The Mishne Torah Project
 The Whole Torah For Everyone

The nusach of the halachas and the changes in the nusach

The nusach is based on Rav Kappah ZTL’s nusach which was edited according to the manuscripts he had after well-established decisions based on the manuscripts.

The accuracy and nature of the Yeminite manuscripts are already well know the world over, and as the editors of the Frankel Edition wrote in “Yalkot Shinoii HaNuschaot”: we saw fit to write about the quality of the nusach replacments:

The books of Yemen are most trustworthy of all. Famous is their excellence over all Israeli tribes regarding accuracy and their wonderful rigor to not change from customary. And it is known that Maimonides books were the foundations of their study fir generations.
From their books it is proven that the duplicators did not dare to change anything that lay before them. It also shows that their Stam Writers were greater bnei torah than their counterparts in other countries in the galut where they were mostly workers and not scholars.
And all those who wish to deal with the exact language of Maimonides should use the Yemen nusach.

It should be added that Yemen ruled according to Maimonides for everything except in very few unusual cases . In general, the people from Yemen’s ties with Maimonides and his ties with them do not need to be prooven. Maimonides version was used as their practical halach a live and vibrant tradition, “for the received tradition and deed are great pillars in establishing [Halachic] rulings and it is appropriate to rely on them” (Sabbatical and Jubilee Laws 10, 6). Also the order of prayers from Maimonides (at the end of the Book of Love) is revealed to be almost identical in a comparison with the ancient Yemenite prayers.

In the last generation many important inquiries have been made to track how decisions regarding nusachs were made by the editors of the exact editions, students and scholars. In an attempt to refine the wording to the limit, we compared the basic text to the nusach of these editions.
Where the editors disagreed in regard to the amended version, we recorded in the margins of the halacha the other version without deciding between them, so the learner can choose the version he prefers. We have tried in this way to include the work of the various editions and ways of deciding between the manuscripts and to put before the students a complete undisputed collection.

We have also a photo of the Oxford 577 (Huntington 80) manuscript – an ancient and exquisite manuscript, which contains the Book of Knowledge and the Book of Love, which was approved by Maimonides at the end of the Book of Love, before the order of prayers, in his handwriting: “Corrected against my own book -I, Moses, son of Rabbi Maymun of blessed memory.”. The manuscript was copied probably from second or third hand, and therefore was not of good quality, and then compared to Maimonides book and its nusach was fixed. In anycase it certainly is not like ” Tell Help “and is not error-free. However its main point of excellence is the proofreading it went through, mostly by passing a line over the words or striking them out in order to erase them. But who could say about each and every change that it was from comparison or that it was not? What was done by the author during the comparison and what has been added in the following years? And unrevised words, are they amended or did the editor miss them? Therefore, we used that nusach only when it matched other manuscripts and reliable nusach witnesses. And when it was clear that this nusach was more exact than the other nusachs we didn’t even commented about it. Nusach changement that didn’t cause change in the meaning were also not marked..

Maimonides’s signature in his own hand

Our edition was compared to all the other exact editions nusachs by a proofreading team and computerized tools courtesy of the editors of those editions. In cases where doubt was not acceptable we even checked the wording in the ancient Yemeni manuscripts, which can be found photographed in Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in National Library of Israel. Through all this with God’s help we were able to weed out many editorial mistakes in Rav Kapach’s edition.