French Halakhic Tradition in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

This study examines the legal writings of the two leading rabbinic figures in French Jewry in the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It characterizes their legal and Talmudic methodology and argues that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French scholars in Italy were generally following in the footsteps of their predecessors in France. Furthermore, it argues for the ongoing existence of a uniquely French subtradition within the larger Ashkenazic tradition in the late Middle Ages.