Maharshal—Rabbi Shlomo Luria המהרש"ל — רבי שלמה לוריא

Rabbi Shlomo Luria was born about 1510—the sources differ, Brisk or Poznań—and died in Lublin in 1573. He was in Lublin from 1555, and in 1567 opened a yeshiva there by royal privilege. He was no relation of Isaac Luria, the Ari, despite the name: the Encyclopaedia Judaica says so outright.

His chief book, Yam shel Shlomo, is built neither as a code nor as marginal notes. It runs through the tractates of the Talmud, and in each topic the whole discussion is raised again: what the Talmud says, what the rishonim say, where they differ and why—and only at the end a ruling. Of sixteen tractates, seven survive.

Separate from it stands Chochmat Shlomo—emendations to the text of the Talmud, Rashi and Tosafot; an abridgement is printed in the Vilna Shas. For its century it is the nearest thing to a critical edition.

The Shulchan Aruch he refused as a ground for ruling, for a reason central to the whole quarrel: the code, he said, is not built on the Tosafists—that is, not on the Ashkenazi tradition by which Poland lives. Pilpul, then reigning in the Polish yeshivas, he called hairsplitting and kept away from.

With the Rema, a younger kinsman, he corresponded and whom he respected, he nonetheless argued hard. The quarrel was first of all about philosophy: "thou art turning to the wisdom of the uncircumcised Aristotle," he wrote, objecting to philosophical categories inside halakhah. Beneath that lay a second matter: the very project of a convenient code he held to be Karo's error repeated. And third, kabbalah: he warned against mysticism taken up without solid command of the text.