Obj. ID: 35752  Hilchot Rav Alfas by Yitzhak ben Ya'akov Alfasi (the Rif), Frankfurt am Main, 1699-1700

This text was prepared by William Gross:

A miniature edition of Hilchot Rav Alfas [the Rif] with Rashi’s commentary. Printed by the brothers Zalman and Avraham Katz of Frankfurt, at the press of Johann Wust.
The book includes a large fold-out leaf at the end of the third volume, with two printed illustrations of birds, referring to the names of the two printers responsible for the work. Above the one on the right, a crane, is the name “Zalman zum kronikh far legir”, and above that on the left, a falcon, the name “Avraham zum falcon far legir”. Interestingly, in the prefaces to the two earlier sections of the Rif printed by the brothers, they are both listed as zum falcon. The inclusion of these printers’ names is in itself quite unusual. Because Jews were not allowed to operate a press in Frankfurt, Jewish printers typically omitted their names and place of publication from their works. Not so, however, in this case, where the identities of both the Jewish printers and the Christian press they used (that of Johann Wust) are recorded in the volumes themselves.
Although it was printed in Germany, the word Amsterdam is enlarged on the title page, so as to suggest the book’s special status, being “printed in the letters of Amsterdam”.
Alfasi (1013 – 1103), a student of R. Nissim b. Jacob and R. Hanenel b. Hushiel in Kairouan, relocated to Fez. Recognized as the leading Talmudic sage of the time, he was, for reasons unknown, denounced in 1088 to the government. He was thus forced to flee to Spain, where he wrote his most important work, Hilkot Rav Alfas – one of the greatest works in halachic literature. It is an abridgement of the Talmud, extracting all pertinent legal decisions and eliminating non-halakhic material, discussions, and subject matter not applicable today.
Normally printed as a large folio, this edition is noteworthy for its small size. It is printed in three volumes, each with a like title page.

Johann Wust was the son of Balthasar Christian Wust, the first known Frankfurter printer of Hebrew books. After working with his father for many years, Johann established his own press in1690, and continued to print for the better part of the first decade of the 18th C. Several Jewish printers are known to have used the Wust press for their works.