Johanan Luria

Johanan ben Aaron ben Nathanael Luria (יוחנן בן אהרן בן נתנאל לוריא) was an Alsatian Talmudist. He lived successively at Niedernheim and Strasburg at the end of the fifteenth century and in the beginning of the sixteenth. After having studied for many years in German yeshivot, he returned to Alsace and settled in Strasburg, where he founded a yeshiva by permission of the government. Luria was the author of an ethical work entitled "Hadrakah" (Kraków, c. 1579) and of "Meshibat Nefesh" (Neubauer, "Catalogue of the Hebrew MSS. in the Bodleian Library" No. 257), an aggadic and mystical commentary on the Pentateuch, founded on Rashi. To this commentary was appended a dissertation in which Luria refuted the arguments advanced by Christians against Judaism.

His father Aaron ben Nathanael Luria is often cited as the first Luria and the progenitor of this family. One of his descendants was Elijah Loans.

Johanan had two brothers, Yechiel Yehuda and Judah "the physician". Yechiel Yehuda had four children, including Dreizel Miriam Zeisel Luria (Rema's grandmother) and Julia-Malka Luria (Meir Katzenellenbogen's mother).