Shabbethai Bass

Shabbethai ben Joseph Bass (; 1641–1718), also known by the family name Strom, born in Kalisz, was the founder of Jewish bibliography and author of the (; ) supercommentary on Rashi's commentary on the Torah. This work contains a list of 2,200 Hebrew books, in the alphabetical order of the titles, conscientiously giving the author, place of printing, year, and size of each book, as well as a short summary of its contents. The majority of the books described he knew at first hand; the description of the others he borrowed from the works of Buxtorf and Giulio Bartolocci (from the latter only in the first part).

His work is a supercommentary to Rashi's commentary to the Pentateuch and the five Megillot. Its general method is to identify the difficulty which made Rashi's comments necessary. Much of its material is based on earlier supercommentaries such as that of Elijah Mizrachi; it summed up with brevity and clearness the best work of fifteen previous supercommentaries on Rashi.

Even today the book is considered a useful aid toward understanding and appreciating Rashi. It is considered so essential that there exists a summary work on it, called . This work generally leaves out the questions that the raises on Rashi, and simply sums up his idea that he culled from the Rashi in about a sentence or two equivalent to the paragraph-length entries in the . (One example is Weinfeld, Joseph Halevi Shalom. Chumash Orech Yamim. Jerusalem: Orech Publishers, 1997.)

Other works In 1669 he reprinted Moses Sartels' Yiddish glossary on the Bible, adding a grammatical preface, a work intended to supply the lack of grammatical knowledge among teachers of the young, and to furnish the latter with the correct German rendering in translating the Bible. Bass was greatly interested in improving the instruction of the young, and recommended the German-Polish Jews to imitate the methods of instruction obtaining in the Portuguese community of Amsterdam, describing in detail their curriculum. (His subcommentary is also intended for elementary instruction.)

His itinerary, entitled , is a short treatise on the roads of the country (Amsterdam, 1680); the book, written in Yiddish, contains also tables of all the current coins, measures, and weights in European countries, and a list of routes, post connections, and distances.