Background
Jacob ben Asher was born in Cologne, Germany in 1269.
Jacob ben Asher was born in Cologne, Germany in 1269.
He stu¬died in his native Germany with his father, Asher ben Yehiel, with whom he moved to Toledo, Spain, in 1303. In order not to be distracted from his studies, he refused any rabbinical office and at times lived in great poverty. His education was almost entirely rabbinic and he had little secular learning.
His greatest work was the Arba’ah Turim (“Four Rows,” referring to the rows of precious stones, which served as oracles, on the breastplate of the high priest; cf. Exodus 28:17). From this book, he was widely known as Ba’al ha-Turim (“author of the Turim”). The quadrapartite division of the book became the basis for the Shulhan Arukh of Joseph Caro and through Caro they were accepted as the standard divisions of Jewish legal codification. The Tur, as the work was popularly known, owed much to the Mishneh Torah, the codification of Moses Maimonides, but unlike his predecessor, Jacob summarized the diverse viewpoints of previous authorities, usually ending the discussion with the views of his father. Like his father, he omitted all laws that were related to the Temple or relevant only when living in the Land of Israel. Much of the material reflects the author’s own single-minded piety. The language is clear and the style simple, which contributed to the work’s great popularity throughout the Jewish world.
Jacob ben Asher was also the author of a Bible commentary strongly influenced by Nahmanides, although he omitted the latter’s mystical explanations and concentrated on literal meaning. Each section opens with a preface in which Jacob’s explanations lean heavily on wordplay and numerology as well as the orthography of the traditional text. These prefaces were widely appreciated and were reprinted in many editions of the Hebrew Bible.