JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1577. R. Yom Tov Tzahalon: The ‘Good Doctrine’, the first book ever printed in the Land of Israel

Safed in the sixteenth century was both a thriving center of Jewish life in the Land of Israel and a node in a wider Sephardic world. In this setting, a young scholar, R. Yom Tov Tzahalon, wrote Lekach Tov [Good Doctrine] a commentary on the Book of Esther. This slim volume printed in Safed in 1577 became the first book ever printed in the Land of Israel and, according to many scholars, the first book printed anywhere in the Middle East or Western Asia, thereby binding together the Hebrew language, the printed word, and the ancient Jewish attachment to the land.

R. Yom Tov ben Moshe Tzahalon (c. 1558–after 1638) was born in Safed to a family of Spanish exiles who had resettled in the Galilee after the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula. He grew up in one of the most dynamic Jewish communities of the time: Safed was renowned for its rabbinic academies, halakhic authorities, and kabbalists such as R. Moshe Cordovero and R. Yitzchak Luria, and it attracted scholars and merchants from across the Jewish world.

R. Tzahalon studied with prominent local figures, especially the major halachic authority R. Moshe di Trani (1505–1580). From a relatively young age, R. Tzahalon’s reputation as a halachic authority spread beyond Safed, and questions were sent to him from various communities in the Ottoman Empire and........

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