Excerpt from The Study of the Talmud in Spain The work which Isaac Alfasi produced, known as 311355 wan, or, in short, the hm; is of stupendous magnitude On the face of it it looks like an abbreviated Talmud. But, it is much more. It contains all the accepted decisions of. The Talmud almost in the language of the Talmud The arguments leading up to the Halacha are left out. But some times the decision was not clear, sometimes the Were not concluswe. The creator of this work ha to delve deep into the intricacies of the Talmudic P' shat. He had often to deternnne the _'p shat and to determine dths Halacha. Hisp' shat sometimes differed from the P' sh, at say, of the Geonim, and his Halacha sometimes differed from the generally accepted Halacha. But Alfasi did not mind that. When he was convinced of the correctness of his interpre tafion and of the halacha as he understood it, he incorporated it in his work. We have therefore In the Rif a work which is a commentary and a code at the same time. The commentary is implied. The code is manifest. And both are in the form of an abridged Talmud. The student of the Talmud _finds In it great help for the understanding of the Talmud, and the decisor finds In it the halachic decisions. The Rif Is not only a monument of deep and vast learning. It 15 also a great work of art. It is unique in its kind in the whole of the. Post? Talmudic literature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.