Ba'er Hetev

Rabbi Yehuda ben Shimon Ashkenazi was a rabbinic judge active in the first half of the eighteenth century, best remembered for the halakhic commentary that gave him his byname. Reference works place his origins in Frankfurt am Main and record that he served as a dayan on the rabbinical court of Tykocin (Tiktin) in Poland. His enduring contribution is the Ba'er Hetev ("Explaining Well"), a compact digest that gathers and condenses later authorities' rulings on Joseph Karo's Shulchan Arukh. First printed at Amsterdam beginning in 1742, his glosses on the Orach Chayim and Even HaEzer sections were eventually bound into standard editions of the code, where they became a familiar study companion; the Yoreh De'ah and Choshen Mishpat portions circulated under the same title in a separate version by Zechariah Mendel of Belz.