Kremsier, Mordecai Ben Naphtali Hirsch

German Talmudist and poet; lived at Cracow in the seventeenth century. He wrote: "Ḳinah" (Lublin [?], c. 1650), a dirge in which he mourns over the 120,000 Jews who perished in the Chmielnicki riots in Russia; "Ḳeṭoret ha-Mizbeaḥ" (Amsterdam, 1660), novellæ on the Haggadah in the Talmud treatise Berakot (this work is called also "Tosafot Maharam"); "Ḳeṭoret ha-Sammim" (ib. 1660; in the Pentateuch ed. ib. 1671), commentary on the Targumim to the Pentateuch of pseudo-Jonathan and of Jerusalem. The title, taken from Ex. xxxi. 11, and which in Aramaic has the equivalent "Mura Dakya," is an allusion to the author's name, "Mordecai," which is explained in Ḥul. 139b as being derived from the two words just mentioned, meaning "pure myrrh."

Bibliography:

  * Fürst, Bibl. Jud. ii. 208.
  * Steinschneider, Cat. Bodl. col. 1671.



S. M. Sel.