הלל בן שמואל

Rav Hillel ben Shmuel of Verona (c. 1220–c. 1295) was a rishon of Italy who was at once a talmid chacham, a physician and a baal machshavah, and a grandson of Rabbeinu Eliezer ben Shmuel of Verona, one of the Baalei HaTosafot. His youth was spent in Barcelona, where he learned Gemara and the natural sciences under Rabbeinu Yonah Gerondi. He went on to study medicine at Montpellier and practiced it in Rome, where he grew close with Maestro Gaio — Rav Yitzchak ben Mordechai, physician to the pope; at Capua from 1260 to 1271, where he also gave shiurim in philosophy, Rav Avraham Abulafia among those who heard him; and at Ferrara, where he had relatives. In his later years he withdrew to Forlì, and is called after that city as well, Hillel of Forlì.

He was among those who spread the Rambam’s philosophical Torah in Italy — interestingly, his own rebbe, Rabbeinu Yonah, had stood among the Rambam’s opponents in the controversy over philosophy; Rav Hillel wrote in a letter that his rebbe had in later years drawn back from that stand. When word reached him in Forlì that Rav Shlomo Petit had come to Italy to press the case against the Rambam’s writings, he wrote to Maestro Gaio setting out what the earlier condemnation at Montpellier had brought upon the Jews and asking him not to join the new campaign; he offered to explain for him the passages of the Moreh that had given offense. To settle the quarrel once and for all he proposed that a council of the leading rabbanim of the East gather at Alexandria, hear the Rambam’s opponents and their objections, and hand down a ruling that all Yisrael would accept.

For all his learning in philosophy he held to the plain teachings of Torah, and bound himself to belief in the wonders told in Tanach and in the Gemara. His main work, Tagmulei HaNefesh, weighs the philosophical writings current in his day — Greek and Arab, Jewish and Christian — and returns at every step to pesukim and to the words of Chazal, Rav Hillel putting forward a view of his own only where they say nothing. Beside it he left a commentary on the Rambam’s twenty-five hakdamot, printed together with it; Sefer HaDarban on aggadah; a philosophical explanation of Shir HaShirim; a medical work he turned from Latin into Hebrew; and his two letters to Maestro Gaio. Tagmulei HaNefesh spread widely in manuscript already in his lifetime, was first printed at Lyck in 5634/1874 by Shlomo Zalman Chaim Halberstam for the Mekitzei Nirdamim society, and was issued in a full scholarly edition in Yerushalayim in 5741/1981.