Rabbi Samson of Chinon רבי שמשון מקינון
A master of talmudic method in France, author of the Sefer Keritot
Chinon stands on the Loire, and its Jewish community was one of the old French ones. Rabbi Samson's dates are given approximately: the reference works say about 1260 to about 1330, and no one has yet said it more exactly. The weight of his word, however, is stated plainly: Rabbi Perez HaKohen Gerondi called him the first authority of his time.
His Sefer Keritot is a book not about the law but about how the law is derived. It has five parts: the thirteen middot of Rabbi Ishmael by which the Torah is expounded; the methods of inference by likeness; an exposition of the thirty two middot of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yose HaGelili; the order of the generations of the sages of the Talmud with the rules of whose opinion prevails; and explanations of particular passages. The third part is the one that matters for our section on gematria: the baraita of the thirty two middot, where gematria is the twenty ninth, reached the printed editions through the Keritot among other channels.
His life fell in the years of the expulsions of the Jews from France, and after one of them he seems to have settled in Marseilles. The book was first printed in Constantinople in 1515, two hundred years after his death, and it has not left the hands of students since.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Sefer Keritot, Constantinople, 1515 — the five parts of the book and the exposition of the thirty two middot of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yose HaGelili
Scholarship
- Samson ben Isaac of Chinon, article in the Jewish Encyclopedia — his approximate dates, the judgement of Rabbi Perez HaKohen Gerondi and the move to Marseilles
Basis: documents and evidence.