Rabbi Vidal of Tolosa רבי וידאל די טולושא
author of the Maggid Mishneh, the commentary without which the Mishneh Torah is not read
The Mishneh Torah is written so that the law stands bare in it: without the debate, without a name, without a reference. That is its strength and its difficulty—there was almost nothing by which to check the Rambam.
The Maggid Mishneh, written almost two centuries after the Rambam, is the answer to that difficulty: it shows from which passage of the Talmud each ruling is taken and why the Rambam understood it as he did. It was written on the whole Mishneh Torah, but less than half survived—the books Zemanim, Nashim, part of Kedushah, Nezikin, part of Kinyan and Mishpatim. The rest is lost.
What survives has been printed alongside the Rambam ever since, and no serious reading of the Mishneh Torah does without it.
Of the man himself little is known: he lived in Villefranche-de-Conflent, then in Barcelona, where in 1367 he met the Ran.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Rishonim
- Maggid Mishneh, printed with the Mishneh Torah — the commentary itself and which of its parts survived
Scholarship
- Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Vidal of Tolosa” — the late fourteenth century, Barcelona, the meeting with the Ran in 1367
Basis: documents and evidence.