 In Rabbi Culi's time, many individuals in Turkey were not sufficiently fluent in the Hebrew language to study the Torah and its commentaries in the original.Rabbi Culi thus undertook the "colossal task" of writing a compendium of the major fields of Torah study.The commentary was to be user-friendly and was thus written in Ladino or Judaeo-Spanish, the Jewish language spoken by the Sephardic Jews in Turkey.