Sefer Yereimספר יראים
Metz · 1135
ראם
Eliezer of Metz
Eliezer of Metz
1115 CE–1198 CE · Rishonim · Metz
R. Eliezer ben Shmuel of Metz (c. 1115-1198), known as the Re'em (an acronym of Rabbenu Eliezer MiMetz), wrote the Sefer Yereim ('Book of the God-fearing'), one of the earliest attempts to catalog all 613 of Judaism's commandments. His twist was the arrangement: instead of grouping the commandments by topic, he organized them around the inner motive behind each one — fear of Heaven, love of God, social ethics, and the like. A leading first-generation Tosafist (one of the foremost Talmud scholars of medieval France and Germany) and the chief student of Rabbenu Tam, he produced a work that was widely cited by the Tosafists, the Mordechai, and the later Acharonim (the rabbinic authorities of the modern era).
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Stop 1 of 11115–1198Wrote
MetzFrance
What they did here
A leading French Tosafist of Metz, author of the Sefer Yereim — an influential early enumeration and exposition of the commandments and their laws.
About Metz
Metz, in Lorraine in northeastern France, was the Roman town of Divodurum and, from the sixth to eighth centuries, a residence of the Merovingian kings of Austrasia. A largely self-governing city of the Holy Roman Empire from the twelfth century, it passed to France in 1552. Its Gothic cathedral of Saint-Étienne dates from the thirteenth century, and the preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet served there as canon and archdeacon in the 1650s. Jews are recorded from at least 888, and medieval scholars such as Eliezer ben Samuel were linked to the city. Jews were readmitted after the French takeover, and the community grew to nearly 3,000 by 1748, keeping a yeshiva and choosing rabbis such as Jonah Teomim-Fraenkel and Jonathan Eybeschütz (1742-1750).
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Eliezer of Metz’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.