Ḥefets ben Yatsliaḥ

Ḥefets ben Yatsliaḥ was a rabbinic scholar of unknown origin, possibly from Mosul, who was apparently granted titles by the geonic academies in Baghdad. Ḥefets wrote a massive Judeo-Arabic text called The Book of Commandments (Kitāb al-shara‘i’; in Hebrew, Sefer ha-mitsvot) that survives only partially. After surveying earlier listings of the 613 commandments in the introduction, he used his own novel enumeration to address the full scope of Jewish law, citing rabbinic literature extensively. Later Jews in the Islamic world quoted Ḥefets often, but it appears that his work was already lost by the time of Maimonides (1138–1204).