יעקב לנדא

Rav Yaakov Baruch ben Yehuda Landau (niftar 5253/1493), known in English sources as Jacob Landau, was a posek of Ashkenaz who settled in Italy, the author of the Agur. His father was among the chief authorities on the Talmud in Germany, and hundreds of talmidim — his son among them — learned under him. Rav Yaakov left Germany for Italy, living first in Pavia from 5240/1480 and then in Naples from 5247/1487.

In Naples, between 1487 and 1492, he brought out the Agur, written for his talmid Ezra Avraham ben David Ovadiah, whose hours were given to other studies and who could not go deep into the sea of the Talmud. That practical purpose shaped the sefer: a digest of the halachot a Jew needs to know, drawn chiefly from the first two chalakim of the Tur — Rav Yaakov ben Asher is his chief authority throughout — together with excerpts from the halachic literature written after the Tur’s day. Through the Agur, the psakim of the chachmei Ashkenaz, the Maharil and Rav Yisrael Isserlein among them, entered the practice of the kehillot of Italy, where they had been little known before. In his preface he gives three reasons for the name: agur as bent low, for humility; as a heap, for it is a gathered digest; and as dwelling, after the tents of Shem — the tents of Torah.

The Agur holds two firsts in the history of the Hebrew sefer: it was the first printed with a haskamah, and the second Hebrew book printed in its author’s lifetime. Rav Yosef Karo quotes it often in the Shulchan Aruch. At its end Rav Yaakov set the Sefer Chazon, riddles of halachah, later printed on its own in Venice in 5306/1546 and in Prague in 5368/1608.