Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller

Thisstudy portrays a man and an age. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller (1578-1654), author ofthe famous Mishnah commentary Tosafot yomtov, was a major talmudist, a disciple of the legendary Rabbi Judah Loew ofPrague, and himself the distinguished chief rabbi of Prague and Cracow. Thetime in which he lived began as a 'golden age' for the Jews of Prague and theJews of Poland, an age of prosperity and the rise of Jewish mysticism. DuringHeller's lifetime, however, the golden age changed to darkness, and prosperitygave way to war, persecution, plague, and massacres. It was the end of theMiddle Ages, the last generation before Spinoza and Shabbetai Zevi.Scholar, preacher,religious and communal leader, Heller embodied a religious and cultural ideal;he was the very model of a seventeenth-century rabbi. Born in Germany, he movedfrom one end of the world of Ashkenazi Jewry to the other, first to Prague, andthen to Poland and the Ukraine. His life was enmeshed in a web of family ties,and bounded by complex rules of class and religion. His writing reflects notonly the full heritage of medieval Jewish thought and its crystallization inthe seventeenth century, but also the time and place in which he lived. In manyways, he exemplified his age, its achievements, and its limitations.Carefully researchedand well written, Joseph Davis's work is the definitive biography of Heller. Hepresents a richly detailed study of Heller's worldview, his conception ofJudaism, of the world around him, and of himself within it: the seventeenthcentury seen through seventeenth-century eyes. Heller was eyewitness tomomentous, epoch-making events: the beginning of the Thirty Years' War and themassacres of 1648. He lived through a time of tumultuous change. Texts such asthe sermon in which Heller responded to the new astronomy of Brahe and Kepler,or a poem on the massacres of 1648 in which he enlarged the capacity of Hebrewpoetry to express horror are significant in the larger context of Jewish andEuropean history.Heller'sworld-view was not static or motionless. His world changed greatly during hislifetime, and his views of it likewise changed greatly over the fifty yearsfrom his first writings to his last, from youth to middle age to old age. Hispersonal circumstances also contributed to this: the experience of betrayal,arrest, imprisonment, the death of his children, and other misfortunes led himto wrestle with such questions as the differences between Jews and non-Jewsand the meaning of suffering. Davisweaves these developments succinctly into a fascinating narrative that doesfull justice both to Heller and the momentous events he experienced.