The Mabit—Rabbi Moshe di Trani רבי משה מטראני

Born at Salonika, he came to Safed at sixteen—and stayed there for life. He learned from his uncle at Adrianople, then from Rabbi Yaakov Berav, and when Berav renewed the semikhah in 1538, the Mabit was among the four ordained, together with Rabbi Yosef Karo.

The Safed of his day was a city of great men and of arguments, and the Mabit argued with Karo to his face—over terumot and maasrot, over Sabbath prohibitions, over how to judge communal money. It was an argument of equals: the city listened to both, and both kept the other's respect.

The Kiryat Sefer works out what in Maimonides comes from the Torah and what from the sages—dry work, and vast. The Beit Elohim is another thing: three gates, on prayer, on repentance and on the roots of faith, a book read by people who never opened his responsa. Of responsa he left eight hundred and forty-one: by them one reads the daily life of the Land of Israel under the Ottomans.

His son, Rabbi Yosef di Trani—the Maharit—became head of learning in Istanbul.