Meir ben Samuel of Shcherbreshin

Meir ben Samuel of Shcherbreshin (Yiddish: מאיר בן שמואל משעברעשין) was a 17th-century paytan and chronicler.

In the years of taḥ ve-tat (1648–49) he lived at Shcherbreshin, Poland, an honored member of the community, from where he escaped, on its invasion by the Cossacks, to Krakow.^[1] There he published his Tzok ha-Ittim (1650), an eyewitness account, in Hebrew verse, of Jewish persecution during the Cossack uprising.^[2][3] This book was afterward published by Joshua ben David of Lemberg under his own name; Moritz Steinschneider was the first to discover this plagiarism.^[4]

Meir wrote also Mizmor Shir le-Yom ha-Shabbat, a Sabbath hymn in Aramaic and Yiddish (Venice, 1639; Amsterdam, 1654).^[5]

Publications

• Mizmor Shir le-Yom ha-Shabbat [Psalm for the Sabbath]. Venice: Giovanni Vendramin. 1639.
• Tzok ha-Ittim [Sufferings of the Times]. Krakow. 1650.

References

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rosenthal, Herman; Waldstein, A. S. (1904). "Meïr b. Samuel of Sczebrszyn". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 440.

1. Halpern, Israel (2007). "Meir ben Samuel of Shcherbreshin". In Berenbaum, Michael; Skolnik, Fred (eds.). Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.). Detroit: Macmillan Reference. ISBN 978-0-02-866097-4.
2. Heller, Marvin J. (2007). Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book. Brill. p. 17. ISBN 978-90-474-2392-8.
3. Heller, Marvin J. (Spring 2018). "Adversity and Authorship: As Revealed in the Introductions of Early Hebrew Books" (PDF). Ḥakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought. 24: 59–74.
4. Weinryb, Bernard D. (June 1977). "The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Cossack-Polish War". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 1 (2): 164. JSTOR 40999943.
5. Heller, Marvin J. (2011). The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus. Brill. pp. 556–557. ISBN 978-90-04-18638-5.