Maharshal — Rabbi Shlomo Luria המהרש"ל — רבי שלמה לוריא

Rabbi Shlomo Luria was born about 1510 — the sources differ, Brisk or Poznań — and died in Lublin in 1573. He was in Lublin from 1555, and in 1567 opened a yeshiva there by royal privilege. He was no relation of Isaac Luria, the Ari, despite the name: the Encyclopaedia Judaica says so outright.

His chief book, Yam shel Shlomo, is built neither as a code nor as marginal notes. It runs through the tractates of the Talmud, and in each topic the whole discussion is raised again: what the Talmud says, what the rishonim say, where they differ and why — and only at the end a ruling. Of sixteen tractates, seven survive.

Separate from it stands Chochmat Shlomo — emendations to the text of the Talmud, Rashi and Tosafot; an abridgement is printed in the Vilna Shas. For its century it is the nearest thing to a critical edition.

The Shulchan Aruch he refused as a ground for ruling, for a reason central to the whole quarrel: the code, he said, is not built on the Tosafists — that is, not on the Ashkenazi tradition by which Poland lives. Pilpul, then reigning in the Polish yeshivas, he called hairsplitting and kept away from.

With the Rema, a younger kinsman, he corresponded and whom he respected, he nonetheless argued hard. The quarrel was first of all about philosophy: "thou art turning to the wisdom of the uncircumcised Aristotle," he wrote, objecting to philosophical categories inside halakhah. Beneath that lay a second matter: the very project of a convenient code he held to be Karo's error repeated. And third, kabbalah: he warned against mysticism taken up without solid command of the text.