יעקב מרגליות

Jacob Margolioth of Nuremberg, Rabbi Yaakov ben Moshe Margaliot (יעקב מרגליות), was a rishon of Ashkenaz, a rav, posek and rosh yeshiva who stood at the passage from the rishonim to the acharonim. His contemporaries Rabbi Yosef Colon, the Maharik, and Rabbi Yehudah Mintz counted him among the greatest rabbis of their day. He was niftar around 1492 in Worms.

He was born in Livorno, Italy, to Rabbi Moshe of Romenda and his wife Margala, a woman of standing after whom he named his family Margaliot, though he went on signing himself “Yaakov of Romemendi” as his father had. He first served as rabbi of Lucca in Italy, was forced to leave the country, and settled in Germany, where he learned from the Maharil and the Maharil’s talmidim. Between 1436 and 1449 he held rabbinic posts in Augsburg, Würzburg and the great community of Mainz, and then settled in Nuremberg, where he lived longer than anywhere else. Community rabbis then drew no salary, so he supported himself as a teacher of boys and as a shadchan (matchmaker), and some say also from the work of the beit din, arranging gittin (divorce documents) and kiddushin (marriages).

In Nuremberg he founded a yeshiva to which hundreds of talmidim came from Germany, Italy and Bohemia. Among the best known were Rabbi Yaakov Pollak, the father of the pilpul method, and Rabbi Naftali Hertz Treves, author of the kabbalistic siddur and of notes on the peirush of Rabbeinu Bachya. He most likely stood close to Emperor Friedrich III, who referred disputes among Jews to him. In the quarrel between Rabbi Moshe Capsali and the Maharik he sided with Rabbi Moshe Capsali.

In his later years he wrote his halachic work on the procedure of the get and of chalitzah (the ceremony that releases a childless widow from marrying her husband’s brother), Seder Gittin VaChalitzah, also cited as Seder HaGet and Seder HaChalitzah.

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