Mahari Weilמהר"י וייל
Nuremberg · 1405
1390 CE–1456 CE · Rishonim · Nuremberg
R. Yaakov ben Yehuda Weil (c. 1390-1456), the Mahari Weil, was the leading German posek of the early 15th century — student of R. Yaakov HaLevi Moelin (the Maharil) and rabbi of Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Erfurt. His Sheelot u-Teshuvot Mahari Weil responsa and Hilchot Shechita are foundational texts of Ashkenazi-German halacha; his Hilchot Shechita remains the standard manual for shechita in much of the Ashkenazi world.
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Ordained by the Maharil, he was appointed to establish a yeshiva in Nuremberg, serving by 1422 as one of the foremost German halachic authorities of his generation.
Nuremberg, a city in Franconia (Bavaria), southern Germany, had an important medieval Jewish community. Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel HaKohen, author of the halachic work known as the Mordechai, was killed in Nuremberg during the Rintfleisch massacre of 1298; later the city was associated with the fifteenth-century authority Rabbi Yaakov Weil (the Mahari Weil).
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Mahari Weil’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Nuremberg · 1405