Kaf HaChayim on Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayimכף החיים על שולחן ערוך אורח חיים
Jerusalem · 1912
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Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer (Kaf HaChaim)
Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer (Kaf HaChaim)
1870 CE–1939 CE · AH · Baghdad
Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer (c. 1870–1939) was a prominent Hungarian Torah scholar and rabbi, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a distinguished figure in the yeshiva world and Orthodox Jewish community of his era, known for his deep Talmudic learning and rabbinic authority. Sofer represented the continuation of the Hungarian Hasidic and yeshiva traditions that had flourished under the influence of the Chatam Sofer and his successors. He was respected as a teacher and decisor in matters of Jewish law, and his legacy was carried forward through his students and family connections within Hungarian Jewish life until the upheavals of the mid-20th century.
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BaghdadIraq
What they did here
Born in Baghdad; later in Jerusalem, where he wrote the Kaf HaChaim.
Baghdad in this era
Baghdad in the modern era remained home to one of the Middle East's oldest and most culturally rich Jewish communities, even as the wider world convulsed with emancipation, nationalism, and catastrophe. Under Ottoman rule through the nineteenth century and then British mandate after World War I, Iraqi Jews—numbering around 150,000 by the twentieth century's mid-point—enjoyed relative security and prosperity, dominating trade and serving as merchants, money-changers, and professionals. The community maintained vibrant yeshivas where traditional Babylonian Jewish learning flourished, and Hebrew printing presses produced works that circulated throughout the Levantine world. Yet this stability proved fragile: growing Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel in 1948, and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars ignited violent upheaval. Massive Jewish emigration followed, with over 100,000 Iraqi Jews airlifted to Israel between 1950 and 1952 in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. The storied Jewish quarter, once filled with synagogues and study halls stretching back centuries, emptied within a generation. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, born in Baghdad in 1920, carried this heritage of Iraqi Jewry with him into his monumental career as a leading Sephardic halakhic authority and spiritual guide to hundreds of thousands of Jews worldwide.
About Baghdad
Major Mizrahi center; home of Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai).
Works(2)
Kaf HaChayim on Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh De'ahכף החיים על שולחן ערוך יורה דעה
Jerusalem · 1900