text · B0052
Arba'ah Turim ארבעה טורים
The code that gave halachah its lasting shape. The Tur gathered the rishonim's rulings — Sefarad and Ashkenaz on one page — into four divisions and numbered simanim, and the frame held: the Beit Yosef was written as its running commentary, the Shulchan Aruch (Shulchan Aruch) kept its structure siman by siman, and to cite "the siman" today is still to cite the Tur's grid.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- ארבעה טורים
- Also known as
- The Tur, Turim
- Era
- rishonim
II. When
- Traditional
- composed by R' Yaakov ben Asher in Toledo, complete by c. 5100 AM
- Civil (computed)
- 5060–5103 AM · 1300–1343 CE
- Academic
- first half of the 14th c. CE, complete before the author's death c. 1343
- Duration
- ≈43 years
- Precision
- approximate
IV. What
- Language
- Hebrew
- Redaction
- Composed by R' Yaakov ben Asher (Yaakov ben Asher (the Tur)) in Toledo, weighing the Rif and the Rambam against his father the Rosh — cited on nearly every page as "my father, my master" — into a single practical arrangement of the law as applied in his day.
- Structure
- Four turim ("rows," after the four rows of the choshen): Orach Chaim on the daily and calendar order, Yoreh De'ah on ritual law, Even HaEzer on marriage, Choshen Mishpat on civil law — each divided into short topical simanim, the addressing scheme halachah has used ever since.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The code opens with Yehudah ben Teima's "be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle... to do the will of your Father in heaven" — setting a program of waking to divine service that the Shulchan Aruch's own first paragraph carries forward. | rabbinic | ★★★★★ | |
| R' Yosef Karo wrote the Beit Yosef as a commentary on the Tur — "I decided to build it on the Tur, for it includes most of the opinions of the poskim" — and distilled it into the Shulchan Aruch on the Tur's own four-part, siman-by-siman frame; the structural dependence recorded in Shulchan Aruch's based_on edge runs through this book. | tradition | ★★★★☆ | |
| The work is a deliberate synthesis of the two halachic worlds its author straddled: son and student of the Rosh, with whom he fled Germany for Castile, he set the Franco-German masters beside the Rif and Rambam and ruled between them — the first code built to serve Sefarad and Ashkenaz at once. | tradition reconstruction | ★★★★☆ |
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