יואל אבן שועיב

Rav Yoel ibn Shu’aib (second half of the fifteenth century), known in English sources as Joel ibn Shu’aib, was a rav and darshan in the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre in the generation before the expulsion. He began his work in Aragon, teaching Torah and preaching, and afterwards settled for a long stretch of years in Tudela in Navarre; shortly before the exiles were driven out he was living in Zaragoza. His writings show a man at home in the general sciences as well as in Torah, and he drew on them in his derashot.

He was among the first to treat the derashah itself as a discipline — how a derashah should be built, what belongs in it, and how it ought to be delivered. In Olat Shabbat, his derashot on the parshiyot of the week, composed in 5229/1469 and printed in Venice in 5337/1577, he stresses that what is said before the tzibbur in shul must be plain and easy to follow, and of practical use to the one who hears it. He spoke sharply against the anusim, holding that by halachah they were to be judged as apostates — a severity that moved many of them to return openly to Torah and mitzvot. One psak brought in his name: a man who comes late to shul and must skip part of pesukei d’zimra need not make them up after davening, since their work is to clear the thorns from the path of the tefillah, and the tzibbur has already seen to that.

Beside Olat Shabbat he wrote a commentary on Megillat Eichah, printed first in Salonika in 5281 and later gathered into the collection Kol Bochim alongside the commentary of Rav Avraham Galanti, and Nora Tehillot on Tehillim, printed in Salonika in 5329. Other sefarim of his are known only from the works that quote them and are otherwise lost: Doresh Tov on the Torah and on Yeshayahu, Ein Mishpat on Iyov, and Shekel Tov on Masechet Avot. His son Rav Shmuel, whose chiddushim were printed within his father’s commentary on Eichah, was among the rabbanim of Salonika, as was his brother Rav Yehoshua, a darshan who settled there after the expulsion.