הרב יעקב צבי מקלנבורג

Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg (יעקב צבי מקלנבורג) was an acharon of Germany who lived from 1785 to 1865. He served as rav of Königsberg and is best known for HaKetav VehaKabbalah, his peirush on the Chumash.

He was born to Rabbi Gamliel in Lissa (Leszno), in the Posen province. Lissa was then a well-known center of Torah learning, and he learned under the rav of the city, Rabbi Zechariah Mendel, son of the previous rav, Rabbi David Tevele, and a friend of Rabbi Akiva Eger, with whom he exchanged letters. As a young man he became a merchant. In 1831, when he was forty-six, after his business ran into trouble, he left trade and accepted the post of rav of Königsberg in East Prussia.

The Jews of Königsberg were then coming under the influence of the Haskalah and of the reformers, and he stood firmly against them. Together with the Malbim he spoke out publicly against the assembly of reform rabbis held in Braunschweig in 1844, which voted to abolish Kol Nidrei and to permit marriage between Jews and non-Jews. He was niftar on 10 Nisan 5625 (1865).

In those years he wrote HaKetav VehaKabbalah, which sets out to show how the Written Torah (“HaKetav”) and the Oral Torah (“HaKabbalah”) fit together. It was the first of a series of sefarim that Orthodox rabbis of his time published to hold back the spread of reform. It was first printed in his lifetime, in 1839, and printed again in 1880, fifteen years after his passing, in an expanded edition that restored passages left out of the first.

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