אשתורי הפרחי

Rav Ishtori Haparchi (c. 5040/1280–c. 5115/1355), whose given name was Yitzchak HaKohen ben Moshe, was a rishon, physician, and the first researcher of the geography and halachah of Eretz Yisrael. Born in Provence into a line of chachamim — his grandfather was Rav Nathan of Trinquetaille, author of Shaar HaTefisah — he learned from his father and grandfather, from Rav Eliezer ben Yosef of Chinon, who was later killed al kiddush Hashem, and from Rav Yaakov ben Machir ibn Tibbon of the well-known Tibbon family, gaining a broad command of Torah together with medicine, astronomy, and languages.

When the Jews were driven out of France in 5066/1306, he made his way through Spain and Egypt and came up to Eretz Yisrael. He first settled in Yerushalayim but left after a year, and made his home in Beit She’an — a place, he wrote, of abundant waters and blessed land — where he worked as a physician. For seven years he traveled the length of the land, first in the Galil and then through its other regions.

The fruit of those travels was Kaftor vaFerach, completed in 5082/1322 and first printed in Venice in 5309/1549 — the first Hebrew sefer on the geography of Eretz Yisrael, written as a work of halachah on the mitzvot that depend on the land. In it he sets out the borders of the land, the division among the shevatim, the topography of Yerushalayim, and its crops, and he identified some 180 places named in Tanach, Mishnah, and Gemara. His rulings on the borders of the land are drawn upon by poskim to this day, and later scholars gave him the title first among the researchers of Eretz Yisrael.