מנחם המאירי

Rav Menachem ben Shlomo HaMeiri (5009/1249–5076/1316), called simply the Meiri and known in his own country as Don Vidal Solomon, was among the greatest of the rishonim and of the chachmei Provence, a commentator on the Talmud and on Tanach, and the author of the Beit HaBechirah. He was born in Perpignan, then part of the principality of Catalonia, and learned under Rav Reuven ben Chaim, author of Sefer HaTamid, himself a talmid of a talmid of the Raavad; he kept up a close correspondence with the Rashba. He lost his father as a boy, and his own children were taken captive in his early years; nothing further of either sorrow is known to us. He is not known to have held a rabbinic post or a place in a yeshiva, and he lived, as most of the Jews of Perpignan did, from lending at interest.

His central work is the Beit HaBechirah, on the order of the Talmud, whose name plays on a name of the Beit HaMikdash and hints that the work selects from the sugya. By his own testimony he began it at thirty-eight and finished it at fifty-one. It is less a running commentary than a digest: he sets out the mishnah and then the discussion upon it, deliberately leaving out the give and take of the sugya to present the conclusion and the differing views of it, and alone among the rishonim he supplies the reader with background. He brings the Yerushalmi far more than most commentators on the Talmud, from versions no longer in our hands, and cites the rishonim not by name but by titles: Gedolei HaRabbanim for Rashi, Gedolei HaPoskim for the Rif, Gedolei HaMechabrim for the Rambam.

Most of his writings did not see print until the beginning of the twentieth century, preserved in a single manuscript in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, rediscovered in 5680/1920 and published thereafter. The Chazon Ish therefore held that his words do not stand equal to those of the other rishonim, since they never passed under the criticism of the gedolei Yisrael. Most of the acharonim, however, treated them as the words of the rishonim; the Mishnah Berurah brings the Meiri l’halacha more than two hundred times.

<pMagen Avot takes up twenty-four halachic subjects and came out of a machloket with the talmidei haRamban, who wished to establish their rebbi’s minhagim in Provence while he defended the minhag of the place. He wrote Chibur HaTeshuvah, a commentary on Tehillim and on Mishlei, and a commentary on Avot whose introduction records the chain of the mesorah from Moshe Rabbeinu onward. He opposed the cherem the Rashba laid on the study of philosophy, and read the aggadot of Chazal on the way of allegory (e.g. stories to bring out a deeper point). His Kiryat Sefer, in two volumes, sets out the rules of orthography for the writing of a sefer Torah, and sofrim rely on it to this day.