Pahad Yitzhak פחד יצחק
It deliberately decides nothing: it gives the references from the Talmud to the author's own contemporaries and leaves the reader to work it out.
Alphabetical entries, cross-references, an apparatus of citations — an arrangement with no precedent in halakhic literature. Its nearest Italian ancestor is the Arukh of R. Nathan of Rome, an eleventh-century lexicon; hence the careful formulation: not the first talmudic encyclopedia as such, but the first alphabetical halakhic encyclopedia.
Its most unusual feature is the refusal to rule. The author collects opinions from the Talmud down to his own contemporaries and invites the reader to weigh them and decide. And he prints inside it the responsa of contemporaries and opponents, including what was written against himself.
It took over a century to print. The first volume: Venice, 1750, in the author's lifetime; part of the second: Venice, 1753. Then posthumously: volumes two and three at Reggio in 1796; the fourth in 1813; the fifth in 1840; the remaining letters from the Mekitzei Nirdamim society at Lyck and Berlin in 1864–1887. A citation reading "Pahad Yitzhak, Venice 1750" describes one volume out of many.
The autograph manuscript — a hundred and twenty volumes — has been in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France since 1845.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Pahad Yitzhak, Venice 1750 — Berlin 1887 — it took a hundred and thirty-one years after the author's death to print
Documents of the period
- The autograph manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France — a hundred and twenty volumes, acquired in 1845
Scholarship
- J. Woolf, Lampronti's Pahad Yizhaq: Medieval or Modern? — a reference work of a new kind in an older Italian lexicographic line
Basis: documents and evidence.