Sefer Yereimספר יראים
Metz · 1135
ראם
Eliezer of Metz
Eliezer of Metz
1115 CE–1198 CE · Rishonim · Metz
R. Eliezer ben Shmuel of Metz (c. 1115-1198), known as the Re'em (an acronym of Rabbenu Eliezer MiMetz), wrote the Sefer Yereim ('Book of the God-fearing'), one of the earliest attempts to catalog all 613 of Judaism's commandments. His twist was the arrangement: instead of grouping the commandments by topic, he organized them around the inner motive behind each one — fear of Heaven, love of God, social ethics, and the like. A leading first-generation Tosafist (one of the foremost Talmud scholars of medieval France and Germany) and the chief student of Rabbenu Tam, he produced a work that was widely cited by the Tosafists, the Mordechai, and the later Acharonim (the rabbinic authorities of the modern era).
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Stop 1 of 11115–1198Wrote
MetzFrance
What they did here
A leading French Tosafist of Metz, author of the Sefer Yereim — an influential early enumeration and exposition of the commandments and their laws.
About Metz
Metz, a city in Lorraine in northeastern France, was home to one of the wealthiest and most prominent Jewish communities in early-modern France. After Jewish resettlement was permitted in the mid-sixteenth century, the community flourished from 1648 until the French Revolution, maintaining a large yeshiva and choosing distinguished chief rabbis; among those who led it were Rabbi Jonah Teomim-Fraenkel and, in the eighteenth century, Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz (1742-1750).
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Eliezer of Metz’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.