About the Author
Shemtob Gaguine (1884-1953) was one of the great Jewish personalities of the twentieth century, conquering with quiet dignity practically every rabbinic field he encountered over more than four decades of professional life. He was diligent as a student, charming as a writer and poet, engaging as a historian, industrious as a Rosh Yeshiba, heeded as a posek by Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike, esteemed by dayyanim from Baghdad to Manchester, and beloved by his wife and seven children. He was a thoroughgoing man of the world, fluent in six languages and widely read in all of them. His Keter Shem Tob is a monument of halakhic scholarship and Jewish ethnography, and the reader will find his other writings no less enlightening. It is therefore a great pity that no biographer has captured his deserving memory for posterity, and this webpage does but minimal justice to a full and inspiring life.
Due to the dearth of biographical information available in the public domain, we hope to publish an original article on Rabbi Gaguine that will become available on this site. Until that project is finished, we have reproduced three short biographical pieces that were written by his colleagues during the 1930s. While all of them contain some erroneous information, they capture the overall picture reasonably well and are useful introductions to his life.
A growing list of Rabbi Gaguine's published and unpublished works is available HERE.
A handful of unpublished letters submitted by a private collector is being translated HERE.
We have also begun the process of translating his "Preface," which appears in Vol. III and offers a glimpse into his religious philosophy. For now, only the first three sections are available, but this will increase with time.
Due to the dearth of biographical information available in the public domain, we hope to publish an original article on Rabbi Gaguine that will become available on this site. Until that project is finished, we have reproduced three short biographical pieces that were written by his colleagues during the 1930s. While all of them contain some erroneous information, they capture the overall picture reasonably well and are useful introductions to his life.
- Click HERE to view the text of M. D. Gaon, which was first published at the end of Pirke Shira in 1937.
- Click HERE to view the text of Paul Goodman, which was published in Think and Thank in 1933.
- Click HERE to view an anonymous manuscript text from 1932, which was first published on ketershemtob.com in 2013.
A growing list of Rabbi Gaguine's published and unpublished works is available HERE.
A handful of unpublished letters submitted by a private collector is being translated HERE.
We have also begun the process of translating his "Preface," which appears in Vol. III and offers a glimpse into his religious philosophy. For now, only the first three sections are available, but this will increase with time.
- Section I – the value of the ancient
- Section II – rejection of Reform Judaism
- Section III – Jewish sectarianism in history
- Section IV – the halakhic visions of Rabbis Josef Karo and Moses Isserles
- Section IV.a – an extensive footnote on the Miamonidean Controversy
- Section V – fifty-one differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic practice
- Section VI – challenging the depiction of Rabbi Moses Isserles as uniformly stringent, and conclusion