ידידיה שלמה רפאל נורצי

Rav Yedidyah Shlomo Refael Norzi (5320/1560–after 5386/1626), known in English sources as Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, was a rav of Mantua and the author of the Minchat Shai, the classic work on the masorah and text of the Tanach. Born in Mantua to Rav Avraham Norzi, he learned under Rav Moshe Cases and received semichah in 5345/1585; toward the beginning of the seventeenth century he was appointed to the rabbanut of Mantua, which he carried until his petirah.

The greater part of his life was given to a single labor: to set the text of the Tanach — its letters, its nikud, and its taamim — exactly according to the masorah. He gathered the variant readings scattered through the Talmud and midrashim, searched out the masorah literature both printed and in manuscript, and undertook long journeys abroad to collate manuscripts — among them the Toledo manuscript written in 5037/1277 — and to find the Masoret Seyag LaTorah of Rav Meir Abulafia, the Ramah, whom he cites more than six hundred times. He drew as well on the Or Torah of his friend Rav Menachem Lonzano, from which he took much of his knowledge of the practices of the sofrim.

He completed the work in 5386/1626 and called it Goder Peretz; when Refael Chaim Basila first brought it to print in Mantua more than a hundred years later (5502/1742–44), it received the name by which the world knows it, Minchat Shai — shin and yud, the initials of Shlomo Yedidyah. It appeared in two volumes, the first on the Torah and the five Megillot, the second on Nevi’im and Ketuvim, with short treatises at the end — Maamar HaMaarich, on the meteg, and the rules of the letters beged kefet — and it became the standard authority for the exact text of the Tanach. The commentary on the Torah was printed with the text at Dubrovna in 5564/1804, and a commentary on the Minchat Shai itself, the Or Chaim of Rav Chaim Zev Bender, appeared in Vilna in 5627/1867.