הרב יוסף ענגיל

Rav Yosef Engel (5619/1858–1 Cheshvan 5680/1919) was av beit din of Krakow and one of the most original lamdanim of the last two centuries — a chacham whose way of learning stands beside that of his contemporary, the Rogatchover Gaon, in sweep and daring. Born in Tarnow in Galicia to a merchant father who was a talmid chacham and a mother of Sanzer chassidim — who brought him as a child before the Divrei Chaim — he was known from childhood as the iluy of Tarnow, learning b’chavruta with his relative Rav Shmuel Engel of Radomysl and with his friend Rav Meir Arik.

After years in Bedzin, where the upheavals of the Russo-Japanese war swallowed the family’s wealth, he moved to Krakow, serving first as dayan and soon as av beit din until the First World War drove him to Vienna, where he was niftar in 5680; some twenty thousand accompanied him. His derech in learning had two signatures: the gathering of far-flung sugyot from across Shas to reveal the single conceptual root beneath them — written, unlike the Rogatchover’s cryptic notes, in clear and flowing prose — and the abstract chakirah, of which his famous question is the model: does quantity outweigh quality? His Gevurot Shemonim answers a single kushya eighty ways; his Shiv’im Panim LaTorah resolves one contradiction seventy ways.

He wrote all his life — his grandson testified to more than a hundred and twenty volumes, of which a hundred and three were lost in the churban of Europe. What survives is a yeshiva bookshelf in itself: Gilyonei HaShas on Bavli and Yerushalmi, Atvan D’Orayta and Lekach Tov on the foundations of Torah logic, Beit HaOtzar — the first volumes of a great encyclopedia of Talmudic concepts — Otzrot Yosef, and the responsa Ben Porat. When rabbanim were pressed in Vienna to sign against the return to Eretz Yisrael, it is told that he stopped the signing with the cry: the hand that signs will be cut off.