Mahari Korkus

1470 CE–1540 CE · Acharonim · Toledo (Castile)

Rabbi Yosef Korkus, known as the Mahari Korkus, was a halachic scholar of Spanish origin, born in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He left the Iberian Peninsula as a young man, apparently in the wake of the 1492 expulsion, and traveled eastward, eventually settling in the Land of Israel. Much of his study centered on Maimonides' law code, the Mishneh Torah, on which he composed an analytical commentary; only part survives in print, a portion of which appeared at Smyrna in 1757 and is today printed alongside the commentary of the Radbaz. His work reached Rabbi Yosef Karo, who consulted it while preparing his own Mishneh Torah commentary, the Kesef Mishneh. Later authorities, among them the Radbaz and Yosef Trani, cited him as a first-rank halachic authority. He was active into the first half of the sixteenth century.

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Stop 1 of 21470Born

Toledo (Castile)טולדוCastile, Spain

What they did here

Birthplace.

About Toledo (Castile)

Toledo is a hilltop city in central Spain, enclosed on three sides by a bend of the Tagus. Once Roman, it became the Visigothic capital in the sixth century and seat of an archdiocese whose cathedral remains Spain's primate church. Under Muslim rule from 711, it later became capital of an eleventh-century taifa kingdom, home to the astronomer al-Zarqali. After Alfonso VI took it in 1085, scholars there translated Arabic and Hebrew works into Castilian and Latin. Its large Jewish community produced leading rabbinic authorities despite repeated violence until the 1492 expulsion. In the sixteenth century Teresa of Ávila founded a convent there, and John of the Cross, imprisoned in its Carmelite monastery, composed much of his Spiritual Canticle.

In Toledo (Castile) at the same time

Abarbanel, Yosef Karo

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Mahari Korkus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Abarbanel, Mahari Berav, Radbaz, Maharalbach, Shlomo Sirilio, Yosef Karo, Mabit, Shlomo Alkabetz, Moshe Alshich, Reishit Chochmah, Shita Mekubetzes, Ramak, Moshe Galante, Elazar Azikri