Tosafot Yom Tov — Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller התוספות יום טוב — רבי יום טוב ליפמן הלר

Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller was born at Wallerstein in 1578 and died in Kraków in 1654. He studied under the Maharal in Prague and in 1597, at eighteen, became a judge there. Then Nikolsburg, Vienna, and Prague again.

Tosafot Yom Tov (Prague, 1614–1617) is a commentary on the whole Mishnah, conceived as an addition and exposition to the commentary of Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro; the title plays on Tosafot. He seeks out sources, weighs variant readings and language — and pointedly does without pilpul.

In 1629 he was arrested. There were two charges, and both were real: on one side a denunciation for insulting Christianity in his books; on the other the resentment of wealthy Prague Jews at his apportionment of the communal tax, which shifted the burden onto them. The denunciation came from within the community. He was tried in Vienna and sentenced to death; the emperor commuted it to an enormous fine and a bar on holding rabbinic office.

Of this he wrote Megillat Eivah, the "Scroll of Enmity," a first-person account for his descendants. That is also the difficulty: the death sentence is known, in substance, only from his own telling.

Then came Nemyriv, Volodymyr-Volynskyi, and from 1643 Kraków, where he headed the court and the yeshiva and lived through 1648. Unlike his teacher the Maharal, he held that God judges Jew and gentile alike by their deeds, and he defended mathematics and astronomy against a blanket ban on "Greek wisdom."