The Bach

Rabbi Yoel ben Shmuel Sirkes, known as the Bach (acronym for Bayit Ḥadash), was a towering figure of 17th-century Polish Jewry. Born around 1561, he served as rabbi of Kraków and later of Lvov, where he became one of the most influential halakhic authorities of his era. The Bach was renowned for his penetrating legal mind and his systematic approach to Jewish law. His magnum opus, the Bayit Ḥadash—a supercommentary on the Tur (Jacob ben Asher's code)—revolutionized the study of halakha by harmonizing contradictions between Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions and integrating the full corpus of Talmudic and post-Talmudic sources. He died in 1640, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most cited authorities in subsequent Jewish jurisprudence.