Bidspirit auction | R. YONATAN EYBESCHÜTZ. KREITI U-PLEITI

R. YONATAN EYBESCHÜTZ. KREITI U-PLEITI – FIRST EDITION – ALTONA, 1763 - Toward the end of a lifetime spent in hora'ah, R. Yonatan Eybeschütz (1690–1764) finally began bringing his halakhic writings to press. Of the extensive works he left behind, Kreiti u-Pleiti was the only substantial halakhic work he himself published during his lifetime, appearing in Altona in 1763, approximately a year before his death. He presented it not simply as another commentary on Yoreh De'ah, but as the accumulated product of some fifty years “sitting on the seat of hora'ah, ” encapsulating its genesis in the striking phrase “ראיתי מעשה ונתעורר הלכה” - an incident would come before him, and from the case a halakhic investigation would unfold. That description captures something essential about the book. Kreiti distills the rulings and conclusions; Pleiti preserves the extended arguments that produced them. Those arguments repeatedly emerge from the practical world of an eighteenth-century posek: slaughterers, menakrim, questions of anatomy and treifot, and the identification of kosher species. Perhaps the most celebrated example is his discussion of the “heartless chicken”: confronted with the earlier ruling of the Hakham Tzvi that a living bird could not possibly have existed without a heart, R. Yonatan (Pleiti 40:4) was unwilling simply to reject reliable observation in deference to received assumptions about nature, and entertained the possibility that another anatomical structure had performed the heart's function. The episode has become a classic case study in the encounter between rabbinic law and early-modern natural knowledge. The circumstances of the first edition are themselves revealing . R. Yonatan deliberately published Kreiti u-Pleiti without approbations. He explained that while his copies remained unsold no competing printer was likely to risk the expense of reprinting the work; once they had sold, he would welcome another edition. Nor did he relish the extravagant titles conventionally bestowed upon authors in haskamot, which he feared might encourage התנשאות רוח (an inflated sense of one’s own stature). Thus one of the great rabbinic works of the eighteenth century entered print with its author consciously dispensing with one of the most characteristic conventions of rabbinic publishing. This copy preserves an intriguing marginal contribution to the textual history of the work itself. In Pleiti, sec. 65, R. Yonatan relates the case of a menaker who traveled through Jewish communities claiming that the traditional identification of the gid ha-nasheh was mistaken. In answering him, R. Yonatan cites a source printed here as סמ”ג - a citation that proved notoriously difficult, since the passage in question is not found in the Semag. Alongside the passage, a previous owner has written: הגה״מ זצ״ל בעצמו תיקן את זה דצ״ל סה״נ היינו סדר הניקור הדפס בטור יו״ד פ״ה ועי׳ בספר גליוני הפלתי לבעל ברוך טעם זצ״ל דף נה בהגה שם אות ק׳ The annotator thus records the tradition that the author himself corrected סמ”ג to סה”נ, understood as Seder Ha-Nikkur, and directs the reader to the Gilyonei Ha-Pleiti of R. Baruch Frankel-Teomim, author of Baruch Ta'am. The very same correction later attracted the attention of rabbinic scholars and modern bibliographers; the claim that a surviving correction is actually in R. Yonatan's hand has been disputed, and should not be assumed. Here, however, an earlier reader of this first edition has preserved that tradition directly beside the problematic text. Altona, 1763. First edition. Modern black cloth binding, gilt spine and central gilt oval ornaments to boards; the binder has amusingly lettered the spine “כרתי ופלסי” rather than כרתי ופלתי. Upper corners of the first four leaves are professionally restored. Minor worming to the upper margins of a sequence of leaves. Leaves/pages 113–114 bound in reverse order. Otherwise a well-preserved copy, with the manuscript gloss described above. References : Mayerson, Rabbi Yehonatan Eibeschütz (diss., Tel Aviv 2021); Leiman, Haskamot Rebbi Yehonatan Eibeschütz veRebbi Yaakov Emden (Ohr Hamizrah 2006) 203; Kahana, A Heartless Chicken (Jerusalem 2021). Provenance : The collection of Abraham Lieberman, Flatbush, Brooklyn NY