Moses ben Isaac Judah Lima (c. 1615 – c. 1670) was a
Lithuanian rabbinical scholar, one of the
Acharonim
In Halakha, Jewish law and history, ''Acharonim'' (, , ; ; ) are the leading rabbis and Posek, poskim (Jewish legal decisors) living from roughly the 16th century to the present, and more specifically since the writing of the ''Shulchan Aruch'' ...
.
When a comparatively young man he successively occupied the rabbinates of
Brest-Litovsk
Brest, formerly Brest-Litovsk and Brest-on-the-Bug, is a city in south-western Belarus at the border with Poland opposite the Polish town of Terespol, where the Bug and Mukhavets rivers meet, making it a border town. It serves as the admini ...
and
Slonim
Slonim is a town in Grodno Region, in western Belarus. It serves as the administrative center of Slonim District. It is located at the junction of the Shchara and Isa (river), Isa rivers, southeast of Grodno. As of 2025, it has a population of ...
. His fame as a scholar soon reached
Vilna
Vilnius ( , ) is the capital of and List of cities in Lithuania#Cities, largest city in Lithuania and the List of cities in the Baltic states by population, most-populous city in the Baltic states. The city's estimated January 2025 population w ...
, whither he was called, in 1650, to fill the office of chief rabbi. Lima was of a retiring and diffident disposition, which probably accounts for the paucity of his writings. He left a manuscript commentary on ''
Shulchan Aruch
The ''Shulhan Arukh'' ( ),, often called "the Code of Jewish Law", is the most widely consulted of the various legal codes in Rabbinic Judaism. It was authored in the city of Safed in what is now Israel by Joseph Karo in 1563 and published in ...
,'' ''Eben Ha-Ezer'', which his son Raphael published (1670) under the title of ''Ḥelḳat Meḥoḳeḳ'', and which, while betraying profound erudition, was so condensed that the editor deemed it necessary to provide it with explanatory notes. Lima did not carry even this work to completion; it covers only the first 126 chapters of the ''Eben Ha-Ezer''.
Bibliography
*
Jewish Encyclopedia bibliography
*
Azulai, Shem ha-Gedolim, i. and ii., s.v. Ḥelḳat Meḥoḳeḳ;
*S. Bäck, in Winter and Wünsche, Die Jüdische Litteratur, ii. 519;
*
Gans, Ẓemaḥ Dawid, p. 596;
*Grätz, Gesch. x. 61 et seq.;
*Jost, Gesch. des Judenthums und Seiner Sekten, iii. 244.
1615 births
1670 deaths
17th-century Lithuanian rabbis
Rabbis from Vilnius
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