Overview
Mas’ud Hai Rakkah was a Tripolitanian rabbi and commentator whose Ma’aseh Rokeach examines difficult rulings in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. The work compares textual variants, Talmudic sources, legal commentaries, and local scholarly traditions. Rakkah’s writing reflects a North African rabbinic culture connected with Livorno’s printers and with wider Mediterranean networks of books and patronage. His commentary helped bring Libyan scholarship into the standard study of Maimonides. Ma’aseh Rokeach demonstrates that major traditions of Sephardic legal analysis flourished in communities often treated as peripheral to Ottoman and European intellectual centers.
