Responsum: On a Book Thief

In this short Hebrew responsum, al-Fāsī repudiates an anonymous jurist who permitted the theft (or perhaps, in the eye of the thief, the borrowing) of sacred commentaries. Al-Fāsī explains that the lenient ruling is based on the premise that one may steal books of Torah for the sake of study, but he argues that it is an egregious sin to take books even if one has noble goals.