Episode 110: The Fascinating Life History of the Maharal of Prague

00:01 After the remarkable story Rachel told her daughter Devorah Leah about driving out the evil spirits that had taken over a house in Poznań, Rachel went on to teach her daughter both Torah and the family’s traditions. First, she explained the difference between the approach of the kabbalists and the hidden tzaddikim to educating girls and that of their opponents, who held that girls should not be taught Torah. The students of Rabbi Yoel Baal Shem, as well as the other kabbalists, held that girls should be taught Torah according to their needs and abilities. As a devoted student of the Baal Shem of Mezhibuzh, Rabbi Baruch Batlan taught his daughter Rachel, and she did indeed become learned. Rabbi Baruch himself began teaching her when she was five. By the age of fifteen, she could study subjects in the Oral Torah, and she continued learning until she was engaged to Rabbi Schneur Zalman, son of Rabbi Moshe. Schneur Zalman, however, was among those opposed to the kabbalists. He held that girls must not be taught Torah. So Rachel, Schneur Zalman’s wife, was learned because her father, Rabbi Baruch Batlan, had taught her, while their daughter Devorah Leah received no education at all. After Rachel told Devorah Leah this story, Devorah Leah became increasingly interested in her family origins on both her mother’s and father’s sides. She learned that her maternal grandfather, Rabbi Baruch Batlan, was descended from the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. Among those exiles, the teachings of Kabbalah were an inseparable part of regular study, and Rabbi Baruch was therefore raised in the spirit of Kabbalah. Rachel’s mother came from a well-known family in Poznań that traced its lineage to the great gaon Rabbi Shlomo Luria, the Maharshal, who was known as a kabbalist. Schneur Zalman, Rachel’s husband and Devorah Leah’s father, was a descendant of the Maharal of Prague. Rabbi Schneur Zalman’s father, Rabbi Moshe, was a fourth-generation descendant of Rabbi Yehuda

03:02 Leib, the Maharal of Prague. Let us tell you about the Maharal. The Maharal was born in the year 5272, that is, 1612 by the secular calendar. His father was the gaon Rabbi Betzalel, a fifth-generation descendant of the gaon Rabbi Yehuda Leib of Worms, who passed away in the year 5008—that is, around 1460. The inscription on Rabbi Yehuda Leib’s gravestone said that he was descended from King David. Rachel went on to tell her daughter Devorah Leah many things about the Maharal of Prague, passed down in stories from father to son, generation after generation. At the age of seven, the Maharal was already so wise that he would debate points of halachah with renowned gaonim who came to the home of his father, Rabbi Betzalel, and to the home of his grandfather, Rabbi Chaim. Rabbi Betzalel, the Maharal’s father, was poor, so he wanted to arrange matches for his sons while they were very young. Besides the Maharal, he had three other sons: Rabbi Chaim, Rabbi Sinai, and Rabbi Shimshon. Rabbi Betzalel sought matches for his sons with families of means, who would undertake to send the prospective grooms to yeshivos at their own expense even before the weddings, and to support them afterward so they could continue studying Torah. Thus, when the Maharal was ten, he was engaged to the daughter of the wealthy Torah scholar Rabbi Shmuel, son of Rabbi Yaakov Reich of Prague. Rabbi Shmuel was very wealthy and close to the royal court, and through his efforts thousands of Jews received help. Around the time of the Maharal’s engagement, when he was about ten, the yeshivah in Przemyśl became renowned. It was headed by the famous gaon Rabbi Yaakov Pollak, a student and successor of Rabbi Yaakov Margolies of Nuremberg. Rabbi Yaakov Pollak had an original, independent method of Torah study. He developed and perfected the method of pilpul. He would separate each sugya in the Gemara into its various subjects, examine each subject according to its different lines of reasoning, and clarify and refine every line of reasoning to the utmost. His yeshivah

06:08 gained an excellent reputation, and students flocked to it from everywhere. The rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Yaakov, was very strict about admissions. He wanted only the finest students, those with the sharpest minds, so he accepted just one out of every twenty or twenty-five applicants. The Maharal was sent to this yeshivah by his future father-in-law, Rabbi Shmuel Reich, when he was twelve, and was admitted immediately. He stayed for four full years, studying with tremendous diligence and devotion. According to family tradition, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak would say of this student, the Maharal—who may have been the youngest in the yeshivah—that he was the third of three points with which he, Yaakov Pollak, had, with Hashem’s help, formed a segol in the vineyard of the House of Israel. He meant three students: Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam of Padua; Rabbi Shalom Shachna of Lublin; and the third, the Maharal of Prague. Of his thousands of students, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak took pride in these three. The Maharal himself would say that at Rabbi Yaakov’s yeshivah in Przemyśl he learned not only to forge a path using the finest and most subtle lines of reasoning, but also to build a three-story palace. In the year 5288, that is, 1648 by the secular calendar, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak left Przemyśl and was appointed rabbi of Prague. The Maharal, after four years of study there, set out on a period of wandering, traveling from place to place. He wandered for two years and then returned to Prague. Two years after his return, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak left Prague for Lublin to visit the yeshivah established there by his student Rabbi Shalom Shachna. But in Lublin, Rabbi Yaakov Pollak fell ill and passed away, for he was already very old. The Maharal’s future father-in-law, Shmuel Reich, expressed

09:01 his wish that the wedding of the Maharal and his daughter Perl take place immediately. After the wedding, the Maharal could go and study at whichever yeshivah he chose. But the Maharal felt that the bride, then fourteen, was still too young to marry. He therefore asked to be sent to a yeshivah for another four or five years. Only then would they marry, and he would be supported by his father-in-law. The prospective bride, Perl, daughter of Shmuel Reich, was exceptionally gifted and knowledgeable. When she became engaged to the Maharal, she was only six years old, yet even then she knew that her future husband was a great Torah scholar of brilliant ability. She decided to study and improve her knowledge so that he would not be embarrassed by her. She began studying on her own, in secret, and continued to develop her knowledge over the years. When the Maharal returned to Prague, she met with him and told him how well her studies had gone, and he was very pleased. Before the Maharal left again to study at a yeshivah for the additional four or five years we mentioned, he set a special course of study for Perl, his bride-to-be, and she promised him she would continue studying as diligently as before. Then the Maharal left for the yeshivah. During his previous two years of wandering, he had met great gaonim along the way. He kept his own greatness hidden, but wherever he went he made an effort to hear words of Torah from the great scholars he met, and he wrote them down for himself. While traveling from place to place, he heard that a great gaon named Rabbi Yitzchak Klober had come to Poznań from Worms, Germany. According to reports, Rabbi Yitzchak Klober had a distinctive method of study based on the approach of the gaonim of Germany and France. So now, when the Maharal was to study at a yeshivah for another four or five years, he decided to spend those years with Rabbi Yitzchak Klober in Poznań. He arrived in Poznań, where he met the grandsons of Rabbi Yitzchak Klober, Shlomo and Rabbi Yechiel

11:45 Luria of Brisk. The grandson was seventeen at the time, two years younger than the Maharal. Rabbi Shlomo, Rabbi Yechiel, and the Maharal became friends and studied Torah together under Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber, Rabbi Shlomo’s grandfather. Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber was already very old, but of these two students he said that he could wholeheartedly apply the teaching of our Sages: “I learned much from my teachers, but from my students more than from them all.” Four years of study in Poznań passed, but the Maharal still did not want to return to Prague to marry. He simply could not tear himself away from his teacher, Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber, and his friend Rabbi Shlomo. So he wrote to his future father-in-law and to his bride, Perl, asking permission to remain in Poznań for another three years. They gave him permission. During those three years, something happened: the bride’s father, Rabbi Shmuel Reich, lost his fortune. He was left destitute and had to sell all his possessions to pay his debts. Rabbi Shmuel Reich therefore informed the Maharal, his intended son-in-law, who was then in Poznań, of what had happened. He told him that he could no longer fulfill the commitments he had made to him, whether to provide for his upkeep or in other matters. Rabbi Shmuel Reich told the Maharal that, as far as he was concerned, the Maharal was free to break off the shidduch with his daughter and seek another match. But the Maharal replied with an encouraging letter. He said that if the bride did not wish to wait, she could break off the engagement, but he would not do so. To him, it made no difference whether the bride’s father was poor or rich. At that point, the gaon Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber passed away in Poznań. That was in the year 5298, that is, 1638. Then they decided

14:29 his students, the Maharal and his friend, to... 1548 by their reckoning. I was off by about a hundred years. In any event, the gaon Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber passed away in 1548 by their reckoning. His students—the Maharal, his friend Rabbi Shlomo, Rabbi Yitzchak Kluber’s grandson, and others—then decided to leave Poznań and move to Kraków. Kraków was a city of Torah at the time, and the Maharal spent five years there. For three years he studied with his friend Rabbi Moshe, son of Rabbi Yisrael Isserles. Rabbi Moshe later became known as the Rema, one of the great halachic authorities, and the Maharal studied with him for three years. In his later years, the Maharal spoke of Kraków with great admiration. He said he had never seen a community as blessed with affection for Torah scholars as Kraków. Even butchers, water carriers, and woodcutters in Kraków were accomplished Torah students. The bonds between people were extraordinary. Kraków was a model of a city of Torah and good character, where people studied both the revealed teachings of Torah and Kabbalah. Now, there was something unusual in Kraków that the Maharal saw there. In the market square was a plot of land thirty amos across—about fifteen meters—enclosed by a stone wall. When the Maharal was there, people believed the wall was about 160 years old, dating from around 1380 by their reckoning. It was said that the plot had been enclosed because the ground had once split open and swallowed a man and a woman before the eyes of many people. This is how the extraordinary event took place. In the year 5123, corresponding to approximately 1363 by their reckoning, the gaon Rabbi Yitzchak served as rabbi of Kraków. Rabbi Yitzchak was among the Jews expelled from Ashkenaz under an expulsion decree imposed on the Jews there, in Germany, at that time. The city of Kraków then belonged

17:45 to one of the princes of Poland. The manager of that non-Jewish prince’s estates was a Jew from Germany, a kohen named Shlomo Zeligman. Shlomo Zeligman was a frivolous man who transgressed: he did not observe the Torah’s mitzvos. In time he changed his name from Shlomo to Sigmund, and sadly, things reached the point where he desecrated Shabbos, ate non-kosher food, and did anything else the Torah forbids. This Jew, Shlomo Zeligman, decided to marry a divorced Jewish woman in Kraków, even though the Torah forbids a kohen to marry a divorcee. Shlomo Sigmund came to Rabbi Yitzchak, the rabbi of Kraków, and demanded that he officiate at the chuppah and kiddushin for him and the divorcee. Rabbi Yitzchak refused and tried to explain the matter to Shlomo Sigmund—to Zeligman—and persuade him not to do it. But Zeligman brazenly said that he was willing to give up his status as a kohen to marry the woman. He went on to say that if the rabbi would not officiate at their wedding, they would travel to another city and marry there. Rabbi Yitzchak summoned the woman and her relatives, who were among the city’s prominent people. He told them that if such a thing were done among the Jewish people, he would place those responsible under a ban. The divorcee’s relatives, who had business dealings with Shlomo Zeligman, actually wanted the marriage to take place. They tried to persuade the rabbi to find some grounds to permit it. The rabbi stood firm and ordered an announcement in the synagogue that the marriage was strictly forbidden. He also warned the couple not to dare violate the prohibition. When Shlomo Zeligman heard of the rabbi’s warning in the synagogue, he was furious. Seeing himself as a man of influence and power, he declared forcefully that he would do as he pleased. A great dispute broke out in the Kraków community. Those who feared Hashem—the more observant people, especially the Torah students—spoke

20:24 out against it, saying that it was forbidden. But the divorcee’s relatives and various Jews looking for ways to permit it defended Shlomo Zeligman, still hoping to be rewarded for it. Shlomo Zeligman did not give up. As he was held in high regard by the prince whose estates he managed, he approached the prince and told him what had happened. Shlomo Zeligman turned the prince against the rabbi, portraying him as someone who, for fanatical reasons, stubbornly refused to perform the minor act of officiating at a marriage between Zeligman and the divorcee. The prince summoned the rabbi and the Christian bishop to a meeting. Rabbi Yitzchak came to the prince accompanied by one of the leaders of the Kraków community. The prince began by asking why the rabbi was preventing two people who loved each other from marrying. Rabbi Yitzchak explained that it was not up to him: Jews lived by the Torah, and the Torah forbade a marriage between a kohen and a divorcee. The prince turned to the bishop and asked whether that was indeed true. The bishop, who was sadly an enemy of the Jews, replied that such a prohibition did appear in the Torah of Moshe. But, he said, the Sages of the Talmud had permitted many things forbidden by the Torah, and under the Jewish religion, rabbis had the authority to change what was written in the Torah, either to forbid or to permit it. Rabbi Yitzchak denied the bishop’s claim. He explained to the prince that, alongside the Written Torah, which Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave Moshe at Sinai, He also gave him the Oral Torah. It contains explanations, interpretations, and instructions concerning the Written Torah, and these were passed down from generation to generation for many centuries until the Sages of the Mishnah and Talmud recorded them. The rabbi went on to tell the prince that the Written Torah and the Oral Torah were not separate, different things; they complemented each other. The bishop began putting questions and challenges to the rabbi in a mocking, contemptuous tone, intending to embarrass him and make him look ridiculous in the prince’s eyes. But the rabbi was

23:01 well versed both in Talmudic literature and in the methods used by enemies of the Jews throughout the generations, including their questions and challenges. He knew the substance of the disputations that Jewish Sages had once been forced to conduct with leading Christians, such as the Ramban’s disputation. Rabbi Yitzchak therefore did not lose his composure. He gave his answers calmly and clearly. The conversation with the prince took place through an interpreter, because the rabbi did not know the local language. But the wisdom of the rabbi’s answers made a deep impression on the prince.