ר׳ אהרן בן יעקב הכהן

ר׳ אהרן בן יעקב הכהן (fl. late thirteenth–early fourteenth century) was a Provençal halakhic compiler best known for ארחות חיים. Older literature calls him “of Lunel,” but internal references to Narbonne customs and scholars make Narbonne the stronger association. He came from a learned family: his grandfather ר׳ דוד wrote on the laws of forbidden animals, and an ancestor studied with ר׳ אברהם בן דוד מפושקיירא. When Philip IV expelled the Jews from royal France in 1306, ר׳ אהרן הכהן left Provence, apparently passing through Spain before settling on Majorca. There, before 1327, he assembled ארחות חיים, a broad compendium of daily prayer, blessings, Sabbath, festivals, dietary and family law, mourning, ethics, and doctrine. Unlike a terse code, it preserves long extracts from earlier Provençal and Spanish works, local customs, explanations, and variant opinions, making it an important repository for texts otherwise lost. Its first section was printed in Florence in 1752; the complete work appeared much later. The closely related כל בו may be an earlier abridgment or draft by the same author, but its authorship and textual relationship remain debated. Because neither birth nor death is securely dated, the numeric lifespan is explicitly conventional. No authenticated portrait survives.