JEREMIAH BEN ISAAC (d. 1805), Hungarian rabbi. Jeremiah studied under Meir b. Isaac *Eisenstadt. He was rabbi of Mattersdorf (Burgenland) from 1770, and of Abaújszánto (Hungary), from about 1797. He lived for some time in Aszód (Hungary) but is not known to have held office there. He took a prominent part in 1798 in the dispute over whether the sturgeon, from which caviar is obtained, is permitted according to the dietary laws, a dispute which in its time engaged the rabbinic world. He declared it to belong to the "unclean" fish, in opposition to the view of Aaron *Chorin, his disciple, who declared it permitted. His Moda'ah Rabbah, supplements and comments on the Moda'ah ve-Ones of Ḥayyim Shabbetai, was published together with his son Joab's Moda'ah Zuta (Moda'ah ve-Ones, Zolkiew, 1795?, Lemberg, 1798).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Joab b. Isaac, Sha'arei Binah (1792), introduction; L. Loew, Gesammelte Schriften, 2 (1890), 254; Pollak, in: IMIT, 11 (1900), 164–6; J.J. Greenwald, Ha-Yehudim be-Ungarya (1912), 53 no. 37; idem, Maẓ ẓ evat Kodesh (1952), 118–23; D. Sofer (ed.), Mazkeret Paks, 1 (1962), 40–43.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

Jeremiah ben Isaac