Maharsha — Rabbi Shmuel Eidels המהרש"א — רבי שמואל אידלס
his commentary is printed in every Talmud — and he alone treated the aggadah entire
Rabbi Shmuel Eidels was born in 1555 — Poznań or Kraków, the sources differ — and died at Ostroh in 1631. He taught at Poznań for some twenty years, then Chełm, Lublin, Ostroh.
The name Eidels is neither his father's nor his own: it was his mother-in-law's, Eidel, widow of Moshe Lifschitz of Poznań. For twenty years she supported him, his yeshiva and its students, and he took her name in acknowledgement. His mother-in-law, not his wife; the two are often confused.
Chidushei Halachot is devoted above all to the Tosafot: where they are obscure he clarifies them, where they seem to contradict the Talmud he resolves it. The book is printed in nearly every edition of the Talmud, and in a Polish yeshiva learning Tosafot without it was not done.
Chidushei Aggadot (1627) is the rarer thing. Before him the aggadah had been treated piecemeal; he went through it entire, from Berakhot to Niddah. And he did it pointedly rationally: the improbable is explained as parable, and the kabbalistic readings his contemporaries used he expressly declines. The aggadot are printed together with the halachot at the back of the volume, which is why many never notice that these are two different books written to different ends.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Chidushei Halachot — the working-through of Tosafot; printed in nearly every Talmud edition
- Chidushei Aggadot, 1627 — a continuous treatment of the aggadah, pointedly without kabbalistic readings
Scholarship
- Jewish Encyclopedia, "Edels, Samuel Eliezer" — the name comes from Eidel, the mother-in-law who kept the yeshiva twenty years
Basis: documents and evidence.