Career
By contemporary scholars he was called Mahrimat (Hebrew: מהרימ"ט), and regarded as one of the foremost Talmudists of his time. Today he is more widely known as Maharit (Hebrew: מהרי"ט). He was the author of She"elot u-Teshubot (responsa), a work in three parts: part i comprises 152 responsa, together with a general index (Constantinople, 1641).
Participant ii consists of 111 responsa in the order of the first three parts of the ritual codex (Venice, 1645).
Participant iii contains responsa to the fourth part of the ritual codex, together with novellæ to the tractate Ḳiddushin, and supercommentaries on RaN"s and Alfasi"s commentaries on the tractates Ketubot and Ḳiddushin (ib 1645). The entire work appeared in Fürth in 1764.
Joseph also published novellæ to the treatises Shabbat, Ketubot, and Kiddushin (Sudzilkov, 1802), and the responsa which were embodied in Alfandari"s Maggid me-Reshit (Constantinople, 1710). He left several commentaries in manuscript on Alfasi, on Maimonides" Yad, and on R. Nathan"s Aruk.
In 2008, Trani"s grave was discovered in Safed by the noted bibliophile and book dealer Shlomo Epstein, near the grave of Rabbi Moshe Alshich.
