Rabbi Chizkiya da Silva—Pri Chadash רבי חזקיה די סילוה — פרי חדש

He was born in Livorno to a family of Portuguese exiles, went up to Jerusalem young, and taught there. In 1691 he travelled as an emissary of the community to Europe and in Amsterdam printed the first part of his book—Pri Chadash, New Fruit, on Yoreh Deah.

The book proved unfamiliar: a young man examined the rulings of the Beit Yosef and the Rema, and where the Gemara, by his reading, said otherwise, he wrote so plainly, without softening. The rabbis of Jerusalem judged this insolence toward the elders and laid a ban on the book. He himself died at thirty-nine, not outliving the dispute.

His book outlived him. A generation later the ban was lifted, and the Pri Chadash came to be printed in the margins of the Shulchan Aruch beside those he had argued with—and there it stands to this day. Both sides were right in their own way: the one guarded reverence for teachers, the other the right to read the Gemara with one's own eyes; we name the dispute and do not judge it.