The preamble to Beit Yosef, and to a lesser extent the complementary and shorter one to Shulchan ‘Arukh, are among the constitutive Jewish documents of the early modern period. Even during his own life, R. Karo clearly considered the preamble an important manifesto for his entire codification project. He insisted on attaching it to all four parts of his books, printed at various times and in different printing presses. The introduction indicates how deeply these double codes are inserted in the rabbinical and post-Talmudic fabric, preserved in a growing number of past books and writings, expanding even further following the deep impact of the print revolution on Jewish culture. The perception of Karo's preamble as exclusively rooted in this Jewish past has come to be taken for granted in Jewish erudition. I seek to show here that this traditionalist perspective leaves too many gaps and cannot by itself explain the full scope of Karo's life project. It is no less essential to examine his text against the background of Ottoman legal history. The important codes introduced by the Ottomans in various parts of their expanding empire included detailed preambles in which they defined the role of law for political control, the Sultan as guarantor of justice and just law, and the contribution of legal mechanisms to the bureaucratic system needed to sustain the empire's ongoing functioning. These preambles reaching the entire empire essentially constituted an Ottoman manifesto of law and rule. As the Jewish minority had a profound acquaintance with the Ottoman law and its courts, they were exposed to these messages, conveyed in the preambles to codes of law (Kanunnameler).

Reading a Preamble to a Legal Code

The attempt to explore the personal world of rabbinical figures throughout the Middle Ages is a frustrating task for contemporary historian. The individual composers hide themselves behind the collective “we” of the chain of past generations and their literary productions. The wide rabbinical literature at our disposal is saturated with paraphrases and allusions to previous compositions or to the canonical literature. One of the channels that allow us to delve beyond this collectivist screen is found in the introductions to books, where authors often propose their motivations for writing or reveal their personal circumstances.