RABBI JUDAH LEV BEN BEZALEL –  MAHARAL OF PRAGUE

Efraim K. Sidon

Known in the Jewish world by his acronym MaHaRaL (Morenu Harav Rabbi Leva), he is the author of a number of works that are among the treasures of Jewish wisdom and is the creator of the legendary Golem. Unlike the date and place of his death (Maharal died in Prague on 18 Elul 5369; his 400th anniversary will be commemorated on 7 September 2009), the date and place of his birth are not known for certain. However, he was probably born in Worms in about 1520. Like his brothers, who also came to the fore as rabbinic personalities, he studied the Talmud in Polish yeshivas, particularly in Poznan. After his ordination, he was active in Moravia, where he held the office of Chief Rabbi for twenty years. His opinions crystallized in Prostějov and Mikulov, later being incorporated in his mainly religious and philosophical works. This means that he was not a legal authority in his day, even less that he confined himself to theory. He applied himself with great zeal to the process of education and bravely reformed the Jewish school system. Precisely because he had such a serious understanding of his people’s mission, he asked himself whether the type of education in yeshivas corresponded to this. He necessarily came to the view that the then prevailing pilpul – as a logic game with texts taken out of context – was a deformation of genuine study. Probably while he was already doing his own studies in Poland, he understood that pilpul in effect diverts attention away from the purposeful development of the Jewish personality, from stable foundations through to a knowledge of the path marked out for the people by their God. When he became the head of the Prague yeshiva, he turned his pedagogical attention back to the Torah and the Mishnah as the basis of the Talmud.

The enormous demands that he placed on the Jewish community and on each of its members were not always accepted with approval. By compelling his community to gauge itself by these demands, he not only complicated his rabbinic career in Prague after twenty years of activities in Moravia, but he also managed to discourage several generations from studying his works, as they found his ideas to be remote after the Thirty Years War and the subsequent spiritual crisis of Sabbataism. Maharal, however, was aware of the discrepancy between the actual state of affairs and the ideal. He emphasized the ideal that it was necessary to head towards so that the actual creation did not lose its meaning. In a number of his works that followed Gur Aryeh, he continued, with his own unique style of gradual exposition, to return to ideas concerning the meaning of the creation, the relation between the created and the creator, the importance of the Torah as a complementary part of the whole person, and the mission of Israel. Most of his works are studied to this day at yeshivas and Jewish universities and published with expert commentaries, and have been translated into English and French. In secondary (reference) literature published in Israel and elsewhere in the world, the Prague Maharal is ranked among the most imposing religious thinkers of all time. Although legends about him have permeated into Bohemian mythology, only recently has it been possible for Czechs to form a comprehensive picture from his works. The task of the Prague conference on his life and work should be not only to commemorate him, but also to enrich contemporary knowledge about the most celebrated of the Prague rabbis.