First edition. 52 ff., 189:140 mm., nice margins, usual light age and damp staining, old hand on title. A good copy bound in later full leather over boards, rubbed, tooled in gild.

 

Author's major work. The manuscript was published by David Ashkenazi without mentioning the author's name, and it is uncertain whether the author or the publisher gave the work its title. Kore ha-Dorot is a chronicle of authors and works from post-talmudic times until the author's own. For the material up to 1492, he leaned heavily on his medieval predecessors' works: R. Abraham ibn Daud's Sefer ha-Kabbalah, R. Abraham Zacuto's Sefer Yuhasin, and R. Gedaliah ibn Yahya's Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah. He supplemented the information in these works with material taken partly from manuscripts that have since been lost. Conforte was the first to prepare an alphabetical list of scholars of the Tosafist period. Though subsequent research findings supersede some of Conforte's information, his work remains important for the biography and times of Jewish authors and leaders. Kore ha-Dorot is especially important for its information about Sephardi scholars who lived in Mediterranean countries in the 16th and 17th centuries. The author knew many of them personally or received reliable information about them from descendants. He also diligently extracted names of scholars from the responsa of his time.

 

R. David Conforti (1617 or 1618–c. 1690), was born in Salonika into a well-known Sephardi family of rabbis and scholars. He studied rabbinics and Hebrew grammar with the leading rabbis of his time and Kabbalah with teachers in Jerusalem and Salonika. Conforte left Greece for Jerusalem in 1644, stopping for about a year in Cairo, where he studied in the bet midrash of Abraham Skandari, and for some time in Gaza with Moses b. Israel Najara. He stayed in Jerusalem for two years, returned to Salonika in 1648, and in 1652 once more to Jerusalem where he founded his own bet midrash. In 1671 Conforte was rabbi in Cairo, where Mordecai b. Judah ha-Levi was chief rabbi; the latter mentioned him several times in his responsa Darkhei No'am (1697–98).

 

שלשלת יוחסין, מרבנן סבוראי עד [שנת תל"ז] זמן הרב המחבר [ר' דוד קונפורטי] נ"ע... קורא ומזכיר שמות רבני הדורות ... כל אחד בזמנו... הביאו לבית הדפוס... ר' דוד אשכנזי איש ירושלים...