Ḥayyot, Menahem Manish ben Isaac
ḤAYYOT, MENAHEM MANISH BEN ISAAC
ḤAYYOT, MENAHEM MANISH BEN ISAAC (d. 1636), Polish and Lithuanian rabbi. Ḥayyot's father served as rabbi of Prague. He himself was rabbi of Turobin, Moravia, apparently while very young, and later became a rabbi in Vilna. No biographical details of him are known but he is quoted in the works of many of his great contemporaries, such as Ephraim of Vilna in his Sha'ar Efrayim (Sulzbach, 1688) and Samuel Bacharach of Worms in his Ḥut ha-Shani (Frankfurt, 1679). His son-in-law was Joseph Josefa *Horowitz. His tombstone was the oldest in Vilna. Of his works the following have been published: Kabbalat Shabbat, also entitled Zemirot le-Shabbat (Prague, 1621), Sabbath songs; an elegy, Kinah le-Ḥurban, on the fire in Posen in 1590 (Prague, 1590?); and a fragment of his supercommentary to Abraham ibn Ezra to Exodus 3:15 (see Herschkowitz, bibliography). In the catalogue of David *Oppenheimer there is mention also of a manuscript of Derekh Temimim (no. 375) by Ḥayyot, a commentary to the weekly portion of the Law, Balak, giving the plain meaning as well as homiletical and kabbalistic interpretations.
bibliography:
S.J. Fuenn, Kiryah Ne'emanah (19152), 67–70; H.N. Maggid-Steinschneider, Ir Vilna (1900), 1f.; M. Herschkowitz, in: Sinai, 59 (1966), 97–127.
[Itzhak Alfassi]