Rabbi Israel Isserlein רבי ישראל איסרלין
the foremost halakhist of fifteenth-century Germany; Terumat ha-Deshen
Born at Regensburg in 1390, orphaned early, he studied at Wiener Neustadt, was rabbi at Marburg, and from 1445 again at Wiener Neustadt at the head of the beit din. Rabbi Moses Mintz called him 'chief of chiefs'.
Terumat ha-Deshen is built unusually: 354 sections in question-and-answer form, but most of the questions he put to himself—not for want of questioners, but because that way a subject can be taken whole rather than as occasion brings it. Separate from it stand the Pesakim u-Khetavim—267 real answers to real letters.
He worked from the Talmud and the Rishonim rather than from later codifiers; strict in prohibitions of the Torah, lenient in the affairs of a community. The Rema leans on him constantly.
And one thing more: his student Rabbi Joseph bar Moses recorded in Leket Yosher not his rulings but his habits—what he ate, how he prayed, what he did on ordinary days. For that age it is a rare sight of a living man rather than a code.
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Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Terumat ha-Deshen — 354 sections, the questions mostly posed by the author himself
- Leket Yosher of Rabbi Joseph bar Moses — the teacher's daily practice as recorded by a student
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Isserlein, Israel ben Pethahiah" — the dates, Marburg and Wiener Neustadt, the make-up of the books, the influence on the Rema
Basis: documents and evidence.