Obj. ID: 38664  Sheelot u-Teshuvot by Yoel ben Shmuel Sirkis, Frankfurt am Main, 1697

This text was prepared by William Gross:

One hundred fifty-eight responsa by R. Joel b. Samuel Sirkes (“The Bach”), addressing matters of prayer, Shabbat, the laws of mourning, matrimony and divorce, financial matters, etc. Published posthumously, this work is R. Sirkes’ magnum opus, and is the source for the acronym by which he is known, “The Bach”. The manuscript of Bayit Chadash was brought to press by the widow of R. Meir Stern, the daughter of R. Mendlen Bass (a student of The Bach).
This is the second edition of this work printed by Wust, and contains a new title page, showing an ornate oval frame topped by two winged putti. The original edition, from the same year, used an ornate title-page (clearly re-employed from an earlier, non-Jewish, work), which included prominent, partially-nude classical male and female figures. Deemed inappropriate and offensive to Jewish sensibilities by the rabbinical council of Frankfurt, the frontispiece was replaced with the one seen here (necessitating the reprinting of the entire sheet with its several pages) (see B.486). This same title page is used on B.422.
R. Joel b. Samuel Sirkes was born in Lublin in 1561. He was a prominent Jewish posek and halakhist. He lived in Central Europe and held rabbinical positions in Belz, Brest-Litovsk and Kraków. He died in Krakow in 1640.
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.