Samuel ben Isaac Jaffe Ashkenazi (1525–1595) was a leading talmudic scholar of the sixteenth century. A native of Bursa (Brusa) in Turkey, Ashkenazi studied under Joseph ben David ibn Lev (1505–1580). Toward the end of the 1540s, he moved to Istanbul, where he was closely associated with Samuel Ṣaba. In the 1550s, already one of the leading scholars in the capital, he was appointed rabbi of one of the city’s congregations, most likely that of the Ashkenazi community. He excelled as an interpreter of halakha, wrote many responsa which are frequently cited by seventeenth-century aut…