Rif — Rabbi Yitzchak Alfasi הרי"ף — רבי יצחק אלפסי
author of the «Sefer HaHalachot», the first code drawn from the Talmud
Rabbi Yitzchak was born in 4773 in North Africa near Fez — hence «Alfasi», the man of Fez. He studied in Kairouan with the students of Rav Chananel and Rabbeinu Nissim, and lived in Morocco until he was seventy-five. After a denunciation he fled to Spain and spent his last years heading the academy of Lucena, the foremost in the country.
His work is called «Sefer HaHalachot», but everyone calls it the «Little Talmud». The Rif went through the Gemara and kept only what carried legal force in his own day, removing the dialectics, the rejected views, and the material bound to the Temple. What remained follows the order and the language of the Talmud, so that the reader sees the law together with its source.
It was a revolution: for the first time one could decide a case without traversing the whole Gemara. Rambam said he agreed with the Rif in almost everything; the Rosh wrote his own supplements to it, and «the Rif» still stands as a separate volume in printed editions of the Talmud.