Spory o status halachy aszkenazyjskiej w I Rzeczypospolitej
The Disputes about the Status of the Ashkenazi Halakha in the 1st Republic of Poland

Summary/Abstract: The religious history of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland and subsequently in the 1st Republic, i.e., from 1569 to the partitions, is largely the history of rivalry between the local Ashkenazi tradition and Talmudic halakhism, rooted chiefly in Oriental tradition. This rivalry, in which, actively or passively, knowingly or unknowingly, not only the elites but practically all the Jews took part, is brushed aside if not ignored altogether in official historiography. The outcome of that struggle varied, but the Ashkenazi traditions were able to survive and in the 19th century they earned the status of a separate Jewish denomination, along with their own version of the halakha. The most spectacular clashes occurred in Kraków, with the role of the chief defenders of Ashkenazi tradition played by the first Jewish printers in Poland, the Halicz brothers, followed by Moshe Isserles, who was appointed chief rabbi by the king (the scope of his powers in practice remains unknown), and who was the only one to dare to present, after the publication of Yosef Caro’s Talmudic code Shulkhan arukh (1565), the alternative Askenazi code known as Torat hachatat (1569). This caused confusion in the Jewish community and provoked the proponents of Shulkhan arukh to counteract it. We are presenting here the origins of the conflict, its course and ultimately its outcome: Isserles’s publication of the Talmudic Shulkhan arukh code, albeit with his own introduction and glosses, in which he presented alternative Ashkenazi regulations and demanded that, in the event of discrepancies the local Jews followed their own halakha traditions, which he himself codified. Therefore he presented his own Ashkenazi code on the sidelines of Yosef Caro’s code. Nowadays, after more than four centuries of halakhic disputes between the advocates of the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic Oriental traditions, it should be accepted that no reconciliation or synthesis was achieved. Caro’s and Isserles’s codes actually petrified the divide between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi tradition; Isserles’s authority was ultimately accepted by most Ashkenazis and the value of Yosef Caro’s code by Sephardic and Oriental Jews. this means that in his seemingly hopeless struggle against the Talmudic halakha Isserles scored a historic if only partial success. Over time, the Ashkenazi traditions codified by him (mostly coming from Lesser Poland) became institutionalized, although not quite when and where he wanted it to happen. They were only recognized in the 19th century by the German maskils as the groundwork of the halakha of all the Ashkenazi Jews and not just the Jews from the Republic of Poland, which disappeared from the maps in the meantime.

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