The Original Layout of the Semak: A Chapter in the Development of the Glossed Hebrew Book

The end of the thirteenth century witnessed a discern able growth in the composition of glossed works in Ashkenaz. It was from this time on wards that authors penned influential talmudic and halakhic works from France and Germany with the intention that they be accompanied by a supplementary gloss, which was to be copied alongside the text. The three most famous Ashkenazic works of law written in this format were Hagahot Maimoniyot on Mishneh Torah, the various hagahot on Sha’arei Dura, and Moses Isserles’s gloss to Shulkhan ‘Arukh. Previously, commentaries such as Rashi and Tosafot were not expected to be copied on the same page of the Talmud and were usually separated from the text. This study focuses on the onset of the multi-level page layout. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, legal scholars wrote their primary texts as legal glosses for extant books. Some scholars even composed their own works as glossed ones, consisting of their own gloss commentary that was copied alongside the primary text. In this study I describe the above development and argue that Isaac of Corbeil wrote his Semak with this format in mind. He designed his work of law as a glossed book, with God’s commandments as its base text and his legal commentary written alongside it, as its gloss. This unique structure has not been noticed because no extant manuscript preserved his work as he envisioned it. In this study I will demonstrate, based on a close analysis of the content of the early manuscripts of Semak, that this integrated glossed format was Isaac’s original intention.