Against the backdrop of the decline of Torah in the last century of Jewish existence in Spain, a figure of great brilliance stood out--Rabbi Yitzhak Canpanton (1360-1463). Canpanton's hermeneutic was based on the insight that a close inner affinity existed between medieval semantics and Talmudic reasoning and argumentation. Thus, it was possible to achieve a synthesis of the two and formulate a rigorous methodology of Talmudic study both 'fit' with the Talmudic suggiyot themselves--and completely justifiable on the basis of general semantic theory. His revolutionary approach restored to the study of Talmud a sense of intellectual novelty, profoundness, and challenge, unmatched perhaps since the heyday of Tosafist innovation in twelfth-century France. His four major disciples formed a vanguard that 'conquered' the world of Sephardic Talmudic study [the MahaRITaTS, the Maharashdam, Moses Almosnino, the Beth Yoseph ; their own disciples were the great scholars of the sixteenth-century Sephardic dispersion."
Zvi Zohar, Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewry, New York University Press, NY, 2005, Chapter 9, 167
