Machir ben Abba Mari (Hebrew: מכיר בן אבא מרי) was the author of a work entitled Yalkut ha-Makiri (ילקוט המכירי), but about whom not even the country or the period in which he lived is definitively known. Moritz Steinschneider (Jewish Literature, p. 143) supposes that Machir lived in Provence; but the question of his date remains a subject of discussion among modern scholars. Strack & Stemberger (1991) indicate that the work was most probably composed in the late 13th or 14th century.
In the introductions, apparently very similar, to these books, Machir gives the reason which induced him to undertake such a work: he desired to gather the scattered haggadic sentences into one group. He seems to have thought it unnecessary to do the same thing for the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls, as it had been done already, to a certain extent, in the Midrash Rabbah; but it may be concluded that Machir intended to make such a compilation on the earlier prophetical books as well. From his introduction to the part on Isaiah it would seem that he began with Psalms and finished with Isaiah, though in his introduction to the part on the Psalms he mentions the other parts.
Only the following parts of the Yalḳuṭ ha-Makiri are extant: Isaiah, published by I. Spira (Berlin, 1894; comp. Israel Lévi in R. E. J. xxviii. 300) from a Leyden manuscript; Psalms, published by S. Buber (Berdychev, 1899) from two manuscripts (one, previously in the possession of Joseph b. Solomon of Vyazhin, was used by David Luria, and its introduction was published by M. Straschun in Fuenn's Ḳiryah Ne'emanah, p. 304; the other is MS. No. 167 in the Bodleian Library); the twelve Minor Prophets (Brit. Mus., Harleian MSS., No. 5704), for which compare A.W. Greenup, The Yalkut of R. Machir bar Abba Mari / ed., for the first time, from the unique MS. (Harley, 5704) in the British Museum, London 1909-1913 (3 vols.); Proverbs, extant in a MS. which is in the possession of Grünhut (Zeit. für Hebr. Bibl. 1900, p. 41), and which was seen by Azulai (Shem ha-Gedolim, ii., s.v. "Yalḳuṭ ha-Makiri"), published by Grünhut in Jerusalem in 5662 (= 1902).
Importance
Moses Gaster (Revue des études juives xxv. 43 et seq.) attached great importance to Machir's work, thinking that it was older than the "Yalḳuṭ Shim'oni," the second part of which at least Gaster concluded was a bad adaptation from the "Yalḳuṭ ha-Makiri." Gaster's conclusions, however, were contested by A. Epstein ("R. E. J." xxvi. 75 et seq.), who declares that Machir's "Yalḳuṭ." is both inferior and later than the "Yalḳuṭ Shim'oni." Buber conclusively proved, in the introduction to his edition of the "Yalḳuṭ ha-Makiri," that the two works are independent of each other, that Machir lived later than the author of the "Yalḳuṭ Shim'oni," and that he had not seen the latter work. Samuel Poznanski thinks that Machir lived in the fourteenth century.
Bibliography
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)The JE cites Poznanski, in R. E. J. xl. 282 et seq., and the sources mentioned above.