יעקב פולק

Rav Yaakov Pollak (c. 5220/1460–23 Sivan 5301/1541), known in English sources as Jacob Pollak and called Baal HaChilukim for his way in learning, was among the first of the chachamim who brought the Torah center of Poland into being and the founder of the method of pilpul known as the shitat hachilukim. He learned in the yeshiva of Nuremberg under Rav Yaakov Margolioth, and afterward served as dayan and rosh yeshiva in Prague together with Rav Eizik Margolioth, his rebbe’s son.

In 5252/1492 a ruling of his set the Torah world in an uproar. His sister-in-law Sulka, an orphan from her father, had been married off in her minority to a talmid chacham of Prague named Rav David Zehner; the match did not hold, and Rav Yaakov ruled that she was entitled to make the declaration of mi’un and thereby void kiddushin whose force was only rabbinic, since they had been made when she was a minor, without needing a get. Fifty years earlier Rav Menachem of Merseburg had ruled that no dissolution by mi’un be permitted, and rabbanim across Germany protested and placed Rav Yaakov under cherem — among them his own rebbe, Rav Yaakov Margolioth of Nuremberg — and Rav Yehuda Minz of Padua decided against him as well. Later authorities upheld him: the Maharshal writes in Yam Shel Shlomo that Rav Yaakov Pollak, out of his standing and his greatness, let the mi’un stand and paid no regard to them or to their decrees, and the woman married another man on the strength of it; the Rema, in his hagahot on the Shulchan Aruch, paskened like him. A further bitter dispute with Rav Avraham Minz over a legal decision is said to have drawn in more than a hundred rabbanim.

The mi’un affair forced him out of Prague, and he came to Poland before 5254/1494, settling in Kraków and founding a yeshiva there. He married Esther, daughter of Moshe and Rachel Fishel of Kraków; his mother-in-law handled the finances of Queen Elisabeth, wife of Kazimierz IV, and in 5263/1503 King Alexander Jagiellon appointed Rav Yaakov Rabbi of the Jews, which set him as intermediary between the kehillot and the authorities. The persecution over the mi’un followed him into Poland, and at one point he received a charter of protection from King Sigismund I. After Sigismund came to the throne in 5266/1506 many Jews left Bohemia for Poland and founded their own kehilla in Kraków; the school Rav Yaakov organized for the learning of the Gemara — which until then had been neglected in Poland — trained young men who carried that learning into the other Polish kehillot.

After some years he moved to Lublin and founded a yeshiva there as well, teaching by his method. Neither he nor his talmid Rav Shalom Shachna of Lublin committed their Torah to a sefer. The reason is given by Rav Shalom’s son, Rav Yisrael Shachna: both men held back deliberately, unwilling to see their psak become a binding yoke upon the generations after them — a reticence he found in other rabbanim of that world as well. Only scattered quotations of Rav Yaakov survive, preserved in the sefarim of others. His greatest talmidim were Rav Shalom Shachna of Lublin, rebbe and father-in-law of the Rema; the Maharshal; the Maharal of Prague; and the Maharam Padua. Of him it was said: from Yaakov to Yaakov there arose none in Yaakov like Yaakov.