A short time ago Rabbi Abba Leiter, a son of the late Rabbi Ze’ev Wolf Leiter of Pittsburgh, reprinted his father’s edition of Rabbi Yitachak Alfasi’s responsa.
“Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi died in 1103 (4863). Nine hundred years have passed since his death. This new edition of his responsa appears on the occasion of this anniversary, ” writes Rabbi Abba Leiter in the introduction to the reprint of the volume. “My later father published this edition about 50 years ago, in 1954. The book is now almost unavailable.”
Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi (known by the acronym Rif) was born in 1013 in Kal’at Hamad near Constantine, Algeria. He studied in Kairouan and later settled in Fez, Morocco where he taught for several decades (hence his surname Alfasi — “the man from Fez”). In 1088 , at the age of 75, he was forced to flee to Spain after being denounced by enemies to the government, and he resided for some time in Cordova. He then moved to Lucena, where in 1089, after the death of the local Rosh HaYeshiva, Rabbi Yitzhak Ben Yehuda Ibn Ghayyat — who in addition to authoring Talmudic and Halakhic works, wrote commentaries on books of the Bible and Hebrew poetry, mostly Piyyutim — he was appointed to the position the latter had occupied.
Rabbi Alfasi served there until his death at the age of 90, having designated his star pupil, Rabbi Yosef Ibn Migash as his successor.
Alfasi’s magnum opus, Sefer Halakha, is regarded as the first significant Halakhic compendium prior to the appearance of Maimonides, Yad HaHazakah (Mishneh Torah). Maimonides himself, in his Introduction to this Commentary on the Mishna, writes the following about Alfasi’s book after mentioning some of the codes of the Geonim: “The Halakhot of the great rabbi, our teacher Yitzchak of blessed memory has superseded all these books because it includes all the decisions and laws which are incumbent upon us in our time, namely, in the Galut.” According to Maimonidies, very few (at the most ten) errors can be found in the Rif’s Halakhot.
The Jewish Press, Friday, July 25, 2003 p. 56