ר׳ בצלאל בן אברהם אשכנזי

ר׳ בצלאל בן אברהם אשכנזי (c.1520–c.1592), known through שיטה מקובצת, was a major Ottoman Talmudist and communal leader. Probably born in Jerusalem or Safed to a family of German origin, he studied with ר׳ ישראל די קוריאל and moved around 1540 to Cairo, where ר׳ דוד אבן זמרא became his principal teacher. After the Radbaz left Egypt, ר׳ בצלאל succeeded him as head of the Egyptian rabbis and led a yeshiva whose scholars included ר׳ יצחק לוריא אשכנזי, ר׳ אברהם מונסון, and later ר׳ שלמה עדני. He intervened forcefully in communal government, helping abolish the increasingly arbitrary office of nagid. His great literary project, first called אספת זקנים and later שיטה מקובצת, copied, compared, and arranged Geonic and Rishonic novellae by tractate, preserving texts otherwise lost. The familiar material on Kodashim was shaped from his marginalia by ר׳ שלמה עדני and should not simply be treated as his finished text. By 1587 he had moved to Jerusalem, where Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities accepted his leadership; he negotiated a taxation settlement and strengthened local institutions. He revisited Egypt in 1591 and apparently returned to Jerusalem, dying in the early 1590s. His responsa appeared posthumously at Venice in 1595.