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, in Franconia, Bavaria, southern Germany, grew around an imperial castle first mentioned in 1050 and became a Free Imperial City, a frequent seat of imperial diets and keeper of the imperial regalia. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance it was a centre of art, publishing and science, where the astronomer Regiomontanus settled in 1471. Its medieval Jewish community suffered the Rintfleisch massacre of 1298, in which the halakhist Mordechai ben Hillel was killed, and a pogrom in 1349; in the fifteenth century Rabbi Jacob Weil served there and established a yeshiva. The city became Lutheran during the Reformation. In the twentieth century it hosted the Nazi rallies and, after the Second World War, the Nuremberg trials.
Across the traditions, in Nuremberg at the same time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Yaakov Pollak’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.