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Dream Interpretation from Classical Jewish Sources

by Solomon Ben Jacob Almoli

Summary

The book on dream interpretation by R. Shelomo Almoli in Salonika in 1515, Mefashar Helmin, is by far the most popular Jewish dream manual ever published. It has gone through dozens of editions, both in its original Hebrew and Aramaic and in Yiddish translation. This annotated and condensed translation is the first in English.

Born in the 1480's in Spain and orphaned at a young age, Almoli reached Constantinople in 1516, where he served as a judge in one of the rabbinic courts, and possibly as a synagogue rabbi as well, but apparently made his living as a physician. He planned to write an encyclopedic work which would present the reader with a compendium of all that was new and noteworthy in human knowledge, Me'assef leKhol ha Mahanot, but little of it was ever published.

R. Isaac de Leon, author of the classic commentary Megillat Esther on Maimonides Sefer ha-Mitzvot, thought sufficiently highly of R. Shelomo Almoli to quote him in the introduction to his own work. However, it was R. Almoli's fate not to have completed the works he had begun, and to be forgotten after his death, but it was also his good fortune to produce a work which became an 'underground' classic, one which was reprinted many times, both in the form in which he issued it and in modified form or translation, sometimes attributed to him and sometimes not.