Yosef Engel

Rabbi Yosef Engel (1858–1919) was born in Tarnów, in Austrian Galicia, where his early gifts earned him the epithet "the prodigy of Tarnów." He grew up close to the Hasidic world of Sanz and, after a period living in Będzin, settled in Kraków, serving first as a rabbinical judge and then as head of its rabbinical court until the First World War. In 1914 he relocated to Vienna, where he remained until his death in 1919. His scholarship joined close conceptual analysis to a broad command of rabbinic literature, and he counted Rabbi Meir Arik among his study companions. Among his writings are Gilyonei HaShas, glosses tracing cross-references across the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds; Beis HaOtzar, an encyclopedic arrangement of Talmudic concepts left unfinished; Gevuros Shmonim, eighty answers to a single Talmudic question; and Asvan Deoraisa, studies in Talmudic method.