Meir ben Samuel of Shcherbreshin

Meir ben Samuel of Shcherbreshin (Yiddish: מאיר בן שמואל משעברעשין) was a 17th-century paytan and chronicler.

In the years of taḥ ve-tat (1648–49) he lived at Shcherbreshin, Poland, an honored member of the community, from where he escaped, on its invasion by the Cossacks, to Krakow.^[1] There he published his Tzok ha-Ittim (1650), an eyewitness account, in Hebrew verse, of Jewish persecution during the Cossack uprising.^[2][3] This book was afterward published by Joshua ben David of Lemberg under his own name; Moritz Steinschneider was the first to discover this plagiarism.^[4]

Meir wrote also Mizmor Shir le-Yom ha-Shabbat, a Sabbath hymn in Aramaic and Yiddish (Venice, 1639; Amsterdam, 1654).^[5]

Publications

• Mizmor Shir le-Yom ha-Shabbat [Psalm for the Sabbath]. Venice: Giovanni Vendramin. 1639.
• Tzok ha-Ittim [Sufferings of the Times]. Krakow. 1650.