ABSTRACT
Our text is a brief excerpt from R. Joseph Karo’s (Safed, Israel, 1488–1575) legal work Beit Yosef (“House of Joseph”). Karo tells us that he began work on Beit Yosef in Adrianople, in the Ottoman Empire (now Edirne, Turkey) in 1522 and completed it in Safed in 1542, after which he worked on a second edition until 1554. 2 Beit Yosef is a comprehensive work of Jewish legal analysis and decisions appended to the fourteenth-century Spanish legal compilation Arba’a Turim (the “Four Rows,” commonly known as Tur), written by R. Jacob ben Asher (Spain; c. 1269–1343). Jacob ben Asher divided Tur into four parts: Orach Chayyim, Yore De’a, Eben Haezer, and Choshen Mishpat (Karo later adopted this division for his own legal compilation, the Shulchan Arukh). The name Choshen Mishpat means “breastpiece of decision” (Exod 28:15), and its 426 chapters cover an array of civil and (what we would call) criminal laws, notably laws concerning judges, evidence, commerce, loans, property, damages, and related issues. Our text is a brief selection from Karo’s comments on Jacob ben Asher’s poetic disquisition on justice at the beginning of chapter 1 of Choshen Mishpat. In this text Karo offers the unblinkered observation that charity purchases social peace; were they not to be given charity, the poor might very well resort to robbery.
