מרדכי בנט

Rav Mordechai ben Avraham Banet (5513/1753–13 Av 5589/1829), the Maharam Banet, known in general sources as Marcus Benedict, was av beit din and rosh yeshiva of Nikolsburg and chief rabbi of Moravia. Born in Csurgó in Hungary, he was raised from the age of five in his grandmother’s home in Nikolsburg, and carried her family name. Held an illui as a child, at eleven he was sent to the yeshiva of Rav Yaakov Katzenelenbogen in Oettingen, at fifteen to Fürth to learn under Rav Yosef Steinhardt, and at eighteen to Prague, where he acquired Torah from the Noda BiYehuda. At twenty-two he married and settled in Nikolsburg, drawing very close to the rav of the place, Rav Shmuel Shmelke Horowitz.

In 5538/1778 he was appointed a dayan in Nikolsburg, and after short terms as rav in Lundenburg and in Schossberg he was accepted in 5549/1789, after his rebbi’s petirah, as av beit din of Nikolsburg and HaRav HaKolel of all Moravia, standing at the head of its yeshiva, which at its height counted some four hundred talmidim. Offers came from Pressburg and from Krakow, but he yielded to his kehillah and held Nikolsburg forty years, until his petirah. The Chasam Sofer, his friend, eulogized him and called him “an only son to the Holy One, blessed be He” — that none was his equal, and even the chasidim honored him.

His sefarim stand among the classic works of the Talmudic literature of his century, and unlike the pilpul of his contemporaries they proceed by clear criticism and orderly arrangement in a clean Hebrew: Biur Mordechai, hagahot on the piskei haMordechai (Vienna, 5573/1813); Magen Avot on the thirty-nine melachot of Shabbat (Zolkiev, 5595/1835); and the responsa Har HaMor and Parashat Mordechai. In a famous letter to Rav Tzvi Hirsch Levin, chief rabbi of Berlin, he showed that the responsa collection Besamim Rosh, which Levin’s son had published as the work of the Rosh, was not genuine. He stood against the innovations of the Hamburg temple in 5578/1818 with two letters printed in Eleh Divrei HaBrit, and his ruling that the organ falls under chukot hagoyim was accepted and has been relied on since.

He was niftar on 13 Av 5589 (1829), aged seventy-six, at the spa town of Carlsbad where he had gone for treatment, and was buried in nearby Lichtenstadt on condition that he could be moved. When his family and the people of Nikolsburg sought to bring him beside his rebbi Rav Shmuel Shmelke, as he had asked, the people of Lichtenstadt refused; the argument that followed was waged in lomdus and left its traces in the teshuvot of that generation. After a heter from the Chasam Sofer he was brought to Nikolsburg in Adar 5590/1830. Among his talmidim were Rav Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, Rav Yehuda Assad, and his sons Rav Yeshaya Banet, av beit din of Kallo, and Rav Naftali Banet, rav of Schaffa.