Coffee with Maharshal

☕️ An early modern pillar of the burgeoning Polish-Lithuanian Jewish community, Maharshal was a strikingly original thinker and critic of codification.

The Maharshal Synagogue in Lublin, Poland, photographed during the Second World War, National Museum Lublin

These past days I’ve been writing about history while living through history—apologies for the delay as we’ve been in and out of our safe room (also my office) during the Iran conflict. It’s been interesting to think about the dislocations and cultural shifts of early modernity against this background—a powerful reminder that Jews produced legal analysis, scriptural exegesis, philosophical treatises, poetry, and more (reams of it!) despite challenging historical circumstances.

Though Maharshal’s life was centered in greater Poland with stability, like Rema’s, Eastern Europe was a relatively new center of Jewish life, reflecting the push of Ashkenazi Jews outside of Western Europe due largely to expulsion as well as anti-Jewish violence. (Jewish and Karaite presence in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe is attested in the later medieval period but it was not yet an important center then.) Maharshal was to be an early pillar of the Polish Jewish community and one whose original voice carried, though it would not win the day.

In this issue:

• An Independent Thinker

• The Limits of Codification

• The Road not Taken: Maharshal’s Method in Practice

• Reads & Resources

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An Independent Thinker

R. Shlomo ben Yeḥiel Luria (c. 1510-1574), better known as Morenu ha-Rav Shlomo Luria or Maharshal, was born into the intersection of at least two founding families of Poland, the Katzenellenbogen and Minz families, both of whom also had ties to northern Italy, specifically the academy at Padua. However, Maharshal was orphaned as a child and raised and educated by his learned maternal grandfather, R. Yitzḥak Klober. Though this pattern was not unusual among medieval and early modern rabbinic figures, in Maharshal’s case, he did not later seek out additional teachers, proudly describing himself as receiving all his traditions from his grandfather. Maharshal was thus largely self-taught, which made him notably original as a thinker.

After rabbinic stints as Brisk (Brest-Litovk, in today’s Belarus) and Ostrog (in today’s Ukraine), Maharshal, in his older life, settled in Lublin, the city with which he is most identified. He first served as Rosh Yeshivah (head of the academy) at the yeshivah of R. Shalom Shakhna. Shakhna (d. 1558) was of the founding generation of Polish rabbinic life and is closely associated with the development of pilpul, casuistry—an exhaustive and exacting method of resolving questions and contradictions by ingeniously applying principles to specific cases, which Maharshal eschewed. After butting heads with Shakhna’s son, Yisrael, Maharshal left his post and founded a rival yeshivah of his own, with the blessing of the ruling authorities. Among his leading pupils—those that did not defect to Shakhna’s institution—were R. Mordechai Yaffe, author of the Levush, whom we’ll meet later int his series, and R. Yehoshua Falk, author of Sefer Me’irat Einyaim on the Ḥoshen Mishpat section of Shulḥan Arukh, printed in all standard editions.

The Limits of Codification

The Maharshal objected to the growing reliance on halakhic codes, arguing that Jewish law must remain grounded in the dialectical reasoning of the Talmud. These views are notably articulated in his introductions to tractates Ḥullin (on kosher slaughter) and Bava Kama (on tort law) in his massive halakhic work, the Yam Shel Shlomo (King Solomon’s Sea, a reference to the enormous bronze basin from the First Jerusalem Temple—see Melakhim Alef 7:23–26 and Divrei ha-Yamim Bet 4:2–5). The following paragraph serves as almost a manifesto of Maharshal’s anti-codificatory impulse:

אבל האמונה, באמונת שמים, שהוכחתי כמה פעמים, בפרט מן הפוסקים האחרונים, שטעו בכמה מקומות מן התלמוד. כאחד מן התלמידים הטועים, בענין עיון הלכה. על כן שמתי פני כחלמיש. ואומר אמרתי בני עליון כולהון, אכן כאדם ידרושון. ולכן לא אאמין לשום אחד מן המחברים יותר מחבירו. אף שיש הכרע גדול בין מעלותם, למי שמורגל בהם בעיון רב. מכל מקום התלמוד הוא המכריע, וראייות ברורות יצדקו ויתנו עדיהן. ולפעמים מחבר אחד כיון ההלכה, ולא מטעמיה. מי היה גדול בחכמה ובמניין כר”ת בזמנו. והוא התיר אשה שזינתה עם הגוי לכשיתגייר (כתובות ג’ ע”ב תוד”ה ולדרוש), וכתבו עליו כל האחרונים, אשר לא הגיעו למעלתו, שטעה בראיות ובמופת. וחזרו הרא”מ והרא”ש (שם פ”א סימן ד’) וקיימו את דינו, וכתבו דהלכתא כותיה, ולא מטעמיה, בעבור כל זאת דרשתי וחקרתי היטב, בשבע חקירות ובשבע בדיקות, אחר כל מקור וחוצב ההלכה, בתכלית היגיעה והעיון, ובמיעוט שינה, וברוב שיח’ עם חביריי, ומתלמידיי יותר מכולם, ולבא עם הספר, וכל הקורא בו ימצא מקור חוצבו עם המופתים, ויבין וידע שלא הנחתי שום מחבר שלא עסקתי בעיוני קודם חיתוך גזר דין:

But the faith, the faith of Heaven, as I have demonstrated many times, especially from the later decisors, who erred in several places in the Talmud, like one of the students who err in matters of halakhic analysis. Therefore I have set my face like flint (Yeshayahu 50:7). And I say: I said, you are all sons of the Most High — yet indeed like men you shall seek (in reference to Tehillim 82:6–7). And therefore I will not believe any one of the authors more than another, even though there is a great distinction between their levels, for one who is accustomed to them through extensive study. In any case, the Talmud is the decisive authority, and clear proofs will justify themselves and give their testimony. And sometimes a certain author has arrived at the correct ruling — but not for the correct reasons. Who in his time was greater in wisdom and number than Rabbenu Tam? Yet he permitted a woman who had committed adultery with a gentile to marry him once he converts (Ketubot 3b, Tosafot s.v. ve-lidrosh). And all the later authorities wrote about him, though they did not reach his stature, that he erred in his proofs and demonstrations. And then the Ra’ah and the Rosh (there, ch. 1 :4) returned and upheld his ruling, and wrote that the law follows him—but not for his reasons. Because of all this I have expounded and investigated thoroughly, with seven investigations and seven examinations, after every source and quarry (ḥotzav) of the law, with the utmost labor and analysis, with little sleep, and with much discussion with my colleagues—and from my students more than from all of them—and I have come with the book. And anyone who reads it will find the source from which each ruling was quarried, together with the proofs, and will understand and know that I left no author untouched without examining him in my study before rendering a final decision.

Yam Shel Shlomo, Introduction to Bava Kama

Here Maharshal insists that halakhic reasoning must return to the “quarry” of the original source of the law, the Talmud. It cannot be mined from codes or even by reliance on latter authorities, no matter how illustrious, since they are still human and prone to error—sometimes, even if their ultimate conclusion is correct. That is, the internal argumentation matters as much as the conclusion, and in order to reason properly, the raw materials must be examined and grappled with. It is this type of scholarship, with its difficulty, that Maharshal elevates as essential to the halakhic process. In so doing, he also creates the space for intellectual independence, as each scholar has the right as well as duty to return to the source of the law and interpret it anew.

The Road not Taken: Maharshal’s Method in Practice

Maharshal was an omnivorous reader: his citations cover the gamut from the period of the Geonim to that of his contemporaries. Like many premodern readers, he left commentaries on a variety of the texts that he worked through, including Rashi (as well as Rashi’s famous supercommentator, R. Eliyahu Mizraḥi), Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, the Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (Semag) of Moshe of Coucy, the Tur, and the Sha’arei Dura, a halakhic work on the laws of Kashrut written by R. Yitzḥak Dueren. In practice, Maharshal was partial to local tradition and thus to Ashkenazi halakhic writing, particularly that of the Tosafot and of the Terumat ha-Deshen (R. Yisrael Isserlein) in making his own rulings, preserved in his responsa. Interestingly, his primarily objection to R. Yosef Karo’s Beit Yosef, which was explicitly careful in citing sources (in contrast to the bottom-line rulings of the Shulḥan Arukh which was based upon it), was its lack of incorporation of Ashkenazi lines of halakhic thinking. Meanwhile, Maharshal largely ignored the Shulḥan Arukh despite arguing against works of its type in Yam Shel Shlomo.

Maharshal’s intellectual interests were not confined to this omnibus of halakhic literature. The diffusion of Kabbalah as a standard area of learning among the rabbinic elite was fairly well-established by the mid-sixteenth century—it would soon become popularized among the laity as well—and Maharshal was no exception. In the Yam Shel Shlomo and elsewhere, he suffused his work with quotations from the Zohar and other Kabbalistic sources, though he avoided using them to render rulings. Maharshal was also devoted to textual criticism, especially of the Talmud text and Rashi and the Tosafot’s commentaries on it, seeking to establish the most correct text. His glosses to his personal copies of the Talmud’s tractates were later published as Ḥokhmat Shlomo (The Wisdom of Solomon), though typically in highly abridged and corrupted versions. A complementary interest was that in grammar. However, Maharshal was opposed to rationalist philosophical study, an issue on which he clashed with his younger contemporary (and likely relation) the Rema.

Ultimately, Maharshal’s method of returning to the source of the law in the Talmud, then working through the reasoning on the text from the time of the Geonim until his own period, with careful attention to local tradition and to the influence of Kabbalah, led to the creation of a cumbersome work that was seldom consulted, the Yam Shel Shlomo. While reams of commentary were eventually written on the Shulḥan Arukh (itself, of course, a digest of and commentary on the Arba’ah Turim), bringing forward the consummate medieval genre of the commentary and complicating its intention to streamline Jewish law, the rise of the code as the central spine of the halakhic tradition was cemented by the acceptance of the Shulḥan Arukh with the glosses of the Rema. Whether halakhah in postmodernity generates a renewed code or breaks out of that mold and returns to a Maharshalian position remains to be seen.

Reads and Resources

• The large Yam Shel Shlomo is not available as a digital text on either Sefaria or Al haTorah, though repsonsa and two other works of the Maharshal are on Sefaria, here.

• For more on the Maharshal and his method, see Dr. Edward Fram’s chapter on the Maharshal in his recent book, The Codification of Jewish Law on the Cusp of Modernity (and the entire book!)

Thanks for reading—I’ll see you next month with a newsletter on the Levush, mentioned above.