Judah Liwa ben Bezalel, better known by his acronym Maharal of Prague, was an original thinker and prolific writer. The Tiferet Yisrael (Venice: Daniel Zanetti, 1599) presents a philosophy of Torah, and its status in the world. In the penultimate chapter of the work Maharal presents a disquisition on the Oral Torah. As in all his writings, he makes scant reference to sources other than the canonical rabbinic texts, let alone non-Jewish writers. Here on this page, in the penultimate chapter of the book (ch. 69, f. 62 col.c) Maharal refers to a discussion he had with a gentile scholar about religious dissension and the proliferation of Christians sects in his own time and among Jews in antiquity.

This reported conversation probably reveals a true picture of Maharal's life which was not restricted to the domain of the Jewish yeshivah, or the Klois, the academy for Jewish scholars, which he himself founded in Prague.