Two Yosef ben Shimons (article preview)
On Gittin 21
A common theme in this column is that two people can have the same name, and we need to disambiguate between them. For instance, Shmuel’s King Shapur is different from Rava’s King Shapur. We need to distinguish between the Amora Rabbi Eleazar (ben Pedat) and the Tanna Rabbi Eleazar (ben Shamua). There were five Rav Kahanas. This extends even to today. On my blog, particularly when someone felt my thoughts weren’t frum enough, a commenter would often conduct a Google search and discover the existence of Rabbi Joshua Waxman, the Reconstructionist rabbi currently leading Temple Beth Rishon in Fair Lawn, and conflate us. A while back, on Nazir 66, the maggid shiur channeled a lot of material from Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz’s (left) Daf Yomi shiur, so I tried looking it up on YUTorah. But alas, I misspelled his last name, and only saw shiurim from Rabbi Aryeh Leibowitz (right). What are the odds that there would be two Rabbi Aryeh Le(i)bowitzes hosted on the same website? It is like having two Yosef ben Shimons in the same town!
In Gittin 33b, we hear of Perata b. Rabbi Eliezer b. Rabbi Perata the Great. This Perata also had a son, Rabbi Eliezer. Assuming they stayed local, there can be two Eliezer ben Peratas in the same town. How common is that? Need we be concerned in terms of Gittin?
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