Ralbach — Rabbi Levi ibn Chaviv הרלב"ח — רבי לוי אבן חביב

Rabbi Levi ibn Chaviv was born at Zamora about 1480, son of Rabbi Yaakov ibn Chaviv — the compiler of Ein Yaakov, the collection of the Talmud's aggadah. In 1492 the family went to Portugal, and five years later, under King Manuel, the young man was baptised by force. He fled to Salonica and returned to Judaism. His father died in 1516 having printed two orders of Ein Yaakov; the remaining four the son saw through the press — which is why they carry none of the father's notes.

From 1525 he was in Jerusalem, and soon its chief rabbi: fifteen years at the head of the community, a series of communal ordinances, a hundred and forty-seven responsa, a commentary on Maimonides' laws of the calendar.

When ordination came from Safed he refused it — and wrote the Kuntres ha-Semichah. His arguments: the sages of Jerusalem had not been asked, so Maimonides' condition of "all the sages of the Land of Israel" was unmet; Maimonides himself closes the passage with "the matter requires decision"; the Safed scholars were judges in their own cause; and above all, an ordained court would claim the right to fix the calendar, and rival calendars would tear the Jewish world in two.

He was backed by the Radbaz, chief rabbi of Egypt. The project died away, and even the ordinations already granted fell into doubt. The quarrel was not only halakhic: in those years Safed was eclipsing Jerusalem, and part of the question was whose voice this was.

He died in Jerusalem about 1545. His responsa and the Kuntres were printed at Venice in 1565, twenty years later.