Isaiah di Trani ben Mali (the Elder) (c. 1180 – c. 1250) (Hebrew: ישעיה בן מאלי הזקן דטראני), better known as the RID, was a prominent Italian Talmudist.
He wrote: Nimmukim or Nimmukei Homesh, a commentary on the Pentateuch, consisting mainly of glosses on Rashi which show him to have been, as Güdemann says, an acute critic rather than a dispassionate exegete.
The work has been printed as an appendix to Azulai's Penei Dawid (Leghorn, 1792); extracts from it have been published in Stern's edition of the Pentateuch (Vienna, 1851) under the title Peturei Tzitzim[4] and Zedekiah ben Abraham, author of Shibbolei haLeket and a pupil of Isaiah, composed glosses on it in 1297.
Isaiah also wrote an introduction (petiḥah) to a seliḥah beginning with איכה שפתי,[6] which has been metrically translated into German by Zunz.
According to Güdemann, Isaiah, as a halakhic authority, had for Italy the same importance that Maimonides had for the Orient and Rabbeinu Tam for the Jews of France and Germany.
He was held in very high esteem both by his contemporaries and by the teachers of the following centuries; even one so important as Isaac ben Moses of Vienna called him and Eliezer ben Samuel of Verona "the two kings of Israel"[11] This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds.