ARDIT, EPHRAIM BEN ABRAHAM

ARDIT, EPHRAIM BEN ABRAHAM (1700–1767), rabbi and preacher. He first engaged in business in his native Smyrna, but later studied there in the yeshivot, and was afterward appointed rabbi of Smyrna. He left manuscripts of glosses on the Talmud written by Spanish scholars; among them R. Jonah b. Abraham Gerondi's Aliyyot on Bava Batra which appeared in Shitah Mekubbeẓet (Salonika, 1791). These glosses were found by Ardit's grandson Isaac, author of Sha'ar ha-Melekh. Ephraim's family published Matteh Efrayim (1791), an anthology of his glosses and dialectic commentaries on Maimonides' halakhic writings, responsa, and sermons for the Sabbaths before the Day of Atonement, Passover, and Purim. A collection of Ephraim's homilies was extant in manuscript at Smyrna until World War I. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Nuñez Belmonte, in: Bezalel Ashkenazi, Shitah Mekubbeẓet al Massekhet Bava Batra (Leghorn, 1774), introd.; Rosanes, Togarmah, 4 (1935), 289–90; A. Galante, Histoire des Juifs d'Anatolie, 1 (1937), 54. (Yehoshua Horowitz)