שלמה פפנהיים

Rav Shlomo Pappenheim (5500/1740–5574/1814), known by the acronym Rashap and in German sources as Salomon Pappenheim, was a dayan, a scholar of the Hebrew language and a poet. He was born in Zülz in Silesia to Rav Zeligmann Pappenheim, who sat as a dayan in that city. He served as rav of the kehillah of Lublinitz and afterward became a dayan in Breslau, a position he held until the end of his life.

His most famous work is the Yeriot Shlomo, a study of Hebrew synonyms in which he also took up questions of time and place. The first part appeared in Dyhernfurth in 5544/1784 and the third in the same city in 5571/1811, while the second was printed only in 5591/1831, in Rödelheim, by Wolf Heidenheim; a fourth part was never printed. In his thinking he drew on the Rambam, on Rav Chasdai Crescas and on Rav Yosef Albo, and he was the first in modern times to hold that not every Hebrew root is built of three letters. In 5562/1802 he brought out in Breslau the opening portion of Cheshek Shlomo, planned as a full Hebrew dictionary; only alef and beit appeared, and the rest of the material he had prepared lay in manuscript with Heidenheim until Rav Moshe Tzuriel published it in 5778.

He also wrote Aggadat Arba Kosot, composed after his wife and three of his children were taken from him, a work in elevated prose that moves from the cup of bitterness to the cup of consolation and closes with the cup of salvations; first printed in Berlin in 5550/1790, it went through more than a dozen further editions in the century that followed. On the question of delaying a burial overnight he wrote in German in defense of the halachic requirement to bury without delay, differing there with Moshe Mendelssohn, and in 5573/1813 he set down that changes in religious life and in chinuch belong in the hands of the rabbanim alone, and that the Hebrew language must not be given up for German. He is quoted often in HaKtav VeHaKabbalah, the commentary on the Torah of Rav Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg. On his matzeivah in Breslau was cut the line that this is no grave but an aron kodesh.