MEʾIR BEN BARUKH OF ROTHENBURG (c. 1220–1293), known by the acronym MaHaRaM (Morenu ha-Rav Meʾir ["our teacher, Rabbi Meʾir"]); German Talmudist, authority on rabbinic law, and communal leader. Meʾir's early years were spent studying under Yitsḥaq ben Mosheh of Vienna and Yeḥiʾel of Paris; he witnessed the famous Paris disputation of 1240 and saw the Talmud burned publicly in 1242. Eventually he settled in Rothenburg and with the passing years was universally recognized by contemporaries as the greatest of Ashkenazic rabbis. With the increasingly precarious situation of German Jewry in the latter decades of the thirteenth century, culminating in Rudolph I's imposition of the status of servi camerae ("servants of the chamber") on all Jews and, in 1286, his confiscation of the properties of Jews who left his domain, many fled...