Darkhei Mosheדרכי משה
Krakow (Cracow) · 1570
רמ
Rema
Rema
1530 CE–1572 CE · Acharonim · Lublin
Rabbi Moshe Isserles (1530–1572), known by the acronym Rema, was the towering halachic authority of Polish Jewry and the figure who made the Shulchan Aruch a code for all Israel. Born in Kraków, he studied under — and married into the family of — Rabbi Shalom Shachna of Lublin, and returned to Kraków to found a great yeshiva that he led until his early death at forty-two. When Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch appeared, reflecting Sephardic practice, Isserles added his HaMapah ('the Tablecloth') glosses recording Ashkenazic custom; the two works have been printed together ever since, so that 'the Shulchan Aruch' today means the combined code. His earlier Darkei Moshe on the Tur, his responsa, and Torat HaOlah — which engaged philosophy, astronomy and Kabbalah — marked him as a posek of rare breadth, one who weighed custom seriously without following it blindly and favored plain Talmudic interpretation over pilpul. His tombstone in Kraków reads: 'From Moses [Maimonides] to Moses [Isserles] there was none like Moses.'
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Stop 1 of 31543Studied
LublinCongress Poland
What they did here
At 13 he was ordained and enrolled in the Lublin yeshiva led by Rabbi Shalom Shachna, whose daughter he would go on to marry.
Lublin in this era
Lublin in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries was a thriving stronghold of Polish-Jewish learning, governed first by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later incorporated into Congress Poland under Russian rule. The city's Jewish community grew prosperous through commerce and craft guilds, earning Lublin renown as a major center of Torah study and halakhic authority. The Maharshal (Rabbi Solomon Luria) established a powerful yeshiva there in the late 1500s, and centuries later the Chozeh of Lublin became the spiritual heart of Hasidic Lublin, drawing thousands of devotees who sought his mystical interpretations and guidance. Despite catastrophic losses during the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, the community rebuilt itself with remarkable vigor. The great study halls of Lublin—packed with young men debating Talmudic complexities by candlelight—became legendary across Eastern Europe. By the eighteenth century, Lublin had become a crossroads where rigorous Lithuanian rationalism in learning met the fervent emotional spirituality of the Hasidic movement, making it a microcosm of the crucial intellectual tensions reshaping Jewish life.
About Lublin
Major Polish-Jewish center; home of R. Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin.
In Lublin at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Rema’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Rema’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Christian world
Islamic world
Works(1)
Related figuresביYosef KaroTSmaSuggested by shared subject matter, not a documented teaching relationship.