Joseph Colon ben Solomon Trabotto, also known as Maharik, (c. 1420 in Chambéry – 1480 in Pavia) was a 15th-century rabbi who is considered Italy's foremost Judaic scholar and Talmudist of his era.
After the final expulsion of Jews from the French Kingdom in 1394, his family emigrated first to the Franche-Comté and subsequently settled in the city of Chambéry, the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, which was home to a significant population of rabbinic scholars.
The exact year and place of Colon's birth cannot be determined, but is estimated to be at the beginning of the 1420s in Chambéry, a city whose Jewish population was overwhelmingly made up of individuals of French, rather than German, origin.
Chiefly, he studied under the tutelage of his father, Solomon Trabotto, a noted Talmudist and Kabbalist, though he referred to others as his teachers, and recalled participating in learned discussion with other local scholars.
These were collected after his death by his son-in-law Rabbi Gershon Treves, and by one of his pupils, Hiyya Meïr ben David and were published in Venice in 1519 by Daniel Bomberg.
Colon's responsa are among the classic productions in this field of rabbinic literature and exercised tremendous influence on the subsequent development of Jewish Law, or halakhah.
It was natural that a man of Colon's stamp should sometimes be carried too far in his zeal for truth and justice; and this happened in his dispute with Capsali, the ḥakham-bashi (Chief Rabbi) of Turkey.
Having been falsely informed by an emissary ("meshullaḥ") on behalf of the people of Jerusalem, that Capsali was very lax in divorce decisions, and that he had declared that the betrothed of a man who had become converted to Christianity should be considered as single, and that he had declared an engagement void because it had not been entered into according to the laws of the community, Colon, in order to establish the sanctity and inviolability of marriage beyond the power of any individual rabbi, wrote three letters (Responsa Nos.
This decree of an Italian rabbi pronounced against a Turkish colleague was an unprecedented attack on the rights of the community, and provoked the righteous indignation of the Jewish social order in Constantinople—all the more as it proved to rest upon a groundless and vulgar calumny.
Capsali, conscious of having been maligned, did not mince matters in answering Colon's letters; and a bitter discussion arose between the two men, in which the leading rabbis of Germany, Italy, and the Orient took part.