Sha'agat Aryeh — Rabbi Aryeh Leib Gunzberg השאגת אריה — רבי אריה לייב גינצבורג

Rabbi Aryeh Leib Gunzberg was born in 1695 in Lithuania and died at Metz in 1785. In Minsk he opened a yeshiva in 1733, but in 1742 had to leave after a clash with Rabbi Yechiel Heilprin — the quarrel was over his pilpulistic manner. About 1750 he became rabbi of Volozhin, where he taught the young Chaim Volozhiner, and from 1765 until his death he headed the rabbinate of Metz and its large yeshiva.

Sha'agat Aryeh (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1755) is neither code nor commentary but a set of questions taken apart to the ground: long proofs, mostly on Orach Chaim. Turei Even (Metz, 1781) contains novellae on the tractates Chagigah, Megillah and Rosh Hashanah. Together they became, in the Lithuanian world, a byword for unbending precision of argument.

Of his beginning at Metz they tell this: he objected to interrupting the reading of the Torah with the piyyut Akdamut, the congregation insisted — and the rabbi walked out of the synagogue. He kept the office nonetheless until his death.