רא"ש

Rav Asher ben Yechiel (5010/1250–c. 5088/1327), known as the Rosh or Rabbeinu Asher, and in English sources as Asher ben Jehiel, carried the Torah of the Baalei HaTosafot from Ashkenaz into Sefarad and became one of the three amudei hora’ah on whom the Shulchan Aruch stands. He was born in Ashkenaz — apparently in Cologne — to Rav Yechiel, a talmid chacham numbered among the Chasidei Ashkenaz, of the family of the Raavan. He grew into the talmid muvhak of the Maharam of Rothenburg, and rav and talmid exchanged scores of halachic letters in warmth and honor.

When the Maharam was imprisoned in 5046/1286 and the crown demanded twenty thousand marks for him, the Rosh stood guarantor and gathered the ransom; the redemption never came to pass, and after his rebbi’s passing in prison he filled his place in Worms as the gadol of Ashkenaz. The Rindfleisch massacres of 5058/1298 laid waste some hundred and forty-six kehillot — among the murdered was Rav Mordechai ben Hillel, his kinsman and chaver from the Maharam’s yeshiva — and fearing that his rebbi’s fate would become his own, he left Ashkenaz in 5063/1303, passed through Provence, and reached Sefarad in the autumn of 5065/1305, stripped of his wealth by the flight. The Rashba called on the kehillot to receive him with honor, and the kehilla of Toledo set him at the head of its beit din and its yeshiva — an appointment without precedent for a chacham of Ashkenaz among the kehillot of Sefarad.

His central work, Piskei HaRosh, written toward the end of his days, follows the order of the Rif’s Halachot, states the practical halacha of each sugya, and joins to it the piskei of the Baalei HaTosafot and his own; it has been printed with nearly every edition of the Talmud and is learned in the yeshivot as part of the daily seder to this day. Beside it stand the Tosafot HaRosh; peirushim on Nedarim and Nazir printed in the Vilna Shas; a peirush on Mishnah for Zeraim and Tohorot; Orchot Chaim, a short sefer of mussar written for his sons, which opens with the charge to distance oneself utterly from haughtiness; a peirush on the Torah; and the Teshuvot HaRosh, arranged by subject into klalim. A later collection called Besamim Rosh that circulated under his name was shown to be an eighteenth-century forgery.

In psak he held that only the Talmud itself is beyond dispute: even the rulings of the Geonim may be set aside where clear proofs from the gemara stand against them. Toward philosophy he was unbending, and he joined the Rashba’s cherem against the study of the chochmot before the age of twenty-five. Of his eight sons, Rav Yehuda — who testified that his father was niftar in poverty — filled his place in Toledo and wrote the Zichron Yehuda, and the most famous, Rav Yaakov, built the Arba’ah Turim upon his father’s piskei halacha; through the Tur, and through Rav Yosef Karo, who set the Rosh beside the Rif and the Rambam as the pillars of the Shulchan Aruch, his psak stands at the foundation of halacha. He was niftar and buried in Toledo.