Shu"t She'eris Yosef
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She'eris Yosef
She'eris Yosef
1511 CE–1591 CE · Acharonim · Krakow (Cracow)
Rabbi Yosef ben Mordechai Gershon HaKohen Katz, remembered by the title of his responsa collection She'eris Yosef (שארית יוסף), was a halachic authority in sixteenth-century Kraków. Born in the city around 1511 and a kohen by lineage, he was a brother-in-law of Rabbi Moshe Isserles (the Rema) and sat on the Rema's rabbinical court. For roughly half a century he headed a Kraków yeshiva, and his rulings—especially on commercial and financial questions, an area in which he was regarded as expert—were widely sought, with Rabbi Shlomo Luria (the Maharshal) numbered among his correspondents. A year before his death he brought to print She'eris Yosef (Kraków, 1590), which gathers his responsa together with commentary on the Mordechai. He died in 1591.
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Stop 1 of 11511Born
Krakow (Cracow)Poland
What they did here
Birthplace.
Krakow (Cracow) in this era
In the centuries after 1500, Krakow became one of the crown jewels of Jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, even as the wider Polish kingdom flourished under the Jagiellonian dynasty and later the elected kings who succeeded them. The Jewish quarter (the Kazimierz district, across the Vistula River) grew dense with scholars, merchants, and artisans, its narrow streets echoing with Talmudic debate and the rhythms of Yiddish commerce. Though the community faced periodic expulsions and restrictions—and endured the catastrophic Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, which devastated Polish Jewry—Krakow remained intellectually vibrant, a stronghold of halakhic learning and mystical study. The Rema (Moses Isserles, 1520–1572), whose glosses on the Shulchan Aruch became canonical for Ashkenazi practice, lived and taught here, cementing the city's reputation as a beacon of legal and spiritual authority. By the 1700s, as Hasidic fervor spread across Eastern Europe, Krakow's yeshivas and synagogues hummed with both traditional rigorous study and the newer devotional movements, making it a crossroads where old and new forms of Jewish piety could coexist and compete.
About Krakow (Cracow)
Major Sephardi-influenced center; home of Megalleh Amukkot (Nathan Nota Spira) and Maor VaShemesh (Kalonymus Kalman Epstein).
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with She'eris Yosef’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.