Chiddushim (largely oral)
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R
Yaakov Pollak
Yaakov Pollak
1460 CE–1541 CE · Acharonim · Nuremberg
Rabbi Yaakov Pollak (c. 1460–1541) was an early builder of Talmudic scholarship in Poland. He studied under Jacob Margolioth of Nuremberg and held rabbinic office in Prague around 1490. After Sigismund I's accession in 1506, when many Jewish families moved from Bohemia to Kraków, Pollak settled among them and founded a yeshiva, planting formal Talmud study in a region where it had been little cultivated. His name is closely tied to the dialectical method of study called pilpul, or chilukim, which trained students to draw fine links across the Talmud through sustained question and answer. Among his pupils was Shalom Shachna of Lublin, whose own academy would teach Moshe Isserles, the Rema. Pollak left no printed works, his teachings passing chiefly through his students; he died in Lublin in 1541.
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Stop 1 of 41475–1490Studied
NurembergBavaria (Germany)
What they did here
Studied here.
About Nuremberg
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).
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Yaakov Pollak’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Yaakov Pollak’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.