שלמה עדני

Rav Shlomo Adeni (5327/1567–c. 5390/1630), known in English sources as Solomon Adeni, was the author of the Melechet Shlomo on all six sedarim of the Mishnah. He was born in Sanaa in Teiman (Yemen), son of Rav Yeshua, the rav of the city, the family name recalling the town of Aden in the south of Arabia. In 5331/1571 his father brought the family up to Eretz Yisrael; his mother passed away on the journey, and his brothers shortly after their arrival. They settled first in Tzfat in deep poverty and then in Yerushalayim, where his father was niftar in 5342/1582, leaving Shlomo an orphan of fifteen. For two and a half years he had no home, until Rav Moshe Chami took him into his house, supported him for five years, married him off, and stood by him afterward — a chesed Rav Shlomo set down for all generations in the hakdamah to his sefer. In Yerushalayim he learned under Rav Betzalel Ashkenazi, author of the Shitah Mekubetzet, and under Rav Chaim Vital.

Around 5360/1600 he settled in Chevron. Poverty never left him — he brings in his hakdamah a family tradition that they were of those whom Ezra HaSofer summoned to Eretz Yisrael in the days of the second Beit HaMikdash and who did not go up, and that want clung to the family in galut ever after — and eleven of his children were taken from him in plagues. There, over thirty years, begun in 5349/1589 when he was twenty-two, he wrote the Melechet Shlomo: a commentary on the whole Mishnah with great care for the nusach and nikud of the text, drawing on both Talmuds, on Rashi, Rabbeinu Shimshon of Sens, and Rav Shlomo Sirilio, weaving in the hagahot of Rav Yehosef Ashkenazi, and cherishing above all the Rambam, whom he crowns “the greatest of the poskim.” Menashe ben Israel drew on its conclusions in his Mishnah edition of 5392/1632.

The work waited some three hundred years in manuscript and was first printed in the Vilna Mishnayot in 5684–5689/1924–1929; later printings restored passages omitted there. He also wrote Binyan Shlomo LeChochmat Betzalel, in which he copied his rebbe Rav Betzalel Ashkenazi’s hagahot on Seder Kodashim — the source of the glosses printed in the gilyon of the Vilna Shas under the name Shitah Mekubetzet — and Divrei Emet, notes on the masorah, a work since lost though the Chida made use of it. He was niftar in Chevron and rests in the ancient beit hakevarot of the city.