A 16th-Century Polish Rabbi Who Went against the Grain

In standard editions of the Talmud, at the end of any tractate, one can find the commentary of Rabbi Solomon ben Yehiel Luria (ca. 1510–1574), better known as the Maharshal. A native of Poland, which at the time was emerging as the heartland of rabbinic scholarship, Luria stood apart from his contemporaries. He rejected the intellectual gymnastics of the then-popular approach to Talmud study known as pilpul (dialectics). And although he wrote commentaries on the halakhic digests of Moses Maimonides and other revered medieval figures, he was a fierce critic of the genre, as Tamar Marvin writes: