.

Zweip, Irene. "Jewish Enlightenment Reconsidered: The Dutch Eighteenth Century." In Sepharad in Ashkenaz : Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, edited by Resianne Fontaine, Andrea Schatz, and Irene Zweip, 291-292. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007.

Digital Image: Washington University in Saint Louis

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