שלמה אלמולי

Rav Shlomo Almoli (c. 5250/1490–after 5302/1542) was a rav, physician and man of letters of the generation of the expulsion — born in Iberia, and active in Salonika and Constantinople, where the exiles rebuilt their world. A physician of reputation, he turned his means to the service of Torah: he printed at his own expense the works of the early grammarians and thinkers, bringing to press the Sefer HaShorashim of the Radak and works of the Ibn Ezra, and he dreamed on the grandest scale — his Meassef L’Chol HaMachanot laid out the plan for a full encyclopedia of Jewish knowledge, centuries before its time.

His own pen ranged wide: Halichot Sheva on the grammar of the sheva; Shaar Hashem HeChadash on the soul and its immortality; and a treatise on Hebrew poetics, Shekel HaKodesh. But his name lives in the sefer that klal Yisrael never stopped printing: Pitron Chalomot, the classic Jewish work on dreams — gathering everything Chazal, the geonim and the rishonim say of dreams and their interpretation, in three parts: the understanding of what a dream is, the interpretations themselves, and the halachot of the dream — the taanit chalom and hatavat chalom of the Gemara and the poskim.

First printed in Salonika around 5276 and again in Constantinople, it crossed the Jewish world — Rav Menasheh ben Israel printed it in Amsterdam, and Kracow, and a Yiddish rendering carried it into every home. Few sefarim of that generation have been so continuously in Jewish hands.