JOSEPH ROSH HA-SEDER

JOSEPH ROSH HA-SEDER (12^th century), Egyptian rabbinical scholar. There is very little biographical information about him. He was born in *Baghdad. His father, Jacob, who died before 1211, was a pupil of *Samuel b. Ali, who sent him in 1187 to visit the communities of Babylonia as an emissary of the Baghdad yeshivah. Joseph emigrated to *Egypt in middle age, leaving behind him in Babylonia an extensive library. He earned his living as a scribe and copyist, and perhaps also as a bookseller. He is unique in having worked out for himself a series of rabbinic-literary projects of very wide scope, and even took preliminary steps for their implementation. Among the *Genizah documents, there are many fragments from planned works which never got beyond their first stage. His projects included compiling a Gemara for those tractates which have none, by assembling the relevant passages from the rest of the Talmud; connecting the oral with the written law by assembling Midrashim according to the weekly scriptural readings; a commentary on the Pentateuch and the haftarot taken from previous commentators; commentaries on the Mishnah, the Talmud, the code of *Alfasi and the prayer book of *Saadiah Gaon. Some of the extant fragments have been published. In order to facilitate his work, Joseph made a collection of numerous geonic responsa according to the order of the tractates, and for the same purpose compiled several lists of books, a number of which are extant. These lists contain material valuable for the history of rabbinical literature. It is worth mentioning Joseph's peculiar habit of applying to himself various honorific titles, some of them self-devised, e.g., Rosh be-Rabbanan ("Chief of the Scholars").

bibliography:

Assaf, in: ks, 18 (1941/42), 272–81; Abramson ibid., 26 (1949/50), 72–95; Benedikt, ibid., 28 (1952/53), 229ff.; Allony, ibid., 38 (1962/63), 531–57; Scheiber, ibid., 44 (1968/69), 546–8.

[Israel Moses Ta-Shma]