He was a pupil of Jacob Margolioth of Nuremberg, with whose son Isaac he officiated in the rabbinate of Prague about 1490; but he first became known during the latter part of the activity of Judah Minz (d. 1508), who opposed him in 1492 regarding a question of divorce.
Pollak's widowed mother-in-law, a wealthy and prominent woman, who was even received at the Bohemian court, had married off her second daughter, who was still a minor, to the Talmudist David Zehner.
Menahem of Merseburg, a recognized authority, had decided half a century previously, however, that a formal letter of divorce was indispensable in such a case, although his opinion was not sustained by the Oriental rabbis.
Pollak had a further bitter controversy, with Minz's son Abraham, regarding a legal decision, in which dispute more than 100 rabbis are said to have taken part (Ibn Yaḥya, Shalshelet ha-Ḳabbalah, ed.
The sophisticated treatment of the Talmud, which Pollak had found in its initial stage at Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Regensburg, was concerned chiefly with the mental gymnastics of tracing relationships between things widely divergent or even contradictory and of propounding questions and solving them in unexpected ways.