The first edition of a highly influential Ashkenazic halakhic handbook.

Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried (1804-1886), a native of Ungvár, Hungary (modern-day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), returned to his hometown after a nearly-two decade hiatus in about 1849, eventually being appointed head of the local rabbinic court. A gifted scholar with a wide range of traditional interests, he is the author of numerous liturgical, Talmudic, grammatical, kabbalistic, and halakhic works, most prominently the present title. In his Sefer kitsur shulhan arukh, Ganzfried selected the most practically applicable halakhot from across Rabbi Joseph Caro’s four-volume corpus and distilled the literature surrounding them into a clear, co꧙mprehensible digest, interlaced with ethical maxims. The book was an instant success, and by the time of its author’s death it had gone through at least another eleven printings. Subsequent scholars considered the work so useful and/or important that they composed commentaries on it and translations of it into numerous languages.