Background
Little information is known of his life. He may have been born in Metz but was chiefly associated with Mainz.
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GERSHOM BEN JUDAH
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also known as
Rabbenu Gershom; Gershom
Career
The apostasy of his only son may have been connected with this expulsion. Gershom’s Talmudic academy in Mainz attracted students from many countries and he was one of the first rabbinic scholars to bring the scholarship of the great rabbinic academies of Eretz Israel and Babylonia to western Europe.
He did not write any large work. The only original work known by him is a lost compilation on the laws of forbidden meat (tereifot).
Gershom is best remembered for a series of ordinances that were of great influence on medieval Jewry. It is not certain whether all of these enactments were issued by Gershom himself (some may have been inserted in his name to give them authority). These ordinances helped to adapt rabbinic law to European conditions and became accepted as normative. Some of them deal with communal issues such as the ruling that the authority of the majority of the community must be accepted by the minority. Others dealt with individual behavior including the ban on reading another person’s correspondence or on reminding a penitent apostate of his former lapse from Judaism.
Best-known is his ban on polygamy, which was binding on all Ashkenazic communities and was eventually accepted also in many non-Ashkenazic communities. He also abolished a man’s right to divorce his wife against her will.
His responsa (answers to legal and ritual problems submitted to him from many localities) were also regarded as authoritative. Many of these deal with business questions, relaxing prohibitive laws concerning business relations with non-Jews.
Achievements
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He made important contributions to establishing the text of the Talmud, which previously was known in northern Europe only in a very unsatisfactory version. He copied out the entire Mishnah and Talmud, basing himself on the best manuscripts he could find throughout the Jewish world. He also copied out an entire Bible, containing the traditional marks and accents (the Masora).
Views
Those of his liturgical poems that have been preserved reflect the troubled experiences of Rhineland Jewry of his day and he wrote, “From day to day my suffering increases, the next day is harder than the one that passed.” One of his poems refers to the persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Mainz in 1012.
