Map of the Land of Israel

Ḥayim ben Bezalel of Friedberg was born in Poznań (Posen) to a distinguished family of rabbis that included his three brothers, the most prominent being Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague. As a child, Ḥayim studied in Kraków and Lublin with leading talmudic scholars, such as Solomon Luria and Moses Isserles, under Shalom Shakhnah. In 1549, he moved to Worms, where he succeeded his uncle as the community rabbi before relocating to Friedberg. His Vikuaḥ mayim ḥayim (Dispute of “Living Waters”) was a critique of Moses Isserles’s codification of Jewish dietary law (Torat ḥata’at), criticizing the implicit curtailing of the right of future rabbinic authorities to issue halakhic rulings of their own. Ḥayim ben Bezalel’s ‘Ets ha-ḥayim (Tree of Life; 1578), written during a two-month quarantine at a time of plague, is an ethical treatise emphasizing the study of Hebrew grammar.