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Ethical treatise on the essentials of faith, the origin, nature, and essence of the soul, the purpose of human life, the future world, and divine retribution (rewards and punishments) by R. Aaron Samuel ben Moses Shalom. Nishmat Adam has an attractive decorative title page comprised of Moses with the tablets of the law and Aaron with his priestly garments at the sides, and a vignette of Akedat Yitzhak at the top. Other ornamentation includes decorative strips separating the text’s ten chapters and a small number of ornamental woodcuts. There are approbations from rabbis in Frankfort a. Main, including R. Isaiah Horowitz (ha-Shelah), and Hanau, an introduction, the text, a postscript (43a) from the editor, Zelikman Ulma, the son of R. Moses Simon Halevi Guenzberg, and the contents. The text has numerous enumerated marginal references to the contents. These features make it an attractive volume.
R. Aaron Samuel ben Moses Shalom of Kremenets (Aaron of Kremenets, d. c. 1620), rabbi and author was a pupil of R. Ephraim Solomon ben Aaron Luntschits when the latter was rabbi at Lemberg. R. Shalom was forced to emigrate to Germany as a youth. Toward the end of 1606 he was preaching in Fuerth. In 1611 he was in Eibelstadt (not, as often stated, Eisenstadt), Lower Franconia, where he wrote Nishmat Adam. In 1615 he became rabbi in Fulda, where he wrote an introduction and notes to a homily on the Decalogue by R. Baruch Axelrod (Hanau, 1616). In Nishmat Adam R. Shalom mentions three unpublished works on ethical and religio-philosophical problems (Be’er Sheva, Or Torah, and Ein Mishpat), as well as novellae to the Talmud, entitled Kitvei Kodesh. |
