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The last, eminent as a Talmudist, the author of commentaries on the Shulhan 'Aruk approved by the leading rabbis of his generation, is also known as a very trustworthy historian. His Megillah 'Afah, written in classic Hebrew, is a valuable source of information on the critical period in which he lived. He won the esteem of the Polish nobility by his secular attainments.
In his unflinching determination to get at the truth, he did not shrink from criticising Rashi and the Shulhan 'Aruk, and dared to interpret some parts of the Mishnah differently from the explanation given in the Gemara.
The same process of reasoning which, spun out to its logical conclusion, led to pilpul in the schools, produced, when turned into the channel of religion, the over-piety culminating in the Shulhan 'Aruk. The Jews found themselves bound hand and foot by ceremonial trammels and weighted down by a burden of innumerable customs.
In Vilna he subscribed to the regulations of the Shulhan 'Aruk, in Mitau he quickly and completely became Germanized. Such adaptability rendered him conspicuous wherever he went, and as early as 1829 his name was included among the learned of Livonia, Esthland, and Courland in the Biographical Dictionary then published by Recke and Napyersky.
No less personages than Isaac Aboab and Saul Morteira welcomed the merchant-Talmudist Moses Rivkes of Vilna when he sought refuge in Amsterdam, and they entrusted to him the task of editing the Shulhan 'Aruk, his marginal notes to which, the Beër ha-Golah, have ever since been printed with the text.
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